Comment by onethought
3 years ago
> Now, to lose weight simple subtract 500 calories per day from what you eat
I appreciate you are trying to be helpful. But most of what you said assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have. People working long hour jobs, or double jobs, or balancing kids/parent responsibilities. Often fast food is the only obvious option, and people aren't buying it until well into the throws of a low blood sugar event.
This coupled with metabolic/genetic differences can really muck up any given diet. What works of you doesn't just not work for everyone, it isn't even possible for everyone to follow.
That said, I know you are being helpful - my words or more to help those that might read them and be saying: "I did all that and it didn't work!"
> assumes a certain level or privilege (resources time/money/ableness) that the vast majority of people don't have
Unless you're talking about extremes (e.g. non first-world country, homeless, or disabled people etc) I'm going to call BS on this.
Everyone eats, and everyone has 24 hours in a day.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia you can buy a 800g can of tomatoes for $1.50, a 185g can of tuna for $1.60 and 1kg of rice for $1.40.
You could cook that up on a stove (with just a couple portions of rice) in about 30min, giving you two nutritious meals for (I'm going to be generous) let's say about $4. That's $2 per meal. 3 meals a day gives you a total of $42 for food per week.
So are you telling me that fast food costs less than $50 per week, that 23 hours isn't enough time left in the day to do everything else, or am I missing something here?
We once, out of pure interest calculated based on nutritional value, the cost of eating on different diets. We took the average discount market shopping cart, a conscious version, the same for a regular (so more pricy) supermarket and did a comparison with ecological as well as regional food sourcing.
Based on nutritional value (taking into account to fulfill the base needs as well as potentially overshooting on salt, fat, sugar and other things like Vitamin A just to name an example) we found that industrial food is always the more expensive solution.
Yes you can feed people on a very cheap industrial diet but they will miss essential nutrients as well as overshoot on salt, sugar, and others to detrimental health effects.
If you want a balanced diet mostly locally and seasonally produce (with added stuff like olive oil and such) cooked by yourself was way more cost efficient per nutritional value.
The problem is, that it takes time to learn this, especially to learn this from experience. Also time to relearn how food really tastes without added aroma and stuff. Time to learn how to cook efficiently and with variation. And so on. We don't learn this anymore. Not from our parents, nor otherwise. But the advertising tells us how easy it is to just open a fully ready meal, pop it in the microwave and be done in 3 minutes.
Instead of enjoying the quality of preparing food together as a family/couple. Spending time, experiencing the smell of fresh cut food, herbs and so on. We nowadays equivalent cooking to a chore.
I meant resource in the form of time/money/education/motivation.
If it were as simple as you say, then why (in Australia) is your minimum wage so high? So 2 hours of work on minimum wage can cover a week of food? And you are calling BS on what I said? Okay.
Fair point, and and definitely some truth to that. I almost added "This works for me, your mileage may vary" disclaimer.
I will say that what I said above is _relative_, so if you go out for fast food "more than you should" than that becomes your baseline. Anything can be a baseline, even if not a healthy one.
I also know at least one person who has tried it and swears up and down it just doesn't work for them.
> Often fast food is the only obvious option
Ironically fast food often has some of the most easily available calories and macronutrient ratio. Working out the calories and macro for a home-made meal can be much more time-consuming
Sure fast food is convenient if you have little time, but people have survived poverty and mental health issues long before it.