They are trying to convince everyone that the fruit & veg & lean meats is every bit as enjoyable as a steak and piece of cheesecake. It may be for them, but as a rule I have my doubts.
There are some fruits and vegetables and lean meats (which absolutely includes "leaner cuts of steak with the fat trimmed off") that I quite sincerely like as much as junk food, if not more. Two pan-fried salmon fillets and a big bowl of brussels sprouts with butter beats the pants off even a pretty good burger-and-fries, the main downside being the prep (and, well, the cost for most people). A pound of fresh strawberries is damn good and not something I have to force myself to eat, etcera.
I don't deliberately avoid dessert, though I do tend to eat it less than I used to. I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
My sympathies to those who really just don't like any fruits or vegetables, but there are lots of other margins to operate on in lowering your dietary energy density. e.g., for a side with your steak, I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
I agree that a salmon filet is tasty. I don't often eat a pound of strawberries though. Both of those are too expensive to eat regularly, and like you said a salmon filet is a lot of effort compared to a burger.
> I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.
That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Just as an aside:
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).
You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
> you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it.
Chiming in as someone whom the GP comment resonates with: the point here is that you literally come to enjoy it less. The natural amount that you would eat isn't constrained entirely by health choices. I find finishing a single slice of cheesecake to be overwhelming: a second one would be actively unpleasant.
If you were following your assumptions here to their conclusions, you would conclude that people who eat unhealthily would eat cheesecake 24/7 if it weren't for conscious health choices. This is trivially untrue, no?
The original claim was that losing weight requires constant extra discomfort, and GP's (and my) claim is that this is false: you can move yourself (with initial discomfort) to an equilibrium that's more comfortable _and_ healthier than the status quo.
I feel the discomfort of constraining myself much less often now than I did when I ate like you. This is again trivial: if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
For whatever it's worth, I don't feel like I actually had to adapt my tastes at all in order to eat healthier. The main hurdle was figuring out how to prep in a way that's easy enough that I'll actually bother.
I wouldn't describe myself as actively adapting my tastes: I just ate better and eventually noticed my preferences shifting. I assume it's some combination of my brain getting more sensitive to the stimulus (of eg sugar), my gut changing, and my better diet reducing cravings.
That's a weird judgement to throw in the midst. I haven't laid claim to my eating habits. I've had great success in losing weight in the past as well as recently by changing my eating habits for the positive. I just wanted people to realize that it's not always just a matter of learning to love yummy veggies and forgetting about icky cheesecake.
> if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.
Agreed - but people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sorry, I wasn't implying anything by this. Just absent-minded phrasing.
> people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.
Sure, I think it's possible some people can't make it through the transition to healthier preferences. That doesn't suggest that the original claim in the thread is correct.
The comment you originally responded to claimed that convexfunction was "restating" the claim that weight loss is pure effortful discomfort (from the top of the thread). Your response was that you doubt that healthy food can taste as good as junk food[1]. In the comment I responded directly to, you say that having cheesecake occasionally is evidence that a healthy person eating less cheesecake comes from conscious healthy effort.
These claims are what I'm pushing back against. I use way less willpower on food now than when I was a junkier eater[2].
[1] Note that the issue here might be that your definition of weight-loss-promoting foods is askew. Steak is a pretty reasonable part of a weight-loss diet, as long as you're not mindless about the quantity. As with the cheesecake example, eating the right amount of steak is a way more pleasant experience than eating too much.
[2] though thankfully never as bad as the avg US upper-middle-class diet
> That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.
Let me rephrase: since changing my diet to include more low-energy-density foods (and being deliberate about eating large portions of them), I find myself less frequently even considering having dessert after dinner.
> You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.
No? I'll put 7g of butter (50 calories) on a 300g potato (280 calories) and not at all feel like I needed more butter. Even if you double that amount of butter, it comes out to 1.2 cal/g.
Not quite everything, but outside of rare social eating situations I do weigh my food when I'd otherwise have to make a bad estimate for caloric content (i.e. not single-serving packaged food or food from a restaurant that publishes nutrition facts). I also track my calories, though I'll willfully go over my daily calorie target whenever I feel like it with approximately no guilt.
I'm sure this has contributed to the success of my "diet" -- I also started lifting weights again in this period -- but the comment I was originally replying to was about how weight loss requires discomfort, and the energy density thing has been the key insight for me on how to make it not require discomfort. I see now it reads like I was solely attributing my weight loss to this one weird trick (though I do think it's been the most important factor), so, mea culpa.
Fair enough. I've had excellent success with just calorie tracking / weighing without massively changing my diet - by setting a small caloric deficit I was able to consistently slowly weight over months without massively changing things and enjoying all my usual foods.
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato ... about as much as garlic bread
See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:
If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.
I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.
"the cost for most people". -- I disagree, it just takes some planning.
A Big Mac menu goes for 10+ dollars where I live.
Sirloin steak, which is reasonably lean (you can go leaner and cheaper with something like London Broil, every 3 weeks it is sold at 2.50 t0 3 dollars per pound), when on sale (this is the planning I was referring to) can be bought for 3-4 dollars per pound. One can buy 20 pounds for 60-80 dollars.
A big bag of frozen vegetables, enough for 10 meals, it's sold at Costco for 10 dollars.
A whole day of abundant eating (2 pounds of steak and vegetables) can cost less than a Big Mac menu.
You can throw in some potatoes and eggs and pay per day what you would pay at MacDonalds or equivalent per meal.
I've had this weird obsession with that Alone show, but there was an episode where one of the contestants decides her nutrition is messed up and she's going to eat the stomach contents of some wild hares she's trapped.
She describes it as one of the tastiest meals she had the entire show. Literally half digested arctic vegetation.
Your body rewards you for eating those things which satisfy your needs. McDonalds will do that, but so will a salad.
One of the fad diets for a while was the "one thing" diet. You could have anything you wanted.. but you could only eat that single item that entire day. Cheesecake? You're having cheesecake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Very quickly participants discover it is very easy to burn out on sweets and junk.
If you eat nutritious food that will actually give you that reward craving.
Also, nothing wrong with steak. Nothing really wrong with cheesecake either - but you only need a tiny bit of those things. There's a reason most people want tiny steaks and not big honking ones, especially people who eat steak with regularity.
One can and will lose weight (say, a 220 pound man) by eating two medium McDonald's Big Mac Menu a day (no sauce, diet soda option). It amounts to 1800 kcal per day.
Being lean trumps quality of food and "healthy" whatever for health short-term. That's a set result at this point.
That is, and this not medical advice, but something I have a done a few times while on vacation, you can do a 10-15-21 days of the above-mentioned McDonald's diet and easily get leaner without starving, looking for "healthy foods", counting calories or steps.
The McRib is 550 cals. I'm now wondering if one could do a weight maintenance program by simply eating 3 McRib's a day whenever they come back on the menu.
Eating sometimes is okay, I guess. Don't forget to take supplements for the micros you're missing. Eating the same thing every day though, requires discipline. I'd get fed up eating the same thing again and again even if it's some kind of a gorgeous meal.
I mean, the Alone people are literally starving. Levels of hunger play a huge part in how much you enjoy your food. I really enjoy a fresh bell pepper at times, but not right after desert.
You're arguing that people who eat bad things constantly only want a little of them when that is obviously not true. Plenty of people eat far too much steak far too often. People are keyed to like salt, fat, & sugar. It's a balancing act of moderation, it's not just a matter of finding that you love vegetables and you will always find them just as satisfying as Twizzlers.
The "taste" changes when you change your diet for a long enough period, which means no more than a few weeks/months.
It is like drinking coffee with sugar, as I used to do two decades ago. After getting used to the bitter, hot reality of black coffee, the absurdly sweet nature of coffee + sugar or those concoctions served at Starbucks and the like tastes terrible, as well as giving the wrong "feel".
Chicken breast with a little flour to help caramelize over high heat and some herbs (basil, oregano, thyme) tastes excellent and feels light and proper.
I am a person with a terrifying appetite if left to my own devices. And if at the beginning of a "diet" the scary appetite and intrusive food thoughts make themselves feel heard loud and clear, after a while, thanks to the physiological changes that occur as the food consumed changes and a mind that is now preoccupied with things and thoughts other than food, as time goes on it becomes much easier to eat fewer and more "healthy" (hard to define, but we know it when we see it) calories.
"Pushing through until it becomes easy" is not a social policy, and other kinds of interventions are needed to solve the large-scale obesity problem.
But at the individual level, it works for me and millions of others.
They do it that way. It does not have to be. You just gotta eat different highly rewarding foods.
E.g. do eat that steak. But without a BBQ sauce you bought. Just salt and pepper is great actually. But a butter and cream garlic sauce (no sugar) is also awesome. Maybe some blue cheese on top instead?
Skip the potato. Just that steak with some nice caramelized onions or veggies you like as a side. But that's not even needed.
Highly rewarding I can tell you. Yes it's not sweet and rewarding. It's not carb loaded rewarding but it's absolutely delicious, fills you up for a long time. Yes this is going in the Keto carnivore direction so might not be for you but having eaten Keto (with less than 20g of carbs a day) I can tell you it was absolutely great and rewarding taste wise as I could finally enjoy cream based sauces and bacon again instead of low fast sugary stuff that makes you hungry again after an hour.
My success has always come without a real gimmick and simply calorie counting. Have what you want, but be aware what you're eating and work towards a goal. I set a slow weight loss goal so I'm not hungry due to extreme of a deficit. I can still eat my ice cream if I've made sure that I still have caloric room at the end of the day. After a while off counting I find my proportions are getting too big, I realign with some tracking again, and carry on.
I'd actually advocate for potatoes as a "weight loss food". They're quite low in caloric density relative to most other "carbs" since they have so much water; there's even a meme "potato diet" (just eat potatoes and almost nothing else for a few weeks or months, basically) with lots of glowing anecdotal success stories.
And, well, I failed horribly at conveying my actual strategy (I guess we're getting hung up on "fruits, vegetables, and lean meats are supposedly not very rewarding"?) because I would describe what I'm doing as "eat different highly rewarding foods".
It depends, I have a really big sweet tooth, but it is a self-reinforcing craving. There are people that really do not enjoy sweet things, and a lot of that has to do with those people not consuming sweets as a part of a regular diet, so there is not the rise/crash cycle, which is ultimately what makes it hard to get away from sugars.
