It’s calorie in/out in the thermodynamics sense, but humans are far too complicated to meaningfully model as a thermodynamic system.
Just doing calorie in/out dieting really doesn’t work for most people. That’s why you need to combine it with behavioral changes, strategies to change habits and attitudes towards food, which usually also involves changing what you eat and when so the downsides of eating less are less bothersome.
For me it’s all about the list. I’m opposed to spending money in general, but I also enjoy, and am pretty good at, cooking.
If I don’t have a good list, my weakness is to start designing meals based on random ingredients I see at the store, and then I buy the stuff, go home and cook the food, and enjoy too much of it. Beyond eating too much of it, it’s just tricky to design a good dish that’s tasty and also not silly unhealthy while standing in the grocery store.
Took a bit to learn to make a note of the idea in my phone, and then design it at home. Then it can go on the list.
Yup, I would definitely agree more with what you’re saying here than what I understood from above.
It definitely takes willpower to lose weight, and you definitely need to learn to identify why you’re eating and break those habits you don’t want, which also takes willpower.
I would characterize boredom/stress/comfort eating differently than hunger, since there’s the distinction between “want to eat” and “feel hungry”.
Whatever your reason is for wanting to eat, you need to handle it. If it’s boredom, you can use willpower to push through chips being more interesting than the show you’re watching, ideally by doing something else.
If you want to eat because you’re hungry, there isn’t a way to handle that beyond eating. So the smart move is to make choices about what and how you eat so that feeling stays away longer, which goes a long way towards helping to break the habit of feeling like you’re “supposed” to eat more often than you need to.
I think you’re initial comment came across much stronger than I see it is now, and we’re actually very close in terms opinion. :)
Like the other commenter said, it’s about the calorie density, not the calories.
An apple makes you satisfied longer than an equivalent number of calories of Oreos, so if you get to snack as much as you want on either, you’ll eat fewer calories of apple than of Oreo over a given timeframe.
You can over eat either of them, it’s just easier with one than the other.
Similarly, something like a steak can fill you up a lot, for a very long time, but has enough calories in it that it’s still better to not eat for every meal.
Except, and this is what I think they were saying, your body is wired to demand food even if it doesn’t strictly need it. You can’t win that battle long term.
Instead you work with your dumb meat sack and eat healthy foods that keep you from feeling hungry for a longer time.
If your diet strategy involves almost everyone who tries it failing, and those who succeed almost always have their progress backslide in a few years, then maybe the problem is with the strategy rather than an intrinsic character flaw in the people trying it.
Precisely. And to be entirely clear: it will always take willpower and motivation to lose weight. Your body is thought to have a sort of target weight that it wants you to be at all else being equal. If it were effortless to maintain a healthy weight, it would be because that’s where your body was pushing you to be.
The key is not to be stronger than your body, but to work with it. Use your finite supply of willpower on things like “making a healthy shopping list and not deviating from it”.
Instead of insisting you need to “not be lazy” and always cook a healthy meal at home, be realistic and accept that sometimes you’ll be tired and have a lazy dinner option that’s a better choice than pizza.
Buy apples instead of Oreos, so that when you feel hungry between meals it isn’t a choice between feeling hungry and eating a sleeve of Oreos, but just eating an apple. You’ll feel more full after the apple than after 20 times more calories in Oreos. If you choose to be hungry, you’ll be aware of being hungry and food in general until you eat, which will likely either make you fail hard, or eat more at the next meal because food is more appealing when you’re hungry.
It can also take a lot of motivation to work through which desires to eat are hunger, which are boredom and which are, of all things, thirst. Eating is a source of dopamine, and so if you’re bored “food” is an easy source of entertainment (your body is so dumb that just chewing is often enough for it, hence “gum” is pleasant). Sometimes your body asks for sugar when what it needs is water.
“You” don’t control what “you” want, you just get to figure out how to get it. A deeper, vastly stupider, part just shouts vague demands you get to act on. “WATER. FOOD. <GENDER> SEX. SLEEP. SCARED. BORED.” it doesn’t stop shouting if you ignore it. So use your willpower to give it what it wants in the healthier but more difficult way, and to make doing so a habit that it won’t veto.
And that’s before you get to things that need a medical intervention in addition to behavioral.
If your pancreas or hypothalamus have decided to be shits, there’s absolutely no amount of willpower that can regulate things.
And people should just “choose to be happy” too, right?
Learn how biology works. Willpower helps you execute a a desire even when it’s uncomfortable. Your hormonal systems control what you desire in the first place. If you’re just trying to ignore your body, it will eventually inform you that you no longer care about weight loss.
Willpower based diets and weigh loss strategies are mostly driven by people who sell them who take advantage of the “intuitive” nature of what boils down to “don’t eat even if you’re hungry”.
If you do lose some weight, which you likely will at first, it’s because the diet works. If you don’t or you fall out of adherence, it’s because you’re not good enough.
That’s why essentially all research on the topic says you should use your willpower to change what you eat and your activity level, and let those drive the weight loss.
It’s easier and more effective to use your willpower to make positive choices than it is to enforce restrictions on yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10015774/
Next time you need to get more done, just try sleeping less and you’ll have a whole six or seven more hours a day to work.
You definitely won’t spend your time being distracted by how tired your are, or spending more time thinking about sleep than if you had spent less effort and willpower on making a schedule that made better time management choices.
That’s a more complicated topic. Not everyone’s endocrine system is wired the same way, and you can’t always just willpower your way through it.
Insistence that willpower is sufficient for weight regulation is a big cause of people going on diet after diet that just doesn’t work. They’re fighting against the system that has a disproportionate influence on what you want in the first place, and if you push it too far you find yourself not giving a shit about your diet, and then being filled with a slew of complex feelings coming from your “lack of self control”.
It’s better to direct that energy towards getting your diet compositionally right than trying to be okay just being hungry.
You can’t get your body to stop insisting it needs food, but you can get it to insist less often. You can teach it that it doesn’t need “SUGAR”, it needs water and maybe an apple or banana. You can give it a little solid protein between meals to keep it from asking for a continuous stream of carbs.
You can learn to identify the difference between eating because you’re bored or want a little dopamine, and eating because you’re hungry. The first one is your brain and you can willpower through it to eventually unlearn the habit.
You can choose to make good choices at the store instead of failing to make them in the kitchen.
Willpower is critical, but it’s important to know what you can or cannot actually solve with it and work within that framework.
You’re in control of your body, but that doesn’t mean that you need to pick the harder path.
And, for some people, their endocrine system is a lot more forgiving. Those usually aren’t the people who have a lot of trouble loosing or keeping off weight because they try to just “eat less” and it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value
It’s not just fruits and vegetables, but getting the right components.
A high sugar low fiber fruit won’t do as much as a higher fiber fruit, so apple > blackberry, for example.
You can also take advantage of your bodies insatiable love for protein and make that a key part of the meal as well, and it’ll signal that it’s full sooner and for longer.
Food that physically takes longer to eat also help because you can eat faster than you can “realize” you’re full.
A trick of mine, that I don’t know if there’s any general basis for it but it helps me, is to not take a plate with as much food as I think I want, but to instead take a plate with about half that. That way I get to feel like I’m having two servings, and the gap between finishing the first and starting the second usually means that the second is less than the first.
That’s called a timeshare, and they’re not a good idea. Very sketchy, almost impossible to get rid of if you don’t want it.
You have to sign up because although you bought the apartment, you’re not the only one who bought the apartment.
You buy it and then get to sign up to use it, and then you pay a fee to use it every year even if you don’t end up using it.
You don’t get to live there.
Google analytics is loaded by JavaScript. There are also other things like Google analytics that are also loaded by JavaScript.
Updating a website can take time, and usually involves someone with at least a passing knowledge of development.
Google tag manager is a service that lets you embed one JavaScript thing in your page, and then it will handle loading the others. This lets marketing or analytics people add and manage such things without needing to make a full code deployment.
It also lets you make choices about when and how different tracking events for different services are triggered.
It’s intended usage is garbage tracking metrics and advertising. Some sites are built more by marketing than developers, and they’ll jam functional stuff in there which causes breakage if you block it. These sites are usually garbage though, so nothing of value was lost.
Okay.
I don’t know why you’d disapprove of doctors making sure patients understand the consequences of a permanent procedure before agreeing to do it.
Hell, we expect tattoo artists to make sure people want the outcome they’re asking for before putting ink to skin, and to refuse if they think you might not be thinking clearly. (Most won’t actually tattoo drunk people for example).
I’m honestly not sure what you’re disapproving of.
Sterilization is quite a bit different from abortion.
An abortion is a choice not to have a child. Sterilization is a choice to permanently alter your body such that you can never have children.
A doctor talking to a patient to ensure they understand a procedure and it’s consequences and that those consequences are what they want when those consequences are permanent is just responsible.
It’s entirely the patients decision, but that doesn’t mean the doctor shouldn’t confirm their intent.
It is entirely your decision. It’s also their decision if they can ethically perform the procedure.
Some people read that a vasectomy can be reversed and understand that they are 100% reversible 100% of the time. If someone says they want a vasectomy so they can skip other forms of birth control until they’re ready to have kids, the doctor needs to correct their misunderstanding before they can ethically perform the procedure.
“Informed consent” requires making sure the individual is “informed”, “able to consent”, and “consenting”.
Yes on the bullshit, less on the creepy sexual part.
More a mix of people who viewed it as ensuring families are healthy and populous, and looking out for a husbands wife’s reproductive tract and keeping his wife’s vagina “good”, and making money with a speciality.
Even in the era when “manual stimulation” as a treatment for hysteria was a thing, there are consistent records of doctors loathing the procedure. Part of what inspired the creation of the vibrator.
Because medical ethics requires some degree of confidence that you’re not making a permanent decision that you’ll regret.
Unnecessary hurdles like mandatory waiting periods, refusing to do it without someone else’s consent, or refusal to do it at all if you’re childless are wrong, but making sure someone understands the procedure and it’s consequences and that what they’re asking for is actually solving the complaint they want to solve is just being responsible.
Doctors aren’t mechanics.
For the military thing, I think there’s coverage for that. The constitution gives Congress the authority to govern the conduct of the military, as well as when it may be used. The president’s “just” the commander, but they’re bound by the same rules for the military that Congress made. I think the best case a rogue president could make there would be that they should be court martialed rather that tried in a civilian court, and I’m unsure if that’s better.
Since Congress has authority over the conduct of the military, I can’t actually think of a situation where “being commander” was the defining thing, and not their conduct as commander. Closest I got was some sort of negligence resulting in death, but that’s derilection of duty and part of conduct.
I believe the executive power thing is essentially “control of the executive branch”. I think that one is actually fairly well fleshed out since it’s the leading source of disputes, since it’s all about what the president can tell a part of the executive branch to do.
It would essentially be “the president is not criminally liable for firing the attorney general”.
So yeah, I think the sane conclusion would be that the president is de facto immune to laws that currently don’t exist, and likely never will that are insanely narrow in scope.
I unfortunately don’t think the court is playing a game.
I think their slow handling of the case was partly avoiding claims of the courts influencing the election, and partly it just being complicated and unprecedented.
I think they were very clear that the other acts are basically anything the president does “as president”, particularly since they ruled that it’s okay for the president to ask the justice department about options for replacing electors, because the president gets to talk to the justice department.
I think it’s also worth reiterating that this doesn’t prevent the courts from preventing an action, or other checks against presidential actions, only the consequences the individual may face afterwards.
The president has the same authority to order the military to disband Congress as they did before, I just might be harder to sue them for it.
I’d agree that that would also be a valid way of accomplishing the same thing. Given the history of how we’ve handled things like civil immunity for the presidency before, it’s at least consistent to call it an extension or clarification of existing practices, rather than something new.
As mentioned in a handful of other comments, it’s all about choices. Rice cakes are usually all carbs, low fiber, but they’re also close to puffed nothing.
So if you know that you’re gonna snack despite doing everything else right, choosing salted rice cakes over chips is a good choice, and if a snack option keeps you from feeling miserable while loosing weight, you’re more likely to stick with it and get to your goals.
Maybe not as fast as if you hadn’t snacked at all, but an attainable goal is better.