sw104

Personally, I get the impression entry-level fitness bands have reached a natural limit in terms of the data they collect, whereby the data is sufficient in scope and accuracy for the average person (trying to lose weight, train for a 5k/10k etc). A device that covers this criteria is very low cost so big brands don't want to bother. You can pick up fitness bands on Amazon for less than £30 which work for most use cases.

On the other end, advanced fitness bands are somewhat converging on smartwatches in both their features (sleep tracking, GPS, music control and phone notifications, maps) and price point, because this is the only way to make something big brands consider worth selling.

Heck, I run over 150km a week, and I wear one of the cheapest Garmin watches available, and I know many people who run a decent amount (50 to 100+km per week) who are in the same situation. There's no major updates my watch needs.

I'm interested. When people say losing weight causes the metabolism to slow down, are they simply referring to the BMR going down as a result of the new weight/height/sex combination.

Between 65kg and 60kg of body mass, my BMR would go down about 50 calories, which given lifestyle and eating changes, wouldn't be such an issue.

Or is there something else I'm missing? How drastically does metabolism slow down? Has anybody calculated how much it does this by, or is there too many variables at play for any accuracy?

I think teaching the test is common everywhere. I remember the same thing for my GCSEs and A levels (UK pre-university qualifications) growing up, and my Russian partner says it was the same for them in school.

For us, the teachers would almost tell us with 100% certainty what was going to be on the test, and what keywords/phrases to include to boost your marks. They also ran us through past papers from previous years, and lo and behold, we had the exact same questions, just worded slightly differently.

Alternatively, tablets with the Kindle app work quite nicely for textbooks.

I replaced physical textbooks with an iPad with the Kindle app on it, since whether it's an iPad or textbook it's something that stays at home. It works really well, especially side by side with Goodnotes for studying.

Hit the nail on the head.

Thailand and the Philippines are prime destinations for morally dubious westerners to find the "love" they never found at home.

Britain is full of middle aged men with 20-year younger SEA wives (many of whom look almost child-like). I'm amazed the Home Office looks at the "relationship" arrangement and allows all of the visas.

> 100% but the actual reading on a physical book is better, right?

YMMV but I don't see any difference at all.

If anything the form factor of the e-reader makes reading more comfortable. I'm not having to hold the book in a certain way to hold the pages open. It's always lighter, which is a big advantage for reading large books. It's also a bit smoother/faster because page turns are instantaneous and using the holding hand. And I can read under light rain without worrying about the book disintegrating.

The e-ink display is akin to paper for my eyes, and more comfortable to read at night with it's reddish backlight as opposed to a physical book with a nearby lamp.

On a side note, I do quite like the built-in dictionary/Wikipedia extract feature in Kindles. For some books (eg. Russian classics) it's quite useful. There's also a feature which based on a slider annotates individual words (slider dictates the complexity of words to annotate from some to many) in-line in the book, which I can see as being of enormous benefit to a new or young reader.

I do still enjoy going to physical book stores and browsing the covers, blurbs and first chapters. On the other hand, when I'm reading about a book online it's nice to be able to buy it and instantly start reading.

I know many people dislike them, but reading has become so much better for me since buying a Kindle and digitising most of my library. I used to be a bookshelf person, but live in a very small space and needed to transfer that space for things from other hobbies.

I still keep 10 or so of my favourite books in print form, and admittedly they do act as decoration more than anything (I have read them), and occasionally buy a print book when no digital format is available.

I know I can't resell the digital books, I can't transfer ownership of them, and they may (unlikely) be censored or removed from my device. I still don't care.

It's so convenient. Travelling with 1 thin Kindle in hand luggage as opposed to 3/4 brick books in my suitcase, the immediate page turns breaking the read less, the backlight for darker situations, the ability to get it in a thin pocket and get it out and read wherever I need to kill a few minutes.

The complementary phone app is also really useful when I don't have the e-reader on hand. I've been doubling my phone up at the gym as a workout logger when lifting and book when using cardio machines like the static bike.

The issue I've always had with books is the idea that when I buy one, I think I'm buying the time to read the book as well. When I go to book store and see dozens of interesting books, I often forget the weeks it will take to read them all. I get through 1/2 books a week and there's a mountain of stuff I want to read. Little optimisations in getting more time to read really help with that.

If somebody exercises hard and sufficiently, of course it can lead to (a boost in) weight loss.

It's just difficult and requires a lot of willpower. Provided you actually worked (didn't sit on a machine at the gym on your phone), burned a decent amount (typically cardio works best), and don't replace the extra calories you burned out with more food, it's all helping you achieve a CICO deficit.

9 times out of 10, it is all CICO.

This isn't really about young people not drinking for health benefits.

It's about economics.

Has anything been said about how the eye-display proximity might affect vision?

Maybe this is a better time than ever to start a new opticians.

If you're arguing that weight gain or a sense of willpower are entirely genetic, I think the onus is on you to provide proof.

Introducing the likening of weight loss, something that everybody is capable of, to changing skin colour and changing your gender/sex is absurd.

Eating below your energy expenditure will cause you to lose weight. Every time somebody decides to eat a (or many) burger or a donut, they have the choice not to do that. Genetics aren't forcing anyone.

Absolute bollocks. Saying weight gain or difficulty with losing weight is genetic is (for the vast majority of people) a coping mechanism for lack of willpower.

They can change, with less food (mostly) and more exercise. It's not beyond the realms of possibility for overweight/obese people to lose weight.

Introducing a drug like this with no lifestyle changes will just lead to eat, inject, repeat.

> That fatties should just have to exist until they can make the identity level genetic changes on their own to lose it.

Or just eat less and exercise more..

What happens when they come off of this drug? Does the weight just go back on again?

Underlying lifestyle changes are the proper way to lose weight and keep it off. The sort of lifestyle changes that most non-fat people have been making all of their lives. That's why many people criticise shortcuts like this. It's a lazy solution to (mostly) laziness.

That's quite alright.

On the exercise front, it might be just due to most people not finding "their sport". When people find exercise they enjoy, it can easily start taking up a lot of their time and fulfilling that physical/mental balance you mentioned.

I think a lot of people take up rather cliche sports/exercises simply for weight loss, and thinking of it that way just doesn't stick. Running is the big one. I love running myself and I know many people who also do, but it seems like the go-to "lose weight exercise", and a lot of people seem to hate it.

Sometimes the path to start a sport / exercise you love can be very strange. I was pretty out of shape last year this time and July/August I just spontaneously decided to walk home from work (1.5 hour walk) and that stuck as a daily thing. One of those walks made me mull over joining a gym, so I did that and have been almost every day since last August. The treadmill there shunted me onto running outside, and revisiting a sport I did when I was younger (orienteering), and sports kept stacking on top, as well as interest in nutrition and health.

I lost about 15kg, taking me from overweight to the lower/middle of healthy, with a lot more strength and I'm barely ever ill now compared to before.

I could easily have not walked home on that day and none of it would have happened. I'd probably still be overweight (and unhappy). It was just random really. I know that doesn't help most people, but it's what I've found with myself and others. A few people I've gotten to know through the gym and other sports is that the "kick" was either a health scare or being in a dark place, and using exercise as an outlet got them into a way better place than they were before.

You just have to be so careful not to relapse though. There can just as easily be a kick in the other direction, and I try to keep that in mind.

It's not a HN-exclusive thing. This is just the universal take on weight loss which happens to also pervade throughout HN.

Weight loss always creates an enormously contentious discussion because for so many people it is interpreted as a personal indictment of their choices and behaviour.

I fully agree with your whole post, from a background of general fitness (healthy diet, heavy daily exercise), and because I've been through the process of losing weight. It was difficult (at first), and is still sometimes difficult maintaining it.

If I hadn't experienced that weight loss experience (and the success it brought), and if I ate worse, didn't exercise, and weighed 10kg+ more, I'm sure something in my brain would probably lean me towards disagreeing with the simple model of weight loss. I'm sure I'd also look for blame elsewhere and look for workarounds, which a multi-million dollar industry would happily (not) provide.

Humans are funny.

And you're not losing weight? What/how much are you eating?

I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.

I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.

We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.

Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.

The idea of making "friends" on the internet, on forums, Facebook, or Discord, has always been ludicrous.

Unless you reach a stage where you meet up in real life and share human experiences, you're basically just talking with the equivalent of an AI chatbot.

In the UK, it's definitely a thing.

Being teetotal excludes you from a lot of social events, and even somewhat unrelated events. We have hiking/fitness groups that typically end the training session with a round at the pub. Many workplaces go to the pub together after work.

Not engaging with this can set you back socially and professionally, because drinking is hugely ingrained in the British population. Most people drink multiple times per week. The people I work with genuinely struggle with "Dry January" and other such abstention events.

Going along to these events and not drinking gets you interrogated, and it becomes a thing to try to get you to drink / get drunk. It's probably an inferiority complex thing on the side of the people drinking because seeing somebody not drinking makes them feel bad about it (even though they needn't feel that way).

For every one person like you that doesn't care, there's many who really want to investigate it and get to the bottom of it. Telling these people you just don't like drinking isn't the solution they're looking for out of their investigation.

My 2 pennies as a lifelong teetotal.

Being addicted to playing computer games and using social media are not the same as being obsessed with playing sports and exercising.

One has tangible benefits to your health, social life, boosts your confidence, gets you out in the fresh air and sun, and forms healthy lifestyle habits.

The other has you sitting staring at a screen for (sometimes as many as 10) hours per day, pretending to be an Italian plumber, or giving themselves depression from looking at fake lives on Instagram.

It depends what the purpose is. I've been on a calorie-in-calorie-out weight loss journey since last August and for most of that time used BMR, as it subtracted a few hundred extra calories each day as a bonus.

For weight loss, eating at BMR is about right generally. And I'd imagine most use cases for calorie tracking apps are about weight loss.

To make it most accurate, I'd personally just add a basic multiplier for what sort of lifestyle people have (sedentary, small exercise like walking the dog, moderate exercise and hard exercise in the multipliers of 1.2x, 1.4x, 1.6x, 1.8x).

I exercise a lot and that typically adds 1000-1500 calories onto my daily BMR of 1500 or so, so the multipliers a lot of BMR / TDEE calculator websites use seem to make sense.

I'm more curious where the food database is sourced from. I tried something similar by getting data from British supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Tescos etc.) and none of them seemed to have APIs, so web scraping was the only possibility.

It always saddens me to see videos like that.

By contrast, the Britain (or the cities and towns around where I live) of today simply looks like everybody has just given up.

I hate constant news. Cutting the news in large part out of my life has definitely improved my wellbeing.

Now, I only check the news on Saturday morning, to know what's going on in the world. It leaves breaking news time to get the facts straight, and to filter out the non-news of the week.

That sounds like the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) as opposed to the TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

Some people use BMR as a target for losing weight, but BMR is sort of like how much energy you'd burn being in a coma. TDEE (1.2 x BMR, ish) would include daily activities like walking around, so is generally more appropriate.

The UK gov doesn't have a clue what it's doing, so they invent a bunch of patriotic crap to try and keep the masses satisfied.

Last year it was a flagship yacht, this year BritGPT. Just stick a Union Jack and 'Brit' somewhere in it, and call it a day.

The country is going through an economic and existential crisis, with amongst the lowest productivity stats in Europe, the shitshow of Brexit impacting everyone, healthcare crisis and national strikes due to high inflation.

Truthfully the UK economy is held together by a handful of dodgy banks in London, and if these left, we'd be left as a borderline third world country. The country essentially makes nothing and is fuelled entirely by debt and consumption. We've become a nation of hairdressers and "luxury" cafes. Electorate is generally stupid, so none of this will change anytime soon.

Thank you. Echoes my thoughts completely.

The UK is a food disaster, and is the reason so many people here are overweight and obese (64% of adults) and die early.

The meal deal is the staple of almost any office workers lunch, and easily packs around 1000 calories in the form of a sandwich (400-600), pack of crisps / chocolate bar (300) and drink (up to 200).

Anecdotally, from what I experience in my office, home-made lunches aren't much better. As you stated, it's always washed down with a pack of crisps and soda (or multiple). When people do cook, it falls under the British triumvirate of home cooking:-

- Spag' bol' (pasta, beef mince and sauce) - Stir fry - Pasta bake (pasta with sauce and cheese and things thrown on top)

Where I live, and when I go to the gym, I see Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats delivering constantly. All high fat, high calorie, salty and oily fast food (eg. McDonalds) or standalone takeaway joints (arguably worse). There's a huge trend in my city (Leeds) for people to eat lunch out, which is not only expensive, but calorie expensive too.

Supermarkets are 80% junk food. Do we really need 100 types of biscuits and cakes? Take a glance at the basket/trolley of the people around you, and there's typically a lot of crap in there.

You also tend to see a lot of fat kids (22% age 4-5, 37% age 10-11) everywhere. High school kids flood the supermarkets after school every day, eating huge packs of crisps and cakes (designed for multiple people and portions), and university students (from what I remember at uni) seem over-reliant on takeaways and ready meals.

I haven't looked it up, but I'd wager the average British energy intake is around 3000 calories, despite most people living completely sedentary lifestyles.

I've always received weird responses to eating fish (unless it's battered and served with chips, in which case it's a national delicacy), and people seem to make out as if it's something fancy, despite the fact we live on an island.

This, coupled with lack of exercise, is a ticking time bomb for our country. Everybody is just slowly killing themselves with various beige-coloured food.

The Russian course on Duolingo is certifiable garbage.

- My Russian partner

I just use an iPad Air with Goodnotes (notes app) and Kindle (e-reader), in exactly the same way you use the Remarkable.

These Remarkable tablets seem awfully expensive for what they provide, almost like "lifestyle gimmicks" like those minimal Light phones which cost as much as a smartphone.

How people deal with distractions is largely on them, rather than the devices. People shouldn't need to buy a stripped down (but premium-ly priced) device. You can probably just take another product and configure it downwards (disable notifications, remove apps, set app timers) if focus is such an issue.

"Feature packed" - remove apps you don't want, configure UI of what you do want.

"prematurely obsolete" - Remarkable are already on a 2nd device. Who's to say there won't be a third, fourth, fifth?

"demands way too much attention from users" - just turn notifications off.

The giants seem pretty well entrenched.

I have to confess. I' think I'll be a bit happier when everything I see doesn't have a Facebook icon and link next to it.