This isn't an account of the cultural moment that indi-fashion hub Harajuku had before its gentrification by Major international brand stores, or a inane J-Travel blog complaining about being out of shape and there being too much walking, It's a possibly interesting story of personal growth only coincidentally related to Harajuku.
I didn't know what Harajuku was, and thought it was going to be some Japanese term for some psychological concept, like ikigai, kaizen, wabi-sabi, or something like that.
Disappointingly, it's about personal shrinkage - weight loss. Yes, you have to want to do it; people fail because they get hungry, and that can be surprisingly hard to fight. The magic GLP drugs work because they suppress hunger, at which point not eating becomes easier.
> and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge.
Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing. Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.
Taking what I just ate and multiplying by 1.5 x 2 meals are two more tiny meals and I've hit my limit. And that's no snacks and avoiding all sugar
The only way to make it lots is to eat heaps of veggies with no dressing / oil.
>Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing.
2000 is "almost nothing"? What are you used to eating? Is it regular natural food or food industry crap loaded with sugar and calories? Here's two examples of eating througout the day:
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
- 10.5 oz salmon + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~750 kcal)
- 1 banana (~105 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + - 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts + 1 apple (~280 kcal)
OR
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
10.5 oz ribeye steak + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~1,000 kcal)
- 1 apple (~95 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice
+ 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts (~175 kcal)
Both are around ~2000Kcal. Are these "almost nothing"?
>Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.
Make the latte into a black and it's 0 calories. But even with latte, you consume 1/4 of daily calories, in one of the 4 (3 + snack) meal of the day. Sounds about right.
This isn't enough for me as 82kg mid 30s man. I will lean out by 3-5 kilos and lose strength for lifting weights.
What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats? No idea how many cals "enough olive oil to lubricate" is. I consciously use cooking fats to creep in more healthy calories to sustain me.
Note that the specified BMR is 2,900 in this article. If you are a heavier individual you tend to have a higher BMR.
A latte with semi-skimmed milk is closer to 100 (probably 125ish) than 200 calories in your example. A low fat greek yoghurt can be as low as 50 calories per 100g, so the 300 calories examples gives you 600 grams of yoghurt, quite a large portion.
The best way to hit a deficit though isn't to eat very little, its to eat satiating and/or high-volume food and add a small amount of exercise. For example potatoes will generally fill you up quicker than rice, pasta or bread for the same calories.
By eating different foods. I frequently get filling bento boxes in japan that are ~500-600 calories. And drinking when is extremely counterintuitive when trying to maintain/lose weight.
I personally skip breakfast and just eat lunch and dinner.
I'm not very active, and I've found that doing that as well as not eating snacks, sugar, or having calories in drinks makes it pretty easy to roughly be calorically neutral day to day.
The bit preceding this quote is pretty relevant to the discussion, specifically about BMR and generally making the right decisions using a data driven approach.
You try to stay under 2000 calories. Why? Is this number backed with data and helping drive you towards a specific goal?
Consider that the author's BMR might have been higher than you think.
I have one maybe one and a half meals per day which works great for me. I don’t think that works for everyone. I basically don’t eat anything from after dinner to lunch. I’m not explicitly doing IF or anything, it’s just an eating pattern I’ve settled on over the last couple of years and matches what we sort of did in our hunter gatherer phase.
I also have a sour-spicy tooth instead of a sweet tooth which means I’m naturally driven to snacks that are not calorie heavy.
I think there's some evidence for this, and it's consistent with my experiences with myself and what I've seen in others.
It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.
There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.
A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.
When I start exercising and tracking how many calories I burn, I realize how hard it is to outrun your diet. Thinking, "This cookie would cost me 35 minutes on the treadmill," is a huge deterrent.
When I stop working out, I quickly forget what calories actually cost.
Totally this. I've recently embarked on a weight loss/fitness journey (coming up on 50 rotations around the sun) and I find it incredibly helpful to think of the 250 calorie chocolate bar as roughly 25 minutes on the treadmill.
On the tracking point: I’ve found that a coding agent that can modify a file system (create and update CSVs) that’s accessible on both my laptop and phone to be the single best way to track things I’ve ever used. Bar none.
Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.
> apparently, 10 pounds of weight loss is roughly a clothing size [XL → L → M]
What? This is so wrong I'm confused how it could have possibly made it in. As a 5'7" guy, I was a M at 145, and still an M when I hit 175, though at that point I was close to an L. There is no way I was 3 separate sizes during that time
Something feels off / sloppy with the article in general and that’s gotta be the smoking gun. I cannot think of a single case where this is true, I’ve lost 35 pounds in the last 6 months, and I’m still a medium. 5’9”.
I see this post is from 2024. Maybe I would have enjoyed the hook and enjoyed reading along to figure out what this "harajuku moment" was back in 2024. But since being exposed to AI slop daily, and having to scan through so much verbose AI outputs during day-to-day "coding", I've now started skimming so much that I got annoyed that it meandered, then just couldn't bother reading the rest of the post after I've figured out what the harajuku moment is.
It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.
Meh, you see all sorts. It's definitely much more touristed in the last decade. The heyday may have been late 90s and early 00s. See Fruits magazines and books. Certainly, "normal" Japanese avoid it, but they always have, just like Asakusa, Kabukicho, Roppongi etc.
That said, you still see Medatsu (目立つ) and lots of younger people there looking for fashion, because that's where many of the (overpriced) used clothing stores are. There used to be more weird bands and such doing pop-up shows or playing at the Yoyogi band shell. Still, lots of Japanese tourists as well as foreigners, and lots of food events/festivals around there.
Ancient Greek philosophy on mind-body developmental balance can help. A physically fit human with no intellectual development and a propensity to follow orders might be the fascist reinterpretation of the classical Spartan ideal, but this would have been viewed as unbalanced aberration. Similarly, producing geeky nerds who can rearrange complicated equations in their head with ease but who can’t run a mile or lift heavy objects is just as undesirable.
This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.
Plato’s Republic:
> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”
Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing. Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.
Taking what I just ate and multiplying by 1.5 x 2 meals are two more tiny meals and I've hit my limit. And that's no snacks and avoiding all sugar
The only way to make it lots is to eat heaps of veggies with no dressing / oil.
2000 is "almost nothing"? What are you used to eating? Is it regular natural food or food industry crap loaded with sugar and calories? Here's two examples of eating througout the day:
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
- 10.5 oz salmon + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~750 kcal)
- 1 banana (~105 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + - 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts + 1 apple (~280 kcal)
OR
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
10.5 oz ribeye steak + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~1,000 kcal)
- 1 apple (~95 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts (~175 kcal)
Both are around ~2000Kcal. Are these "almost nothing"?
>Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.
Make the latte into a black and it's 0 calories. But even with latte, you consume 1/4 of daily calories, in one of the 4 (3 + snack) meal of the day. Sounds about right.
What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats? No idea how many cals "enough olive oil to lubricate" is. I consciously use cooking fats to creep in more healthy calories to sustain me.
A latte with semi-skimmed milk is closer to 100 (probably 125ish) than 200 calories in your example. A low fat greek yoghurt can be as low as 50 calories per 100g, so the 300 calories examples gives you 600 grams of yoghurt, quite a large portion.
The best way to hit a deficit though isn't to eat very little, its to eat satiating and/or high-volume food and add a small amount of exercise. For example potatoes will generally fill you up quicker than rice, pasta or bread for the same calories.
I'm not very active, and I've found that doing that as well as not eating snacks, sugar, or having calories in drinks makes it pretty easy to roughly be calorically neutral day to day.
You try to stay under 2000 calories. Why? Is this number backed with data and helping drive you towards a specific goal?
Consider that the author's BMR might have been higher than you think.
I also have a sour-spicy tooth instead of a sweet tooth which means I’m naturally driven to snacks that are not calorie heavy.
It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.
There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.
A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.
When I stop working out, I quickly forget what calories actually cost.
Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.
What? This is so wrong I'm confused how it could have possibly made it in. As a 5'7" guy, I was a M at 145, and still an M when I hit 175, though at that point I was close to an L. There is no way I was 3 separate sizes during that time
It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.
I used to enjoy longform content... alas.
Over 95% of the people in Harajuku are tourists going there to do exactly that. Locals completely avoid the area.
https://archive.org/details/fresh-fruits/mode/2up
That said, you still see Medatsu (目立つ) and lots of younger people there looking for fashion, because that's where many of the (overpriced) used clothing stores are. There used to be more weird bands and such doing pop-up shows or playing at the Yoyogi band shell. Still, lots of Japanese tourists as well as foreigners, and lots of food events/festivals around there.
This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.
Plato’s Republic:
> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”