A weird tip for weight loss
Hacker News isn’t just a great resource for tech-related news. The ‘Ask HN’ threads can also be a wonderful source of information or just provide different ways of thinking about the world.
In this example, the top-voted answer to a question about weight loss had me thinking about gut bacteria ‘craving’ sugar. Weird, but a useful framing.
This is a weird tip I think I could only share with the hacker news crowd. Once I learned about gut bacteria I started thinking of my cravings as something external to me. Like instead of saying "I'm hungry and I'm in the mood for something sweet" I would realize "the hormone ghrelin is sending hunger signals to my brain and the gut bacteria in my body is asking for something that's not actually in my best interest." Being able to emotionally distance myself from my feelings let me make decisions that I knew were better for me.Source: Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss? | Hacker News
You can never get rid of what is part of you, even when you throw it away
🤖 Why the Dancing Robots Are a Really, Really Big Problem — "No, robots don’t dance: they carry out the very precise movements that their — exceedingly clever — programmers design to move in a way that humans will perceive as dancing. It is a simulacrum, a trompe l’oeil, a conjurer’s trick. And it works not because of something inherent in the machinery, but because of something inherent in ours: our ever-present capacity for finding the familiar. It looks like human dancing, except it’s an utterly meaningless act, stripped of any social, cultural, historical, or religious context, and carried out as a humblebrag show of technological might."
💭 Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains — "We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our “defensive activation theory,” dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses."
✅ A simple 2 x 2 for choices — "It might be simple, but it’s not always easy. Success doesn’t always mean money, it just means that you got what you were hoping for. And while every project fits into one of the four quadrants, there’s no right answer for any given person or any given moment.."
📅 Four-day week means 'I don't waste holidays on chores' — "The four-day working week with no reduction in pay is good for the economy, good for workers and good for the environment. It's an idea whose time has come."
💡 100 Tips For A Better Life — "It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle. When people’s actions contradict their talk, pay attention!"