Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

The problem with diets based only on calories is that they don't take satiety into account, nor health.

Calories is what makes you gain/lose weight, it's basic physics. Satiety is what makes you want to eat more/less. Nutrients are what is making you healthy.

Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full. Lack of them allow you to eat large amount of calories without feeling full. You need to keep track of micro and macro nutrient to stay healthy.

Quite so, and I think he does address that, but those are all second level factors, along with activity level, exercise, and their effect on your caloric requirements. He puts together a bunch of excel spreadsheets for tracking many factors, but I have found the simple discipline of accounting for what I eat in a little txt file on my phone sufficient to align my choices with my desired outcome.

Exercise and activity are contributing to calories (calories out). These days there are apps that make it easy to track calories, macro and nutrients.

Sure; it's a layered system, each one taking more effort or thinking than the other.

Easy diets: drink this shake 3x a day. Don't eat $food_category. Limit calory intake to $amount / day.

More complex: The above, plus macronutrients.

More complex: The above, plus micronutrients.

Add dimensions like lifestyle choices (vegetarianism, veganism etc) or food sensitivities (celiac, lactose intolerance).

I'm no diet expert and need to lose some weight myself but the main advice I'd give is to get stable first. Plan your meals, eat regular meals at regular intervals, keep excess / luxuries / "rewards" to a minimum. Only when you have reached a stable and sustainable pattern should you start to make adjustments. The problem with diets or major lifestyle changes is that they're hard to keep up, simply because they are so different from your usual. The shake diets generally don't work long term because people suffer and go back to their old habits, if not overcompensate because their body signals a deprivation of some kind.

I would slightly tweak your last. Different nutrients (vitamins/whatever) also impact your body in specific ways. Not just "makes you healthy" but "causes you to do certain things." Caffeine is the easy example here.

This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.

On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.

There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.

The context is even more broad than this.

Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.

You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.

So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.

One of life's great annoyances to me, is how incredibly effective "just doing something" tends to be. To that level, the act of tracking things is a strong something that almost always shows results. Be it lists on how often something has been cleaned, or procedural checklists on things that need to happen.

I'm convinced, at this point, that there is something mental on it, too. Getting you to think of something gets your body and mind to act differently towards it.

Part of this was obvious to me when I had kids. If they fell, they would immediately look to the reaction of others around them. If people looked scared, they would feel more hurt than if people didn't react at all. If people were encouraging what they were doing, they would sometimes not realize something might hurt.

But, back to my annoyance. As someone that hates tracking lists... why do they have to be so effective? :D

You just need to keep it simple. Every time you are hungry have an enormous glass of water, and eat all the vegetables you want, always. Snacks are carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumber.

Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.

Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.

We cannot make that claim with relative certainty. We cannot make the opposite claim either, but it is more likely.

Apologies, I see I used the wrong word. I meant to use confidence, not certainty. :(

Shakes don't provide satiety, most people will hate this and start eating something else within a few days.

I think it depends on the shake contents. Fiber addition is absolutely crucial for the satiety. Most of your soylent and equivalents include it. Doing an only-shake diet is indeed difficult for most people that want novelty in their food, especially if they are addicted to the dopamine hit from food.

I had to rethink my relationship to food in order to lose weight. Eating a soylent clone for the majority of my meals helped me to do that. Getting a gram-accurate scale for measuring food helped. Building a database in my head of calorie estimates of various foods helped when I was not at home. Double checking nutrition facts for fast food helped too. Really, I was raised by an emotional eater. And I didn't have the natural intuition about food that most people acquire from their parents. I had to unlearn all of that shit, and learn about nutrition, calories, macros, etc

Food is not a treat or a reward, it is fuel to live. Taking a more ascetic approach to food has helped tremendously. And if I know I am going to an engagement with rich foods, I'll even lightly fast before hand so that my calorie intake stays reasonable for the day. And of course, if I have a craving for something calorie rich, I try to make an effort to justify that intake with additional activity that balances things out.

The thing about satiety is that we've conquered food scarcity in the developed world. Feeling hungry is practically taboo and is used as an excuse to consume more, the longer the feeling is felt. When in reality, hunger should be used as a signal of how soon to eat, rather than how much. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, but the world is also not going to end if you skip a meal or two, especially for the overweight people. Having proper emotional regulation around this is important, too.

> Fiber and protein tends to make you feel full

And fat. Primarily fat is what will satisfy you (I mean eating it, not listening to Lizzo or Meghan Trainor.)

Put some butter in those eggs as you fry them. Use olive oil and coconut oil while cooking. Drink whole milk and have some raw eggs with the yolks.

Or just 1,000 cram rice cakes into your mouth all day until you choke