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In general, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here about eating more vegetables and way less sugar being the way to go health-wise, but I do want to respond to some specific things you've said.

> You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added, except in Asian restaurants

Restaurants are typically not where I go to eat healthy food anywhere in the world, although I do think you have a pointed that American restaurants are often relatively junk food oriented.

> ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer....

There is nothing inherently wrong with "processed" food; it is entirely possible to use industrial processes to make a perfectly healthy and wholesome food product. Take for example, (this is by no means an endorsement) Larabar [1]. They make snack bars that typically contain 2-3 ingredients that are all just dried fruit. Should they be banned as "processed" food because of how they are made?

> If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it

This is a ridiculous statement and is one of the main reasons why I'm commenting. I wouldn't eat a spoonful of yeast, should I not eat bread? I wouldn't eat a spoonful of salt, should I not eat... anything?

> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added.

I've never lived in an area in the United States where I've ever had any problem finding anything like this.

[1] https://www.larabar.com/

> We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment

The flour you make French bread with is not found any more or less naturally in the environment than the sugar you get from cane or beet.

This whole thing about evolution and nutrition is entirely pseudoscientific woo.

If humans had to eat the same way as our ancestors (ie actual paleo, not some hipster fad diet) humanity would have died out long time ago.

The French thing makes this all the more ironic... I can’t imagine much more triumph in modern processing than the five mother sauces.

Clearly the American diet has a crazy oversupply of sugar... fructose, glucose, sucrose... at the amounts we’re talking about in the average American diet it doesn’t fucking matter (making the whole HFCS controversy always a joke).

As a Chinese person born in America, you're absolutely right. If you don't cook, it's difficult to eat reasonably / "normally" in this country, even if you have money. You kind of have to pick your poison: salt, sugar, unnatural fats, etc.

At least I grew up on the east coast and my parents cooked. Anecdotally, I'm shocked by what my acquaintances from the midwest eat, and the consequences really start to show up when people reach their 30's (although there are signs earlier)

I read Michael Pollan's books (Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.) 10-15 years ago and they opened my eyes to how broken this country is in terms of food.

https://michaelpollan.com/books/

It's funny he is considered "liberal" here but it's just common sense in the rest of the world. The thesis is actually "conservative": eat things that your grandmother would consider food. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. Did your grandmother (or great grandmother) cook with high-fructose corn syrup? Or processed oils / margarine?

The problem with restaurants (globally!) is they have zero responsibility or incentive to serve food that fits the nutritional needs of their customers.

• Restaurants don't sell food, they sell satiation, taste, brand, ambiance, customer experience.

• You rarely can ask for an ingredient list, you often can't see who made your food, it is a black box in a black box.

• All we really care about are omissions: the list of chemicals, macronutrients, hormones, and ingredients that are excluded from our menu items.

Not only does this disconnect us from the ingredients in our food... I think this is a huge problem that compounds toward multiple health crises such as obesity and diabetes. Chefs are seen as food experts, yet the nutrition aspect of restaurant food is entirely ignored. We expect individuals themselves to be their own nutrition experts (curating meals and ingredients for their own health).

I don't know what the solution is. But at the very least I think every restaurant owes its customers the macros and ingredients for every product they serve, in accessible formats. It should be easier to get that information onto your phone than a tweet. Food receipts should list macro and calorie breakdowns. Tools for nutrition analysis should be free, standard, integrated, and widespread. etc

> I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally"

That very much depends on your location. High tourism locations will often have lots of junk food places. If you can move larger distances (i.e. rent a car and the like) you'll find wonderful and cheap restaurants pretty much anywhere. Even in otherwise expensive places like SF or NY.

Here's the problem though: portion sizes are _enormous_ . It took quite a bit of time to adapt, and adapt I did, if my measurements are any indication. If you want healthy portions, you'll either waste food, or you'll have to ask for a take out box. Essentially, a lot of places will serve you portions that are enough for two meals.

Ingredient availability varies a lot. In larger centers you can find almost anything you could possibility want. Even farmer's markets if you are lucky, which will often have locally sourced produce at lower prices compared to big supermarket chains (and sometimes even lower if you get there near closing hour ;) )

The US has its issues with food (in particular, lower class individuals have trouble finding cheap food that isn't junk food), but I'm surprised to read the rest of your comments.

I travel all around the US a lot for work (or did, pre-covid) and all the way down to your fast food restaurants all the way up to fancy $500/plate places, I've never once found it difficult to eat a "standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added". I would say that 80% of my meals are exactly that. I've never once been to a single non-fast-food restaurant where they didn't have multiple different kinds of vegetables on the menu.

There's certainly an issue with portion size at most US restaurants, but I've never found it difficult to get a plate of plain roasted vegetables with lightly seasoned fish, for example.

>It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added.

Yogurt in particular is not really popular in the US, so you will not find it in many restaurants. You can, however, find packaged sugarfree yogurt in most convenience stores and certainly every grocery store if that's your thing. Other than yogurt, there are plenty of sugarfree snacks widely available. Starbucks is on every corner and sells plain vegetables, plain fruit, plain eggs, etc, for example.

I suspect your complaints are mostly rooted in simply not being aware of certain brand names or which stores are known for what type of food, because all of the things you mentioned definitely are available as long as you aren't going to McDonald's or Five Guys for every meal.

Remember that (almost) everything in America is a business. Sugar is cheap and addictive. I had an "aha" moment when digging into Starbucks' nutritional labels. I realized that, with certain types of drinks, Starbucks had essentially legitimized drinking a milkshake for breakfast. I'm not sure how much that contributed to their success but it must surely have been a component.

As an American who has traveled a lot, I think a large part of the problem here is Americans’ over reliance on restaurants for food. You can rightly criticize the processed, sugary, or fried foods that many people habitually cook, but to claim that Americans don’t know how to make plain foods or have access to the ingredients is ignorance: every proper grocery store sells good proteins, fresh vegetables, and unprocessed grains, and they do it because it’s profitable, because people do largely cook pretty standard meals at home (and as others noted, your yogurt example is wrong). But regardless of how healthy our cooking is, why is it so rare for Americans to eat a home cooked lunch, and so strikingly common to meet people who never cook their own dinner when compared to other countries? Your country has on average healthier foods than we do (not sure by how much once you account for the dishes people actually order), but the portions at restaurants are still too big. People are healthier in France because they cook most of their meals at home, not because the restaurants give them a proper diet. If we all started eating like the French do we’d probably have a more balanced diet, but we’d still be fat if we ate at restaurants all the time.

> you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added

I have a difficult time finding these, as well. The culture here (spoken as an American) is to avoid fats, which is why most products advertise "no fat" (yoghurt with no fat seems like a strange contradiction to me).

> in Asian restaurants (and even there, food is often sweetened)

This is also true from my experiences. Chinese restaurants add sugar due to believing that's part of the American palette. (For Chinese foods, there's also a distinction between "typical" and "authentic" styles, and most Americans are unaware of the latter.)

Quick remark: Sugar, as other carbohydrates, is cheap. It also tastes well, objectively (as much as taste can be objectively measured).

So if you go for industrial-level food production, you end up with a higher proportion of sugar than what would be considered healthy. Sugar per se ist not bad at all (try to have an apple without it ;)). But our economy demands cheap, somewhat tasty, calories. Hence we end up with a lot of sugar or carbohydrates in general.

Any diet that rules out carbs works well because of that, not because of some intrinsic property of carbs.

As a French person you would probably never consider giving up on a good croissant or baguette, but in France these things are expensive. I doubt anyone gives their kids fresh croissant before school every day.

What part of the US were you in? I think your experience will vary widely; in NYC there are healthy meat n veggies fast food places every couple blocks. That being said I think you are accurately describing the majority of the country.

Your opinion is balanced. But it'll appear as nonsense to Americans. Americans are ideologues. They love freedom. They like their own camps. They want to find eternal truths in everything. (There's no such thing).

In the dietary world, you'll find anti-sugar camps, anti-fat camps, Atkins diet, ketogenic diet, fitness buffs. This article is an example. It's a deep dive full of science. The conclusions, however, are mostly nonsense.

I'll eat like you suggest. But I'll entertain with the reading. :)

> I think sugar is the main problem (not fat)

Most of the research is that it's both. (Tt's the worst when fat and sugar are together) Specifically food is more rewarding, denser, cheaper, and easier to find than it used to be, so we overeat it. Same thing happens with almost any animal that's given ad libitum access to the american diet.

It seems there are two societal solutions, extremely heavy handed government interventions to ban tasty food or we invent a weight loss pill.

My recommendation, if you're staying at a hotel, is to ask if they have a BBQ for guest use. Most do, and then you can stop at the grocery store and buy some chicken/fish, some vegetables (also a roll of aluminum foil), and cook it on the bbq.

I travel quite a bit for work (at least, when there's no pandemic) and even though my per diem would cover restaurants, I have almost completely switched over to hotel BBQs and eat better for way less money.

Yup I agree. I call it the food gravity problem of america. Trying to eat healthy here is like trying to beat gravity:

This youtube video goes into more detail about the US problem compared to japan: "Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM

The American processed food industry uses very cheap ingredients that inherently taste awful, but they get us to eat them by adding salt, sugar, and fat, all of which Americans are semi-addicted to.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/26/172969363/ho...

> standard meat-with-vegetable

"Standard" in the countries I've lived in would include a starch. Part of your reaction may just be to cultural differences in what's considered a standard meal.

Your "2 cents" is nothing more than an expression of the food culture you grew up with. There are many other amazing food cultures around the world - even in parts of the US, although you don't find them in the chain stores and chain supermarkets.

I live near a college town, with food from dozens of nations. I can have crepes for breakfast, Vietnamese for lunch, good Italian for dinner. Tomorrow: steak and eggs at a diner for breakfast, sushi for lunch then dinner at a nice Czech place with cabbage and sausage. All cooked by immigrants or descendants of those heritages.

But no, not typical. Most Americans buy all their food at the Dollar Store, and its everything you say.

One interesting and also really annoying phenomenon about going to another country is that it can be really difficult to find what you want to eat in the grocery store. I think the grocery stores in each country have to categorize and organize goods by how people use them, which differs in each country, and when you mix that in with goods actually missing, the experience can be really frustrating. It is not unusual for ex-pats to swear that something is not sold in the country, only to find out that they were looking in the wrong section. For example, in Germany I've known ex-pats to complain that there is no sweetened condensed milk, but I found it at Rewe next to the coffee (do Germans put it in coffee? Sounds good, I guess). At Rewe the peanut butter is next to the jelly, where I would expect it, but at Real it's in the "American foods" section :D I would expect any store that sells yoghurt in the US to have non-sweetened yoghurt, too. Just keep looking :) Dairy products are also sorted differently in each country.

Calorie count _is_ the key. This is incredibly well established in studies. Weight loss does not occur without caloric deficit, no matter what you eat. Likewise, weight loss will occur in caloric deficit even when eating what people would consider "junk", including sugar. See The Twinkie Diet, for example: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Avoiding food because "we didn't evolve to eat" is not sound science, either.

Neither pure white sugar nor vegetable oil occur naturally in the environment. Can't just blame sugar when fat has twice the energy density of sugar and is used abundantly in the processed foods that we like to overeat.

Few years ago I had some eating disorder, I could only eat raw vegetables.

My diet habit shifted 180deg in 48h, it's a weird realization:

1) eating raw vegetables tickles your brain differently (raw veggies make you feel full faster)

2) most probably because there's no fat nor sugar added (which makes you want to eat more I guess)

3) even dressing is bad, so raw is best to have a natural negative feedback system

4) even the most mundane raw veggies have a lot of flavour.. I eat carrots like M&M's nowadays, it's sweet. Same for lettuce or tomato. I really think modern western culture is hurtful there.

Ah, the Americans... ;-)

As a Dutch person living in Amsterdam, I completely agree. I noticed when I visited SF a few times (and California in general) that:

- Vegetables are more expensive

- Bread is sweetened (there goes my breakdfast)

- Bread sucks (yep, I said it, basic bread should be thrown into the thrash can)

- Basic cheese in the US is a new species, and I am afraid of it

I went around these 2 issues by buying the highest quality French bread and imported cheese (how I missed actual France with their actual French bread... :'( ). While it was expensive, I could at least make a breakfast that I eat in Amsterdam (bread with cheese with butter, unsweetened).

The butter was normal. I have to give the US that.

Though, I do like what you guys can do with oatmeal. It taught me that the normal Dutch breakfast is uninspiring as hell, haha. So all in all, it was reall a positive experience, but it's so much nicer when you meet American people showing how they eat breakfast rather than traveling around in the country and simply guessing how to eat normal (normal being unsweetened / healthy -- I find that normal...).

Also, I found the US amazing with certain dinner options (e.g. sushi burito's).

I held much the same view but it occurs to me that in many East Asian countries, added sugar to dishes is common and overall sugar consumption not necessarily that low. Not to say it's healthy, but it seems an insufficient explanation.

The proliferation of junk foods, boxed refined products, seems higher in North America. As you say dining out tends to comprise the Standard American Diet of high fat and carbs, low fiber.

You can get a burger, or salad (usually with an option to add chicken) at any "American" restaurant. Does that fulfill your standard meal?

When the production of sugar and related sweeteners is among the most subsidized industries in the country, is it any wonder that these find their way into everything?

And a handy side effect for producers is that satiety is short lived, leading to repeated demand in the short term when included in a product.

I absolutely agree - sugar is definitely the issue. Most individuals don't get enough healthy fats due to marketing tactics. Stuff like Omega 3s and general unsaturated fats are incredibly important for brain function, reparation of tissue, etc.

I imagine eating a spoonful of pure steviol would be unpleasant, the acceptable daily intake is at most 12mg per kg of body weight. It's fine for you otherwise, and at a reasonable dose makes a great sugar substitute.

> I'm French ... I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally"

This really needs so much attention and focus given the ungodly delicious amount of butter French people cook with.

Yes eating out is mostly unhealthy. Anyone who have tried to recreate restaurant dishes at home, you will know how much extra salt, sugar, fat is needed to get that similar tasting profile.

Irrespective of ingredient choices, another thing that differentiates commercial food (non home-cooked) in the USA vs just about everywhere else, is portion sizes. Your portions are huge.

It is not actually that hard to do, we just have a rushed culture that ends up encouraging people to pick the fastest option. A lot of us are too lazy to cook properly.

This may sound dumb, but any suggestions on how to eat (i.e. a recipe book) in what you describe as "normal"?

I find that the Wholefoods and big Walgreens stores have the best natural healthy food for the least amount of money.

Last year I went to Europe for a two week vacation. I stuffed myself like a greedy pig for two weeks, but I barely gained any weight on my return to the US. The next week, I went on a staff retreat for only 3 days and stuffed myself again. That time, I gained more than twice what I'd gained in Europe.

I'm convinced that the quality of European food is, on average, vastly superior to what's available in America.

Cheap Fast Food and Huge Portion Size are the biggest culprits to the heath (obesity) crisis in the US.

> I'm French (and incidentally a doctor,and my post is not judgemental in any way, this is not the point). Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" (= by my own standards).

As biologist with a background in Agriculture and Culinary: they exist, most farm to table restaurants in the US just have a small footprint in overall ecosystem. I spent most of my culinary career within them, ranging from Vegan to vegetation to seasonal based omnivore option. I also worked and ran kitchens in Agrotourisms in Europe and I'm familiar benefits with the Mediterranean diet, Spain having now surpassing Japan in Life expectancy, and diet is a significant contributor to it.

> I think sugar is the main problem (not fat) and I'm not convinced calory count is key. We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment.

Agreed, and even that is not always so cut and clear as having extra CNV of the amalayse gene (like I do) can be super beneficial, which leans to the need of the Biohacker space (of which I'm a part of and is comprised mainly of many dissatisfied Health Scientists) to play with diet and the epigenetic effects of it, as that has been woefuly neglected for decades in Medicine and Scientific journals but a mainstay in the Biohacker community that has become mainstream due to influencers.

As a kid I never understood the allure of sweets/desserts because of the CNV in my saliva is already breaking down the sugars in my mouth and makes super sweet things always taste a bit like the after taste of bitter chocolate or coffee--none of which I like. I always liked eating fruit, especially tart or sour ones more as a desert and only found out later in Life why that was. the study of how a palette is formed is a very interesting and entirely negated study in my opinion.

> This implies to know/learn how to cook (not so hard but this is easier when the local/family culture allowed you to learn passively).

Agreed! The best thing to do is to learn to cook with local, fresh organic products and help solidify a local food supply chain and relationship with your local farmers! This has a compound effect throughout the entire community and many communities are open vacant lots to community garden spaces.

> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added. (Or I didn't look at the right place, once again this is not judgemental).

It's there, its just found at higher end stores and outlets, ironically it costs more to deliver a product with less sugar and additives; but even Walmart has been a big player in the Organic produce Market. There is one next to my gym and I often went in to buy a pre-workout snack or a kombucha and there was always something I could eat without spiking my glucose levels.

> Generally speaking, it is easy to find online high-level cooking courses, but hard to learn the basics of how to cook your onions or tomatoes in different ways in everyday life, or make an healthy meal with what's left in the fridge; this could be interesting to have.

Agreed. Its an undervalued art and craft, in Boulder (one of the most concentrated 'foodie' places in the entire US) there are classes offered via a business that offers Learning Kitchen experiences where professional chefs from the surrounding area are commissioned on a topic/recipe/menu and teach paying members of the community on how to do things via interactive cooking.

Its a very cool model that I think should be expanded on. I'd love to be able to work with some of my old team members in the Industry especially if it could help offset my expenses and help me fund other projects in my Life; online learning could be a bridge or a primer, but cooking is ultimately a craft you learn by repeated instruction and correcting hand positioning (re-enforced with lots of cuts, burns, scrapes) that makes it more like going to the gym than watching a lecture on a subject.

You can learn online, I know I did watching Michelin Star chefs on Saturday Kitchen on the BBC before making the return into culinary in Europe, having only ever worked in catering while I was attending University as it inspired me to experiment with different techniques. I'm now retired from Kitchens but want I want to create a food docu-series, as I feel now is a critical time in Restaurants after having been so impacted due to COVID, that many may not make it.

> ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer.... If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it. - ban all added sugar, except (real) honey in reasonable proportions.

I'm not for banning anything, just using it in moderation and having people have a solid understanding on what it does to you metabolically and its impacts on health. Japanese and Italian cuisine are the two pillars my culinary repertoire and sugar is a vital component of Japanese recipes that simply cannot be substituted. I've tried stevia and honey but it just doesn't work, a proper tare is sweetned with sugar not just for taste and lush sheen and gloss when used to grill, but also as the precursors for the bacteria to ferment that takes place over years to give it a unique and umami loaded taste that defines Japanese cuisine.

And pasta and bread, carbohydrates, are just processed long-linked sugars and I can never give those up despite seeing and personally experienced the benefits of keto and carnivore diets in my friends.

I'd throw including intermittent fasting and meditation/yoga in that equation as well and you have a solid foundation for how to be healthier and more productive in Life that I found via Biohacking methods, cooking and farming professionally.

I also have the genetics for longevity on both sides of my family: my grandparents all made it to their late 90s, and my grandmother on my maternal side hit 99.7 before passing due to non health related issues, so I'm hoping that with this information guiding my behaviour I can make it to 150 years of age.

> Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally"

I'll second that, I've only been once for a few weeks on a work related trip, and I never paid attention to what I was eating but by the second week I felt run down, lathargic and really 'not great' - Hard to describe properly but I wasn't myself at all. With work I was connected with a doctor that I met because I just didn't feel 'right'.

I wasked asked the usual questions but after talking a bit more about my diet usually (even before mentioning what I was eating in the US) she knew exactly what was going on. My body wasn't used to breaking down the amounts of processed sugars that are more commonly found in everyday foods in the US.

I took a more concious approach to what was coming into my body and over a week I was able to feel normal again.

I come from Ireland, we have a diverse mix of foods available, you pick a country, I can tell you a street to find their food authentically and I love trying them. I also cook heavy with bad cholesterol, lots of butter thanks to French friends, lots of salt in other dishes from others, lots of cheese, cured meats, smoked cheeses and meats, snacks etc. - My diet was never interestingly good.

After my US trip I realised that there is a small poisoning in a sense being taken over the consumption.

> My 2 cents: - eat as much vegetables as you want (learn to cook them, with a little bit of olive oil)

I'm not stereotyping here, my exposure to the collegues from the local area never cooked. This is fine, but when you replace good food for fast food, you start to go into that chain. They didn't know a good way how to peel an avocado, which I found out on a drunken night with them in my apartment. 10+ and none of them knew how to prep an avocado. But that is not their fault at all..

> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA

Spot on. I cannot stress this point enough. You have to go out of your way to eat even moderately health conscious. This is a real shame. We will all take the easier path : 'Ah tonight I'll just get take-away, I'll just grab something on the way home.'

I grew up as a kid in Italy until I was 12, probably the only thing that I too away from it as a positive was that preparing, cooking and eating food is really not for sustenance.

Sustenance is the result, what matters is the social time, the prep is almost like a meditation, and the collaborative effort is like a social movement.

Food is really not just for sustenance. And I implore anyone reading this to try just cook a meal with friends, family or loved ones. It has a nice impact on way more than your sustenance intake.

Sugar is good, avocadoes have a lot of them, even the bad ones, but I would much prefer to enjoy my food than inhale it, in the US, it was seen as a time consumer.

'You are what you eat' - This expression didn't come from nowhere.

PS: 5 a day and the Pyramid might be wrong, there is no 1 scale for everyone. But there sure as shit isn't a cereal loaded with sugar for anyone.

What really annoyed me though, was the cost of it. To eat more natural, is more expensive than processing food. Odd.

As an American that avoids sugar like the toxin it is I agree. The food manufacturers put it in everything. I got an off brand of milk the other day because of the shortage, a local brand it had added sugar, I took two gulps and said "WTF". Bread it's like a staple now in baking white bread fuck it pack it with sugar from corn. Pizza make %50 of the sauce sugar. Drinks, would you like 100MG of liquid sugars in every $5 bottle? Coffee: Have some bean filtered water with that Mocha sugar sludge.

As a Mexican I agree (even if I think hating on sugar is misguided, in an otherwise healthy diet you would be sufficiently healthy to deal with it in reasonable amounts.) The US simply has such a mind boggling reliance on empty calories and overall low-quality food, with brothless soups, iceberg lettuce salads, and frying everything in cheapo oils like sunflower, canola or similar. If I do not cook at home, or choose very carefully, or as you say spend the big bucks at a fine restaurant, I simply cannot find nutritious good quality food. I now realized I was spoiled growing up by having two parents who love to cook good stuff and find good eats.

I am totally not convinced by this argument against sugar. Yes, sugar is calorie dense. Yes, it's easy to eat a lot of calories from sugar. But in the end, even eating NO sugar, if you eat a ton of things, you'll get fat. An then you go on to recommend honey as though there is something magic about it and not pretty much the same thing with sugar.

Big shoutout to saying low impact cardio. Running is the big example that can cause pain where people's bodies are so different that it's not clear what the correct form is for them or if there's even a good form.

I play and follow golf and the big injury issue with Tiger that made him multiple surgeries, and also had to reshape his golf swing from the pain running caused. Here's an article[0] about that from Running Magazine. There's more to the story on this, like his background and mentality on Navy Seal training, with his body type and high impact running it caused huge problems he's still dealing with.

As for funning form types, check out the video of Cliff Young and his running style[1] for the Sydney to Melbourne race at 61 but shuffling.

What I'm saying, and what I'm glad you included, is the importance of cardio being low impacts, and to also not feel bad if you're not a running. Biking, and especially swimming are great alternatives and so much better on your body long term.

[0] https://runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/tiger-woods-regrets-run... [1] https://vimeo.com/258718906

Intermittent fasting also helps. Many people do 16:8 (16 hours of fasting) and only eat from 12-8 or 10-6.

With IF, I lost about ~5 lbs doing nothing besides being more mindful. Once I added in daily runs / walks of ~4-5 miles, I lost another ~10 lbs easily.

I think the biggest challenge for people looking to lose weight is mindless eating / snacking. Initially I kept a diet journal and wrote down everything I ate or drank, and realized I would get more snacks throughout the day than I thought. I also drank a lot less water than I thought.

The other thing is portions. When I was at my largest, the portions I would set for myself were larger, and I would more often get a second round. All without really thinking about it, of course. Now I deliberately think about how big of a portion is appropriate and I never go for seconds except on some cheat days.

The problem with daily measurements is it can lead to frustration. The daily number may change constantly but it's the moving average that matters. Few people can track a number without asking themselves what that number means for them.

I want a scale without a screen and a measuring tape without numbers. Track often but only see the trend when you ask for it.

> the downside is that we’ve lost a great deal of local culinary tradition

I don't think we've lost anything; it's just that, in an era of cheap economies of scale from mass-production, artisanal anything (including artisanal cooking) is going to cost more—possibly enough to put most "authentic" / "traditional" cuisine out of reach of the working class, unless they're willing to make it themselves. (And who has the time for that?)

If you live in a city, look through restaurant reviews for a couple minutes and you'll probably be able to find a dozen local places in your own neighbourhood that have been open for 80 years or more, keeping up the tradition of serving the same food, the same way, that they always have. The only thing that such places have changed between then and now, are their prices.

The funny thing is that eating rice isn't even that old of a tradition, and neither is eating it in polished, white form. White rice only became ubiquitous when milling technology improved, and spoilage of the oils in brown rice became a concern for storage.

> Despite its long history in Japan rice was, for a long time, a food reserved for the warriors and the nobility. It was consumed by the majority of the population only from the seventeenth century onwards, not becoming the basis of Japanese food until the early twentieth century

https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/chopsticks-at-the-r...

> A disproportionate share of the rice crop was therefore consumed in the cities and by the political and economic elite, while the diet of much of the rural population continued to depend on the availability of a range of other grains – wheat, millet, barley, etc. – together with vegetables, fruit, pulses and occasional fish or game, grown at home or collected in the locality.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0955580070133003...

I honestly don't know how my grandparents ate. Between their generation and my parents', a lot of traditional food knowledge was lost. My maternal grandmother made all sorts of things from scratch--but I can't recall my mom making anything that didn't come in a box or a can.

I've had great success losing weight and keeping it off with food logging (shout out to Cronometer, the best food logging app I've used), trying to adhere to a keto diet, and time-restricted feeding (18 hours fasted, 6 eating). If I tried to do an ancestral diet instead, I'd fail primarily from ignorance of just what that might be. (Also, I'm from the southern US, so it's not like that ancestral diet is necessarily good for me anyway.)

As a practical matter, does 4 bowls and 2 plates per person, and preparing 4-5 different dishes, every day have a huge overhead in preparation, cooking and washing up?

This is very informative.

I think a lot of that last point can be attributed to gradual improvement and acclimation to that improvement. If you were able to snapshot mood and mental health like you could a picture of your body, you might see a marked improvement over pre-healthy-lifestyle vs., say, post-1-year-healthy-lifestyle.

For example, I've been losing weight and doing body-weight training the last month-and-a-half and a picture of my body now vs. then shows a fairly drastic change. But I can' say that I feel like I weigh less or feel that I'm stronger. Though, the scale and reps of exercise that I can do say otherwise. Every day starts a "new normal."

What I notice personally is that whenever my health improves, I only feel it a small amount incrementally.

When I stop training, I quickly feel sluggish, with brain fog, muscle knots, difficulty sleeping, etc.

This is mostly a reminder to myself that my body wants movement and good nutrition, and that lapses are not worth it.

I think it is simply because a large number of adults in the US (as well as a lot of other countries) is struggling with this, at about 39% obesity rate and 71% overweight rate [0]. For comparison, only 1.5% of adults in the US are underweight [1].

While I agree that there is way more to "being healthy" than just not being overweight/underweight, I think it isn't a bad idea to approach this in the priority order. Solving the issue of being overweight is much simpler and much more impactful to the overall public health than trying to go after more rare and difficult problems.

0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/underweight_adult_15_16...

I was a bean pole into my early twenties, and would have been 20 lbs skinnier still if not for cycling. I never gained any more weight until I dumped the classical advice and did my own thing.

Everyone tries to compress a workout into a single time interval in the day, where you do n sets of each exercise and then go home. To do three sets in three minutes, you're going to have to pick a very conservative goal. Doing 5 sets spread out over the entire day, I could lift more and saw results pretty much right away, and really for the first time. I'd exercise while waiting for things like the drier to ding or toast to pop up, a file to download, a commercial break or a cut scene to finish. But, I had to have exercises I could do at home, which takes some creativity (or a lot of money).

Your body is conserving resources. The whole point of 'exercise' is to trick your body into thinking that you are an active person who needs to spend the extra resources to build and maintain large muscles, cardiac or lung capacity, or all three. If you are actually active you don't have to 'work out'. Your life is work, and your body adapts.

Once I got past that initial roadblock, I got results even from the gym, but I was able to be more consistent doing it at home.

The trouble with putting on a lot of bulk though, is if you stop. Exercise burns a lot of calories. Persistent exercise therefore changes your notion of what a 'normal' amount of food is. If you stop, it probably due to some major life event, and adjusting your notion of 'normal eating' might get lost in the mix. Which is probably why a lot of pro athletes chunk up when they retire (or get retired). Going from 3-4000 calories a day to under 2500 is quite a lifestyle change.

It's all in the terminology. You both say "weight", but they want to lose fat and you're looking to gain lean body mass. Many folks would like to do both, there's no contradiction.

That's because, at least anecdotally, many more people are overweight than underweight, so "being healthy" involves weight loss more than weight gain.

Do a Mark Rippetoe program for 1 year. Thank me later.

edit: Caution: don't start on squats without coaching.

My biggest concern about focus on weight loss as the metric instead of "healthy lifestyle" is that losing weight is easiest when you do it in an unhealthy way. Crash diets are a good example of unhealthy weight loss.

Another funfact is that you can literally go to bed for a few weeks, let muscle atrophy kick in, and lose more weight than any diet+exercise regime. Won't make you healthier, but you'll lose the weight. Yay metrics!

Gaining weight is easier. Drink your calories and you will balloon in no time.

What were the changes you made that had biggest impacts?

I mean.... what did you expect... "I CRISPR'd myself and now i'm photosynthetic?"

Yes, I would have liked to hear more about his experiences with the other types of biohacking he mentioned!

So... where can a non-PT find this kind of advice? Maybe you, or any other trainer you can recommend? Or some online resource?

(Personally, I'm probably above-average knowledgeable about fitness, but I still find the information unmanageably overwhelming - train every day, every 3 days, every muscle once a week, every muscle 3 times a week, big muscles less often than small muscles, focus on strength, focus on growth, focus on flexibility, cardio, no cardio, ...)

I recently found this fairly thorough article on measuring blood glucose for self-experimentation: https://quantifiedself.com/blog/qs-guide-testing-food-with-b...

For some reason, pharmacy nearby threw out a bunch of glucose monitors for diabete (we assumed it was some legal obligation to replace stock every N years). Would these work in theory ?

Insulin does not lead to increased weight gain. If this approach does work, it's because it's a roundabout way of eating lower calorie foods and thus lowering daily caloric intake.

Agree! (and wrote a bit more in a comment above). I think IF was the high order bit that enabled me to achieve a long-term consistent deficit. I used to track it with Zero but stopped later because there isn't much to track. I strictly stick to 12-8pm window (often 12-6), which does not need an app for tracking.

Not trying to be nitpicky but urine sticks are notoriously unreliable:

False-positive when you are first starting because you are not well adapted to utilizing ketones and urinate out most of the BHB.

False-negative when you are well adapted because usable fuel will not be wasted in urine.

It is generally accepted that the only foolproof way to truly know if you are in ketosis is to do a blood BHB measurement.

Other than that, I would only comment that it seems there are certain phenotypes that have much more success with low carb diets and vice versa with high carb diets. I don't think it is as easy as dismissing it because you had a poor experience.

Also, not particularly a fan of many of the observational nonsense coming out of both camps (low carb vs plant based) over the last few years. There was a HN article posted a while back but we really have a legitimacy problem in nutritional science right now. P-value hacking and nonsense correlation is just far too common and then most never read the study to get the true story behind the results.

Finally, this is anecdotal but I have known people whose libidos have dropped on low carb diets and also others who lost libido when they went most vegan (whole food, plant based). This supports the idea:

"Figure out what works for you and ignore the rest."

Crazy concept...

What is 'now', how long have you been eating this way?

> The reason our body always favors burning glucose first is NOT because glucose is "better" but actually because it is an inferior type of fuel (it creates "pollution" and is difficult to burn - you can develop diabetes from too much of it) - so our evolved system tries to get rid of it first, while hanging on to the "good stuff" for as long as it can.

This is not the standard textbook biological view of the bodies use of glucose and fats.

I'm all for having heterodox opinions but I think you should let people know what is a heterodox position, and provide more supporting evidence than when giving a textbook explanation.

You don't develop type 2 diabetes from being fat, you develop diabetes from high average blood glucose levels triggering insulin resistance.

Also, what is the pollution you are talking about? From what I understand, lipolysis generates ketones, which at normal lipolytic amounts aren't toxic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_2_diabetes?wprov=sfla1

I'd love rowing machines plugged into an alternator so my health powers my laptop ~_~

Yep there is a saying in cycling; ounces on the bike, pounds in the kitchen.

The body basically has a bunch of tricks for tricking you into not losing weight. It starts making you subtly lazier, reduces random energy expenditures, slows down basal metabolic rate, it makes you hungrier, it makes you crave more calorie dense food, and it even starts to reduce willpower related to food.

I'd argue that it almost quite clearly indicates that focusing on calorie deficit is too simplistic a model to accurately predict/forecast weight loss. Just look at that subway map at the top of the article, there's no way that calorie deficit is an adequate model for the complex interaction of macro-nutrients and how different parts of that "subway" interact.

Maybe you don't have to entirely agree with me that Nutrition science's idea of a calorie is the last bastion of phlogiston theory in any science, but surely you can admit that all of the evidence suggests the model isn't accurate enough, continues to give surprising results that do not match reality, (and arguably causes more harm than good in the way some diet plans use calorie deficits as a bludgeon to make people feel bad). The models need to be refined, the human body is not an ideal furnace nor a "spherical cow".

(But yeah, I wish the Apple Watch would let me change all the displays that read "calorie" to just read "phlogiston" as useful as they "are" to me.)

No sources but it's common knowledge in fitness groups like bodybuilding. For every 1g for carb you intake, your body wants 3-4g of water to digest it.

Also glycogen is what provides your muscles quick access to energy, and is stored within the tissue. It increases dramatically with higher carbs and water.

All of these increase your weight temporarily, but they are not fat. Weight!=fat and you want high glycogen stores in prepartion for a workout. And bodybuilders further manipulate these facts to get a pump and more muscle defintion.

> I am able to reduce my daily meals to 2 by having a bulletproof coffee in the morning.

For whatever it's worth, two tablespoons of butter on your coffee is 204 kcal according to Wolfram Alpha. Even Bulletproof says things like "Bulletproof Coffee is breakfast" and "curbing your hunger with food that keeps you full for hours. Bulletproof Coffee checks those boxes." which I read as saying that they think of it as (liquid) food. https://www.bulletproof.com/recipes/bulletproof-diet-recipes...

You're replacing a potentially less structured breakfast (I eat different breakfasts every day) with a single standardised one. If you buy Bulletproof's analysis, you might be doing something ketogenic which might be beneficial in some way. But you're not skipping a meal. Though there is a blurb on that page that says something like "you're having a meal without breaking your fast because [arbitrary definition we made up on the spot]".

For whatever it's worth, I wouldn't take health advice from a product sold with an origin story of "the founder was dangerously overweight and at acute risk of stroke or heart attack at the age of 30, so the biohacker in them decided it would be smart to go on a difficult mountain trek in Nepal".

Of course it does. Famines tell us as much. Gyms increase your burn rate, though. Running for 5 miles a day will burn up a quarter of a 2000 calorie diet.

That being said, a lot of gym activity that I see is basically useless and probably taken up just to feel good about going to a gym regularly (some examples in my gym: walking on treadmills instead of around the block, paying for membership every month to solely use the 5lb dumbbells for 30 minutes that go for $12 online).

This is not the proper conclusion. He also started regular resistance training.

I would say one of the biggest problems is seeing weight loss as either being nutrition or fitness, when it should ALWAYS be seen as a combination.

Why? Because the goal is usually to lose fat. Without muscle stimulus, the body will include muscle in the weight loss. Muscle tissue is important long term for metabolism and other health aspects.

Lean body mass is a misnomer (and DEXA scans aren't reliable).

Lean body mass = Total Body Mass - Fat Mass

That's "lean body mass," but it's not 1:1 "muscle mass," because bones, organs, and etc. do not constitute as skeletal muscle, but still take up weight.

And muscle mass itself is a misnomer, because the actual weight of your muscle protein is not 1:1 to the actual weight of your entire muscles.

Most people think muscle is made out of protein, but while that's true, it's not the main way you muscles get "bulk." The main compound that gives muscles "bulk" is water. Usually that's because your muscles have hydrophillic compounds like glycogen (stored sugar), electrolytes like potassium and sodium, and creatine. These latter compounds draw the water into the muscle, and make up for most of its weight and size.

All these compounds get used up during exercise, so your muscle hold less water, and it's technically "consumed" during exercise, and needs to be replenished after. A coincidental fact is that once these stores are depleted, they become "super-sensitizied" that means they're much more likely to take up compounds out of the bloodstream than before. So, exercise depletes them, but if you eat enough after, you can fill them up to be bigger than where they were before.

I'd love someone qualified to answer this... feel like this happens to me all the time

// increased water consumption impacts metabolism a lot

impacts as in it helps lose weight?

How much have you increased your water consumption and what was your baseline?

Resting heart rate is commonly tracked by wearables e.g. Apple Watch. Blood glucose can be self-monitored with the same tools diabetics use. Nutritional deficiencies can be measured with blood tests; WellnessFX was one of the early channels to get these but I believe Quest will let you self-order them now.

Seems pretty straight forward. 162,000 kcal / 239 kcal = 677.8

It says he was going strength training, that should improve testosterone levels and prevent muscle loss.

It's lot of technical details that basically proves the old adage "Eat Less, Exercise More" to see weight loss. He just did extensive tracking around it.

I switched from table salt to "No Salt" or "Lite Salt" which cuts the sodium with potassium. It isn't noticeable in most dishes, and it's a great simple substitution for getting an important mineral.

Any websites for healthy lazy cooking options?