I can’t recommend The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk enough, I wish this book had been out 10 years ago before my mom took her life.
Nonetheless, it’s been instrumental in helping me alleviate my anxiety and depression. I read it a year ago and I can’t imagine going back to the way I felt then.
Specifically I’ve done two forms of therapy — EMDR and Somatic Experiencing — that were recommended (among many others) in the book.
I’m undergoing EMDR for PTSD from childhood trauma. It’s kind of amazing how well it has worked for me, much more so than I had expected (I was skeptical at first). It hasn’t completely wiped the feelings and memories away but they are much easier to cope with and process.
I’ve tried nearly everything - Medication, counseling, support groups. EMDR has been the most effective treatment I’ve found so far.
I did some sessions of a therapeutic approach similar to EMDR called Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). I too was skeptical, and amazed at how well it worked. When I told a friend about it, he pointed me at the "Memory Hackers" episode of Nova, which isn't about EMDR or ART, but discusses the science of rewriting memories, and helped ease my skepticism about the approach.
Seems to have really good reviews. Is it something worth reading for somebody without a depression or a trauma? Any insight that stuck with you the most? I'm sorry about your mom.
I honestly read the book just because I consider myself an autodidact and student of human nature and it sounded interesting. While reading I realized that the traditional psychotherapy I’d done since my mother’s suicide was mostly just a way to cope with the tragedy rather than to heal from it (coping is still better than nothing though IMO).
I’d say it’s still worth reading to better understand the people around you who seem to act in almost objectively “illogical/irrational” ways, even when presented with better solutions. Even though such behavior is typically self-destructive, this book helped me to see the “logic” of it (Eg some obese women are obese because they were abused as children and they unconsciously overeat/eat junk food to make themselves fat and unattractive to potential abusers, so without resolving that issue no amount of healthy nutrition knowledge will help them, they’ll always regress).
It’s also given me more empathy for those around me, instead of feeling like they’re doing things “to me” I’ve been able to keep the bigger picture in mind and realize that people mistreating you is typically just a sign that they have unresolved issues themselves (that doesn’t mean you just let it happen without saying anything, but the increased empathy helps me handle the situation better).
> Eg some obese women are obese because they were abused as children and they unconsciously overeat/eat junk food to make themselves fat and unattractive to potential abusers ...
I‘m not a big fan of these kind of „logic“ explanations. I think the explanation can be a lot more straightforward, like by being treated worthless your whole childhood you‘ve internalised this feeling and now continue to do the same to yourself.
But yes, it‘s really helpful to somehow understand or least get an idea why a person behaves in a certain way.
To my understanding, the logic is that there's a hormone called leptin which strongly guides your eating patterns, cravings, energy, etc. Stresses and traumas can affect your leptin levels, so particular stresses and traumas can cause you to eat more. This makes evolutionary sense, since if you're in a famine, or an ice age, you better stock up on as much food as you can. Move slowly, digest slowly, don't lose any of it, because you never know when you'll run out.
Sexual abuse traumas get interpreted by some bodies as the same kinds of stress signals as famine, raising leptin, causing overeating.
So I guess the broader point is that some of the "unconscious logic" going on inside us isn't just habits or odd personality traits, but actual chemical processes.
Note that I got all of this knowledge from reading a Pop Sci weight loss book. HN, let me know if you know better :-)
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, the book goes more in depth, and again the question becomes — so you’ve internalized feeling worthless, what is the solution?
I believe the book provides a key to understanding how to resolve those feelings that traditional psychotherapy lacks (with its focus on identifying the problem and acting more logically, most people know exactly what they’re doing wrong, they don’t need you to point it out, they need to resolve the underlying issue — which typically seems to be some childhood trauma).
While van der Kolk et al. have certainly contributed a great deal to the study of trauma and helped popularise ideas that have been known within the academy, he remains a controversial figure and spends a great deal of the text going off on self-aggrandising tangents. If you’re interested in psychotherapy in general or the interpretation of the human experience through a psychological lens, I would recommend anything picking up one of Rogers, Yalom, Frankl, or Satir’s books.
Much if addiction, depression, anxiety, etc is rooted in trauma (typically from childhood), and regular psychotherapy is insufficient to fully heal people. He recommends a number of different modalities to heal trauma (many to be done as adjuncts to traditional psychotherapy).
How about we stop masking the problem of insulin resistance by pumping type 2 diabetics with insulin?
Why don’t we start telling diabetics the truth — your diet is broken and needs to be fixed; avoid most carbs, do strength training.
We don’t need more insulin to shove the massive onslaught of blood sugar from your crappy diet into your cells (which are telling you they’ve had enough, AKA insulin resistance), we need more honesty.
The healthcare industry is morally and intellectually bankrupt. All the honest people who got into it trying to make a real difference don’t stand a chance, the truth doesn’t survive for an instant in this corrupt industry more focused on how much they can get out of insurance companies than treating patients.
First of all, diabetics take insulin because it keeps them from dying, not because it cures diabetes. Prior to getting on insulin, type 2 diabetics have likely already been on a drug which does not exacerbate insulin resistance (e.g. metformin). As the disease progresses, the pancreas starts to crap out and you eventually end up on insulin since your body can't produce enough insulin on it's own.
> Why don’t we start telling diabetics the truth — your diet is broken and needs to be fixed; avoid most carbs, do strength training.
Yes, since no diabetic person has ever heard this advice before... as someone who is not diabetic but knows many people who are, every single person who is diabetic knows that diet and exercise will help them, yet they can't seem to get it sorted out. To me, this says knowledge and willpower are not the problem. Also, if someone has made it to the point where they are on insulin, their body is already pretty screwed up at that point and making these drastic lifestyle changes is going to be very very difficult (though not impossible). Regardless, we should have some more compassion for these folks - it is a very difficult disease to deal with and shitting on people for being sick is just mean, regardless of how they got there.
It seems to be that these organizations are in the business of SICKcare, not HEALTHcare. It is much more profitable to keep people just a little sick (and dependent) than to cure them (which most diabetics are not even told is even a possibility).
I'm not saying the ADA and CDA are right or that your advice on diet and exercise is wrong, I'm saying the issue is more complicated than you are making it out to be. Your average diabetic knows what causes the disease and what is making it worse, yet they have a very difficult time making the lifestyle changes required to improve their outcome. If you're familiar with Jason Fung's work, you'll know that he himself raises this point, and this is why he is such an advocate of intermittent fasting - this lifestyle change seems to be easier to make for someone who is diabetic than improving diet and exercising more.
I’m not trying to make it a black and white issue, and there is definitely tons of variance in terms of what people respond to, my only claim is that when you have an absolutely massive portion of the population with diabetes, there is something seriously and fundamentally broken, it’s not just about coming up with some better ways to help patients make small behavioral changes (even if that is also important).
If telling people in America that "improving diet and exercise help manage your diabetes" doesn't get rid of our diabetes epidemic why would it get rid of Africa and Asia's?
Everyone wants to blame the government or big pharma, but I think the fact of the matter is, human beings are evolved for a world that is very different from the one we currently live in. At least my perspective, this explains the situation much better.
Humans evolved in an environment where there were no highly processed sugars or highly processed carbohydrates and where our long ago ancestors got daily exercise looking for food, building shelters, running or fighting predators and so on. The human body is optimized for a certain type of diet and a certain level of exercise. In addition to this, human beings evolved to crave sweet food and eating sweet food is an enjoyable experience. We know that eating highly processed carbohydrates or sweets leads insulin to rise more than eating other things and doing this repeatedly over time leads to fat accumulation, insulin resistance and diabetes.
Contrast with the world we live in today: sugary drinks and foods and processed carbs are everywhere. Many of us are required to sit all day (or at least be stationary, if not sitting) for our jobs. To get food today most of us either drive to the grocery store, drive to a restaurant, or have food delivered to our home. We don't build our own homes. We don't hunt. We don't fight off predators. There is very little that many of us have to do in modern life that requires exercise. Almost all exercise is optional.
Another thing to consider, is that the amount of stress we encounter in daily life has not gone down. If anything, at least in the developed world, we have ramped up the amount of stress that people experience on a daily basis in the past few decades. Stressful commutes, office politics, fighting the crowds while out shopping, constantly being prodded to compare yourself to everyone around you (i.e. social media) and poor sleep (and then overindulging in caffeine the next morning) are all parts of modern life. Consider that the stress response evolved in living things in order to get that living thing in to action, to flee or fight for its life. As it turns out, the physical activity that follows a stress response usually turns off the stress response.. but the times we find ourselves in stressful situations often do not offer a physical outlet for our stress. Thus, cortisol remains elevated in many of us, and it turns out that consistently high cortisol leads to insulin resistance.
So two hormones being persistently elevated lead to insulin resistance: insulin and cortisol. These hormones are persistently elevated in the average human in the developed world. Exercise improves insulin sensitivity but most humans in the developed world have no reason to exercise, aside from attracting mates and staying healthy.
Lastly, one's ability to forego pleasure or leisure now for a return later (or, for the promise of not getting sick later) varies a lot throughout the population. Some people are very good at this, some are not. Obviously the amount of education and knowledge one has also varies from person to person in the developed world. Since most of us crave sweets and processed carbs, they are readily available and nothing in our lives requires us to exercise, those who are not good at forgoing pleasure now or those who do not know that eating this way is bad for you, will sit and eat like garbage right now because it feels great right now.
It is not a simple explanation, but to me, this set of facts explains why it is becoming more of a problem as time goes on. As much as big pharma may want people to get sick and buy their drugs, big pharma didn't make people crave sweet food, nor did they make processed food ubiquitous, nor did they come up with office jobs that keep us sedentary, nor are they keeping us stressed out. These are all byproducts of evolution and our own technological successes.
I agree with most everything you’re saying, but it doesn’t change the fact that the healthcare industry is giving specifically harmful advice to people rather than drawing a hard line and saying it’s urgent and imperative that you make behavioral changes to fix diabetes. They’re told it’s terminal and all they can do is manage it, the reality is that many people could rid themselves of diabetes, which few doctors tell their patients.
People rely on doctors and doctor’s rely on research, and then when articles like this come out no one thinks there’s something fundamentally wrong with the industry?
> Why don’t we start telling diabetics the truth — your diet is broken and needs to be fixed; avoid most carbs, do strength training.
We already tell diabetics the "truth". In medical school, we're taught how to properly inform the patient in an unbiased, nonjudgmental way. It isn't up to the physician to force them to change their lifestyle, but instead for a mutual agreement to be made. Most people aren't able to change their lifestyle for a variety of reasons from being economically disadvantaged to lacking the knowledge of proper nutrition. It is not as simple "your diet is broken and needs to be fixed; avoid most carbs, do strength training.". I really wish it was.
It seems to be that these organizations are in the business of SICKcare, not HEALTHcare. It is much more profitable to keep people just a little sick (and dependent) than to cure them (which most diabetics are not even told is even a possibility).
I love that you’re completely ignoring that I’m making a broad, philosophical recommendation that people need to fundamentally focus on improving their diets and engaging in a specific type of exercise proven to improve glucose disposal and your only response is to be snarky.
Diabetes is an incredibly scary disease and we need more focus on the underlying causes and permanent solutions instead of pumping all this money and effort into stop gap measures that perpetuate the problem.
CBD — the non-psychoactive cannibinoid sourced from hemp but legal almost everywhere. CBD does an awesome job of decreasing my anxiety and making me laser focused (at small doses, 5-10mg) and help me get a great night sleep (at higher doses, 20-30mg)
There are tons of different brands but my favorites are below:
My mother committed suicide 8 years ago, and this is something I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and trying to understand (in part to ensure I never suffer the same fate).
For anyone who has struggled with depression or severe anxiety, if you haven’t read the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, I encourage you to read it as soon as possible — it’s one of the best, most approachable, resources out there to understand not only many of the roots of depression, but many strategies to actually overcome it (it’s very different from traditional talk therapy, which is mostly focused on getting people to cope with their past trauma rather than resolve it).
+1 for The Body Keeps the Score. One of the most useful books on overcoming trauma I've ever read. The idea of Developmental Trauma Disorder is so much more constructive than other models.
So many of the things we call "diseases" can be traced to trauma. "Mental injury" may be a more useful construct than "mental illness". In the same way that your body can heal from a femur fracture, your psyche can heal from a trauma-induced mind fracture.
More than any specific modality, what I got from the book was confirmation that the way to heal developmental trauma is to create a safe space and then to engage with it. As opposed to seek to hide it or cover it up pharmaceutically as recommended by Big Pharma.
Practices I have found to be useful in dealing with childhood physical abuse and chronic emotional abuse:
- sauna/cold plunge (incredibly useful way to trigger fight or flight and learn to deal with conditioned fear response)
All non-market pricing options (like rent control) are inherently arbitrary.
Also frequently it’s property taxes that force people out of neighborhoods (eg their families own a place for years, and then the property values go up making it too expensive for them to live in). If property taxes were eliminated, this would displace fewer people. Naturally you don’t see any politicians talking about this since they don’t want to eliminate a source of revenue for the state — they’d rather blame Airbnb!
All market interventions have some cost. The idea is that the benefits exceed the costs. The notion that benefits can never exceed costs is wrong on its face but somehow its what everybody assumes. We live in very cynical times.
Prop 13 wouldn't be so damaging if it were easier to build. Unfortunately Prop 13 incentives and/or minimizes the consequences of communities restricting development, so it had this weird feedback effect. Regulations have unintended consequences and so we should be rightly wary of them. But that reality shouldn't be dispositive on whether we should attempt them.
Market dynamics are like gravity: you can't ignore gravity but gravity doesn't make human flight impossible, it just constrains the solution space. Arguing that we shouldn't attempt market interventions is like arguing that we shouldn't have attempted human flight because God didn't equip us with wings or that we should've waited around until we evolved wings.
Property taxes are one of the few ways you can concretely tax the wealth of people that hold large amounts of property for speculative purposes, its far too easy to play shell games with liquid money.
If you eliminate property tax, or prevent it from rising, you make the absentee owner who only cares about a payoff 20 years from now leaving perfectly livable homes empty many magnitudes worse. (as evidenced by california)
It’s not only speculative wealth or property that get’s taxed, ask yourself how many low-income senior citizen’s who are home owners now living in gentrified communities are put into a position where they need to sell their home due to property taxes.
That's the purpose of property taxes. If they hadn't prevented construction of residential real estate then they wouldn't have to pay these high taxes.
> eliminating property tax only incentives blocking all new development to drive up property values and encourage rent seeking
I'm quite interested to see your reasoning behind that statement. Don't people still want their property values to go up even with property taxes? Except in a no property tax scenario, people who own their homes outright would still be able to stay if they wanted to. Perhaps no property taxes would more highly encourage local owners to restrict newcomers. Isn't the government also interested in increasing property values so they can receive more revenue? In that case I suppose they would in a sense be "earning" the taxes they levy.
>Perhaps no property taxes would more highly encourage local owners to restrict newcomers
Bingo. Rampant NIMBYism. Also growing the local economy should be the priority for local governments not creating a housing bubble
There is an argument that can be made that people who cannot afford to live in prime real estate in an economic powerhouse should sell their house and move somewhere else to enable growth or allow more housing to be built. But picking neither is not a productive outcome
No, as a property owner who doesn't plan to sell in the near future I want my properties values low: I pay taxes on the value of the land, so the lower that value the lower my costs. When I decide to sell I want low property taxes because I know the future buyers of my land will consider property taxes, I just want high property values.
Sure, that's the ideal situation. Paying no tax and having high property values. Ultimately I'd assume you still want the property to be worth more than what you paid for it. You and the government's incentives are aligned in that sense. Of course you still are moderately adversarial since they are taxing you.
I was just trying to point at that local governments are also encouraged to have high property values for tax revenue. They also tend to have a bit more power to be able to affect large areas property values by force. If people cannot/don't utilize the government to enact policies to force people out, it seems to me that it would be pretty difficult for people to enact those policies without governmental power.
What we see in places like San Francisco are property owners and governments teaming up to drive property values up in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Edit - It could be said that the government itself is rent-seeking in such an arrangement.
As another former >300lbs man, let me politely suggest that you are completely full of shit. Calories are by far and away the most important metric when losing weight. Controlling food addiction is an issue too, but you're not going to solve it by eating "whole foods".
Cus you had to be a lot richer to have access to shit tons of calories. The meme of the rich fat person goes way back in time; it's only very recently that food is so cheap and calorically dense.
That sounds true but the evidence shows otherwise.
Women in the 1950s were mostly lean and did almost no exercise.
Look around at the people who are the most physically active today (day laborers/construction workers). They’re active all day, and yet most are still overweight.
It’s not about activity, it’s about consuming quality food to fix your hormone levels.
Please provide evidence that hormonal balance or other endocrine mess is involved.
I'm quite interested in such.
I think it is combination of both increased calorie intake and somewhat reduced physical work thus caloric demand - mostly sitting (in car, at work) instead of walking or standing.
Having food be more palatable and caloric plays into this too but seems secondary.
There is absolutely nuance to it, I’m certainly not a proponent of a sedentary lifestyle or not working out. But if people just start exercising without also switching to whole foods, they will never out-exercise their diet — in fact many people end up losing muscle (because they’re running a lot and not eating enough protein), which slows down your metabolism even further.
I great book for you to checkout is Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf — it talks about how different foods affect insulin differently while also including the nuance of differences between people, as well as a way to test your personal response to certain foods to determine your optimal macronutrient intake.
I suspect insulin is only a small part of the story in obesity and other hormones are more important, esp. growth hormone family (e.g. ghrelin) and steroids - in starting the cascade that leads to metabolic syndrome. We do not know nearly enough and any book is liable to be outdated by at least 10 to 20 years and trying to sell something.
Otherwise diabetics with insulin replacement wouldn't go fat - but instead even controlled type 2 diabetes is highly linked to obesity. (Both ways!)
Likewise type 1 diabetics are somewhat more likely to be obese despite tight control on insulin levels.
This book is cutting edge science, with ample references to recent studies. It came out last year and is written by someone who has personally helped hundreds of thousands (if not millions of people) to lose weight and keep it off long term, I highly encourage you to read it before making judgments about the motives of the author.
Unless it is one of those scalping Springer research books there is really no way for it to match latest research...
And just do you know, most books are made to sell and this one does not strike me as a technical (enough) one. Though it is well written (based on the preview), I would not trust the conclusions. It really tries to sell a paleo diet which is an instant red flag because we do not have good evidence for efficacy of any diet, even less so for so-called paleo.
Nutrition science is finally starting to move fast beyond preconceptions hopefully.
When you've had to put yourself through the things I've had to put myself through to lose, and keep off, half of my body weight, it becomes a bit difficult not to be rude to some conman trying to sell convenient lies.
Losing large amounts of weight is plenty hard enough without having to wade through misinformation.
Exactly. I am a strict calorie counter and I am not overweight. (155# 5’10” 55 year old man). Sometimes I have hostess cupcakes for breakfast. (330 calories). Sometimes I have a Big Mac for lunch (550 calories). It’s hilarious when fat people talk about ‘whole foods’ and ‘mindful eating’. It’s calories.
I wouldn't call it hilarious, but as Mel Brooks once said "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die".
When you're that obese, food is an addiction in the literal sense. There is a ghrelin/dopamine feedback loop at work and it is not at all fun to break that. People are lured in by these schemes because the addict part of their mind is desperate for excuses not to stop eating. I know how this feels, because I fucking lived it. You wouldn't believe the things you can convince yourself of as an addict. Not to mention that lowered blood sugar is directly correlated with decreased willpower.
It's calories. We know it's calories. We know we shouldn't eat so many calories. That's not the hard part.
But this law is all about calories. And counting calories works. If you’re unable to count calories then of course you need some remedial help. But pretending that it’s about “eating the right foods” is lying to yourself.
Every obese person needs "remedial help", that's the definition of treatment. Even attacking the problem from multiple angles may not be enough. Counting calories combined with accurate monitoring helps but is very often insufficient. And even from just that the drop out rates are big - even without actual caloric restriction.
Increasing base metabolism is known to not work as it does not suppress the appetite or fix reward loop. Though thyroid therapy may be needed for some cases.
Dopamine uptake inhibitors exist but they have other side effects, petty bad. (Among them addiction.) SSRI make the problem worse, as do certain antipsychotics.
Direct appetite suppressants have not been invented yet though you can cheat some with special diets. (Well there are some but they're not stable and pain to inject. Could be done like insulin injections but somehow not considered cost effective and unsafe as ghrelin has additional functions.)
Having accurate data on food contents (including caloric) is vital but insufficient.
This is overly reductionist and places the blame on people attempting diets.
Most people I’ve found have simply been given terrible dietary advice (like eat high carb, low fat), which doesn’t work for the vast majority of people (because it elevates insulin levels, making them hungrier), and then they’re blamed later for not sticking to the program.
It’s completely ridiculous, it’s like putting a faithful man in a whorehouse and forcing him to ingest 4 doses of ecstasy. Sure it’s still his fault if he cheats, but are we going to pretend that the context doesn’t matter?
Ecstasy and whorehouses are a poor plan for fidelity, high-carb low-fat is a poor plan for fat loss.
Not long term it’s not, the studies that show that are short term in nature, like most diet studies.
Fiber is a double edge sword, some people do great with more, some people do terrible with more — it’s highly dependent and the only way to know is experiment. The book Health Gut, Healtby You by Dr. Ruscio is the most up to date book on gut health.
In general I agree. There is a major confounder that the best source of fiber are raw vegetables which have other beneficial properties - but most studies of it tended to use something much simpler than actual fiber combinations found in foods.
We do not know nearly enough about how diet impacts gut microbiome, nor how the environment does. It is really hard to study anyway.
As someone who helps people lose fat professionally, I can say with near 100% confidence this will have almost zero effect on the vast majority of people.
People were lean long before calorie counts were readily available, the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food.
The problem is philosophical — if you think all edible substances qualify as “food,” you’re never going to lose weight and keep it off.
If you think you should only be consuming whole foods the VAST majority of the time, then you will lose weight and keep it off relatively effortlessly.
As someone who has lost 20 pounds since the new year, I can say with near 100% confidence that it would not have happened for me without obsessive calorie tracking. Can't recommend MyFitnessPal enough.
It won’t last, calorie counts are not reliable indicators of how many calories you’re actually digesting (look up the thermic effect of food), and long term you will not keep it off if you focus solely on calories, quality whole foods come first.
That just makes no sense, unless you are suggesting that we magically generate matter, calorie counts are an upper bound on how many calories you are actually digesting.
Sure, but how does that in any way make calorie counting less effective? It's an upper bound. Sure, you could maybe eat a little more protein than you would otherwise budget for, but if you are aiming to lose weight, overestimating the count of an item a little isn't going to hurt.
Dude, I can see what you're saying, but as somebody who apparently does this professionally you need to work on how you get your point across.
I've lost over 15KG/35 pounds since the start of the year doing nothing but CICO - it's not incorrect to say that Calories is the king when it comes to how to lose the weight.
For everything else you are saying, it's not wrong either - anybody who starts CICO pretty quickly discovers that "Yes I can eat anything, but my god I will be hungry at 7pm if I used all my Calories on KFC and Donuts" - but don't keep saying simply that "Counting calories is not going to work".
Edit to add: and my wife and I have done this all with cooking home made meals at least 5-6 nights a week. It only takes a minute to enter a recipe in a calculator app.
To be clear the population of people on HN is a self-selecting, techie group of ppl. Most people cannot do CICO long term. And even if you can you’ll realize it doesn’t work the leaner you get, quality becomes increasingly important at that point.
The GP said UPPER BOUND. Sure, protein and fibrous foods require more energy to digest. Great, that's a nice bonus. However, if your counting calories then you're not taking that into account, therefore you're over counting. That leads to _more_ weight loss, never less.
I’ve yet to see the caloric intake which cuts off 500-600 cals of your BMR which for most non bedridden people equates to about a 1000 calories daily deficit that wouldn’t result in weight loss regardless of the nutritional makeup of said calories.
What I’m saying is that while eating 1500 cals of pure sugar a day might not be good for your long term insulin sensitivity you’ll lose weight at about the same rate as eating 1500 “well balanced” cals of fat/protein/complex carbs a day.
This is a statement that’s technically true but misses the most important point — sourcing your foods from fat/protein/veggies will naturally take care of the calories piece.
All mammals, including humans, have the ability to naturally regulate their energy balance when they eat the foods they evolved to eat.
That is exactly how I get my many, many clients to lose weight — eating meat and veggies naturally causes people to reduce their calorie intake by increasing their feelings of satiety from the foods they’re eating.
No, how you make your clients lose weight is by restricting their caloric intake that’s it.
The fact that’s is more easily achieved by saying that you can eat 3 chicken breasts a potatoe and a bucket of kale a day than 5 large cookies, isn’t exactly ground breaking nor does it have anything to do with what humans evolved to eat because we’ve been eating processed sugar for far longer than we were eating meat.
In fact scratch my first comment that started this I would rather see a menue that is at or over your daily caloric requirement which magically makes you lose weight.
Restaurants being required to show calories may change menus in a way that cannot help but have an effect for everybody. It incentivizes having lower calorie options, disincentives healthy sounding but not really items like some salads and disincentives really over the top items.
Even if that doesn't pan out, it certainly makes life easier for the millions who do count calories.
> the problem people have is NOT lack of awareness of the number of calories in their food
Maybe that's not the problem but it could be part of a solution. Don't underestimate gamification and feedback loops.
What type of awareness are we talking about? I imagine a progress bar telling you precisely where you are for the day and the week, now you have to consciously break the ceiling if you want to eat too much.
I’m all for anything that helps people, including gamification.
But if your focus is calories, and not the quality/source if your food, then you’re not solving the REAL problem which is distorted hormone levels affecting how full you feel. Junk food causes you to be hungrier than you should be.
Look around, no other mammal is overweight other than humans, and most humans weren’t overweight until junk food wasn’t invented.
Congrats on starting! That’s the hardest part. As someone who helps people lose weight professionally, I’m curious to hear what program, if any, you found and how did you decide to do it? (I’m not selling anything, just curious).
I had been going to the gym, but I was frustrated with the crappy heart rate monitors on the cardio machines there. I was also looking for a replacement for my Pebble Time, so I got the new Fitbit Versa. It works pretty well, and has a nice feature of giving me a "calorie budget," telling me about how much I can eat.
So far, though, the hardest part is estimating how many calories are in something, and how much of something I'm eating.
If you stick with properly raised proteins, healthy fats (no trans fats), and low-carb veggies you don’t have to keep track of anything, the calories take care of themselves.
Limit starchy carbs and treats to one meal after your workouts.
People love to downvote me on this thread but that advice is essentially what people pay me thousands of dollars to get them lean.
Nonetheless, it’s been instrumental in helping me alleviate my anxiety and depression. I read it a year ago and I can’t imagine going back to the way I felt then.
Specifically I’ve done two forms of therapy — EMDR and Somatic Experiencing — that were recommended (among many others) in the book.