
To Lose Weight, Eating Less Is Far More Important Than Exercising More - joeyespo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html
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abalashov
Thank you. I've been saying this forever, based largely on personal experience
living in countries where average portions aren't grotesquely oversize, and
where the chemistry of a typical meal is healthier and more natural.

I spent the first six years of my life in the USSR, where my formative
attitudes about food were formed: received cultural wisdom was that you should
be grateful for food and clean up your plate, both as a social grace and out
of larger moral considerations. This stayed with me, but unfortunately is a
disaster when applied in the US, where everything is enormous. Accordingly,
I'm prone to overeat, since almost all eating out in the US is overeating by
global standards. I'm not obese per se, but weight control has always been a
struggle.

On the other hand, I lived in Yerevan, Armenia for nearly two years 2012-2014.
Within about half a year of arriving, I lost nearly 30 lbs, eating an average
diet and having no exercise regime whatsoever. There was no gym membership and
no morning jog. I did nothing special to lose weight, it just happened. The
amount of walking involved in everyday life surely helped, but it wasn't
extraordinary; the inner centre of Yerevan is small, not on the scale of a
European capital. I just ate a lot less, it turns out. It was a fairly rich
diet, too, with lots of dough, bread, meat and carbs--just less.

Of course, I promptly gained the weight back a few months after returning to
the US.

