alt Hacker NewsA lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs.
This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
(as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)
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It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight.
Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value.
I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it.
Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand?
That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all.
Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large.
If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through.
The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake.
CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss.
I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings
The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
I never understood why calories in == calories out was relevant when we can't know how many unprocessed calories are remaining undigested. Here's what the bots had to say: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say...
(FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements.
An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs.
It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.