Calories or kilojoules?

This maybe of interest:

http://www.skepticality.com/the-science-of-fat/#axzz2IZjfPwqb

An opposing view:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-we-get-fat/

I come at this from a different angle. Growing up I was skinny as a rail. As an adult I gradually gained about 25 pounds and was, from my mid-20s onward, at a pretty healthy weight for my height. I exercised regularly but not obsessively, mostly basketball, some bicycling.

Then I had two kids. I gained 50 pounds with my first pregnancy (at age 35), lost all but 10 pounds of it, got pregnant again, ditto. When my 2nd child was about 3 I decided to lose that excess 10 lb., so I counted calories (in, not out) for six months and kept myself at a strict limit of 2000 a day. I lost the 10 pounds, quit counting calories, and promptly gained 20 pounds back. Then, gradually, 10 more.

Eventually I developed an auto-immune skin condition, and when the conventional dermatologist said he could do nothing for me but monitor the situation, I went to an alternative practioner whose major piece of advice (there was quite a lot of it, mostly dietary) was to stop eating wheat.

It took me a year to get serious about that, because I love good bread (hey, I’m half Italian), and bread and pasta are the easiest foods in the world, not to mention relatively cheap. But when I did get serious I lost 30 pounds effortlessly (except for: no bread! no pasta!) in a year and a half, back to my original steady state adult weight, and I’ve stayed there ever since, about 15 years. I get none of the strenuous exercise of old; I walk a lot and I stretch, but my knees are wrecked so there’s no more basketball or cycling for me.

And — my skin condition and several other chronic and annoying symptoms cleared up as well.

My admittedly unscientific conclusion is *not* that avoiding wheat would help everyone, but rather that if we could each figure out which foods “agree with” us (as my old grandma used to say) and which don’t, maintaining a healthy weight wouldn’t be as much of an issue for a lot of us.

I think what happened for me was that when I stopped eating what didn’t agree with me, my weight stabilized along with my health. (Aging does a number regardless, it seems, but that’s a separate phenomenon.) Before I stopped eating wheat it had gotten so that I was naggingly hungry all the time. I suspect this was because my gut was constantly irritated, so I wasn’t absorbing nutrients properly, and when the irritation stopped, the nagging hunger stopped too. (For the record, I have tested negative for celiac disease.)

Having glanced for half a minute at hardindr’s links, I’ll repeat/emphasize that I don’t think one size fits all is a good approach to diet, except in the most general way (Michael Pollan quote from the second link: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”). I eat some of this and some of that, not much meat, some fish, a lot of rice-based stuff, vegies, olive oil, cheese (I’m trying now to switch to sheep’s milk cheese, the price of which will limit my intake if nothing else does).

I had a thermo professor that calculated that he could bath in ice water for ten minutes every day and never have to worry about his weight until he realized that for diet and food, kilo calories are always used so he was off by 3 orders on magnitude. That’s a much longer time in the ice water bath tub.

To gain knowledge about manipulating one’s body composition, it seems pretty clear that one ought to turn to the people who devote their entire being to body composition manipulation, who stay rigorously abreast of whatever relevant scientific knowledge exists, and who minutely track their own relevant behaviors and personal outcomes. These people are, of course, body builders and fitness models. However existentially repellent you might find their vocation, it’s clear that, when it comes to reducing one’s body fat percentage, they know of what they speak. And, in my experience, what they speak lines up much more closely with Gary Taubes @1 than with the competing “calories in minus calories out” argument. Specifically, what sort of calories you consume and when you consume them matters a great deal, as our bodies’ various hormonal responses have a great deal to do with fat and muscle loss and gain. For example, you should only ever allow your blood sugar to spike in the brief window surrounding intense exercise.

Use the metric system, you nation of troglodytes.

15kg weight loss is quite an achievement! Congratulations.

It’s not “kilogram calories”. It’s kilo-calories, i.e. 1000 calories.
For some stupid reason people say calorie when they mean kcal, which
is equivalent to saying 1000=1.

I don’t think there’s much alternative to calorie counting in order to lose weight. Fortunately, new mobile apps make this a lot easier. Plenty of good recommendations in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence guidance: http://www.nice.org.uk/cg043

Unfortunately, I’m one of those who needs to calorie count for life, so I promptly put on a whole load of weight as soon as I stopped.

@JQ. Oops, I would indeed.
“In an attempt to avoid confusion, the large calorie is sometimes written as Calorie.”
Sure, that really helps.

The experience of body builders and the like is NOT especially informative for the 99% of us who have (a) average genetics, (b) an aversion to performance-enhancing drugs, and (c) jobs, kids, activities we enjoy other than being in a gym, etc. Also, bodybuilders/fitness folks allow their weight and bodyfat levels to fluctuate enormously throughout the year, cutting fat for shows and then gaining fat back while they try to build more muscle between them; most of us don’t want our weight to fluctuate by 10-15%+ over the course of months.

Even assuming correct calculation of calories in (people tend to underestimate intake by about 50%, on average with a large standard deviation), actual losses will nearly always fall short of calculated losses. The most notable reason is that non-exercise activity tends to drop when people diet and exercise.

It’s not just a “oh, I read a magazine whilst on the recumbent bike for a half hour this morning, I can sit on the couch all day” effect, although that’s some of it. Unconscious energy-burning activity — e.g., fidgeting — also goes down during a diet, which can be a very large part of the “calories out” side of the equation. Just your body’s way of saying, “I love you.”

I recommend Lyle McDonald’s site if you want a “scientific” approach to losing weight (meaning one that’s based in the scientific literature on nutrition and exercise, not just the fad of the day). Aside from a couple of books, he’s not selling anything or doing the morning talk show circuit thing to sell junk science (ahem, Taubes, cough).

my 2 cents worth of wisdom:

1. a carrot is a carrot, but raw or steamed makes a lot of a difference, and the experience / constitution of the body you feed it to, too.

The simple equation delta fat = energy in – energy consumed does not work that simple.

2. when you take a closer look at the data, people live longer with BMIs > 27, and age 70 I would be fine with BMI = 30.1, when the hunger horder boohooos “obese”.
But that is OK, they will die earlier, and I get a slightly higher pension : – )

When you take a look at how much physical exercise helps you how much, something like 15 – 20 min per day are actually the BROAD maximum Utility point, ……, IF you hate the time spend on workout, and “account” for it versus your lifetime.
If you do this, because you walk anyway to work or shopping, or actually enjoy it, seeing some seasonal change, think about some stuff, without the need to focus on traffic ….., well, then 60 min dont hurt, obviously.

I believe, the increased mortality for that supposedly “ideal” weight BMI < 25 does not really come from being intrinsically "unhealthy", but that too many folks, desperately trying to keep up with some supposed social norms, do not listen to their bodies, do unhealthy things to stay that way, and in general enjoy life a lot less.

Can I "prove" that? No.

You might try clinical depression. I find it generally results in a roughly 10 percent weight loss.

I fully agree with KJM that Cal and kJ are just units, and your reasons for Cal over kJ are irrelevant. This means that one should use kJ, because Cal is not SI and outdated, it’s a bad unit (there’s a reason it’snt SI). Moreover, the confusion between Cal and cal is a very good second reason why one should avoid using either. (And it’s kJ, not Kj, as the symbol for joule is J and the symbol for 1000 is k.)

I am happy to say that I can keep up my perfect record of antagonism to genauer.

The paradox that being somewhat overweight does not reduce life expectancy significantly should not be confused with the idea that being overweight is “healthy”. Being somewhat overweight does correlate, unfortunately, with many chronic disease conditions, which, though they don’t kill you, do reduce the quality of life lived.

You might try clinical depression. I find it generally results in a roughly 10 percent weight loss.

Depends on whether you’re self-treating with whiskey.

While the law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy are both true in the context of the weight of the human body, the following post (also by an economist) is definitely worth reading.

http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/04/17/obesity-and-the-first-law-of-thermodynamics/

@ JW Mason & Bruce Wilder,

if I would be wrong with what the ECB and Bundesbank,
and the folks I elected to do, what they are doing now (Merkel, Schäuble, Weidmann, Asmussen), just speaking theoretically : – )
you could argue, that it hurts you and your people.

If I would be wrong with my assessment of those health myths, it should only hurt me, or ? And vice versa. It is not a win/lose.

This could be a good opportunity, to learn more about each others approaches to common (individual) problems.

“crooked timber, upright walk” was, 30 years ago, a significant turning point in my life.
Krummes Holz, Aufrechter Gang
The point I became an adult, not fearing to be in a small minority, taking responsibility, not just for me, my family.

Calories in, calories out is a bad model: the body is not a wood stove. Rats fed yogurt with calorie-free artificial sweetener gained weight when rats fed yogurt with no sweetener gained none, though they consumed the same number of calories. In my personal experience, and the experience of a lot of other people, replacing diet soda with water caused a significant weight loss even though there was no calorie change. Studies show that high-fructose corn syrup tends to cause more weight gain than an equivalent number of table sugar calories.

The best thing you can do is replace your fluids with water, sleep restfully and enough, don’t eat your emotions, avoid HCFS, and fast 16-18 hours twice a week. That will get you within 4kg/10 lbs./a half-stone of where you should be. That last bit requires intensive exercise and dieting beyond the scope of what you’re looking for here.

By “maintain a healthy weight,” I take it you mean you’re struggling to put yourself in the overweight or slightly obese range?

Because that is, in fact, far healthier than being “normal,” with a mortality rate about 5% lower. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23280227

I don’t debate the merits of exercise, but it seems likely that losing weight is bad for you: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8363208

Obligatory qualification about correlation and causation, of course, but these are exactly the opposite of the results you would expect if the enormous time and energy people pour into losing weight were worthwhile.

JQ: “Whatever the effects of hormones etc, they must work in a way that is consistent with energy balance.”

Yes, but what was your energy balance? It was:

(Baseline energy consumption + Extra exercise – Food energy intake) * (kg fat to store 1 kJ energy) = kg of weight lost

All your calculations are done at the margin. You assume baseline energy consumption is constant and look at exercise and changes in food intake. But baseline energy consumption (amount of energy your body burns just by sitting around) is not constant. It depends on your metabolism, not to mention things like how cold it is, how stressed you are, etc. If your body adjusts its metabolism in response to what it perceives as starvation or other factors, as people here allege (I can’t vouch for this, but I hear it a lot), then that could reduce the baseline amount of energy you consume. That change could be enough to overwhelm changes in food intake or exercise.

One other thing: You say your exercise guides give energy burned in calories, and the efficiency of your body means it actually takes 4 food calories to produce 1 calorie of work. But beware that your exercise guides have probably already taken this into account! When they say running for x minutes burns y calories, what they are really trying to tell you is that it compensates for y calories of food intake. They are measuring exercise in calories because Americans label food in kilogram calories (unforgivably written as just “calories”). So it’s probably all sorted out for you already, and if you try to adjust by 4x you’ll just end up eating 4x too much. And then when you try to come to America to yell at us for our confusing exercise guides, you won’t be able to, because you won’t fit through the airplane door. Catch-22!

When you keep track of your food intake and exercise in terms of energy (Americans call this “counting calories” or just “Weight Watchers”), most of the effort involved comes from having to count the energy in every bagel, apple, and pasta supper you eat. So you should use whatever units are written on your food, which I guess for you is kJ. You can sum up your exercise amounts in calories, horsepower-hours, or whatever you want and convert at the end. Or better yet, get an Austrian exercise guide which I presume will give you estimates in kJ.

And finally, while I share your general feeling that K is wrong and should have read Wikipedia before posting, he is actually right. As Wikipedia says, the real calorie, used by chemists, is the gram calorie. Then there is also the kilogram calorie, which equals exactly 1000 gram calories. Therefore, even though Wikipedia defines it slightly differently, 1 kilogram calorie is exactly the same thing as 1 kilocalorie. And at some point long ago, some idiot in the U.S. Government decided to measure food energy in kilogram calories but label it as calories.

Losing 60 pounds (okay, 27.3 kilograms) is easy. I’ve done it twice in my life so far, and may do it again. (As Mark Twain would say – but it’s the truth.) Both times I decreased my food intake and increased my exercise. Speaking of the effects of depression, the first time seemed quite easy because I was, as they say, heart-broken, and I often couldn’t tell if I was hungry or not because my stomach hurt all the time.

I disagree with this statement (although I could of course be wrong): “Exercise will also result in fluid loss, but since fat doesn’t contain much water, this is all temporary.”

As I see it, the basic chemical equation used by our cells is:

C6H12O6 (simple sugar) +6O2 –> energy + 6CO2 + 6H2O

So after I’ve walked five or six miles, despite swearing through my clothes, I also have to urinate. I’ll replace a lot of that water, but not necessarily the part which came from burning the sugar (which may have been reduced from fat).

according to my records, I left just one comment a year ago on the blog “crooked timber”, in response to niam. And then, recently, just a few, on just one entry “home truth”.

You also made a brief but pungent intervention on one of the Aaron Swartz threads.

So I even disagree with you about your posting history here. :-)

I’ve read a lot that fidgeting is a big deal, don’t know how robust the studies really are. One example:
http://m.sciencemag.org/content/283/5399/184.short

Given that it seems impossible to consciously balance inputs and outputs completely accurately, and some people (not including me) maintain reasonably constant weights, there have to be decent negative feedbacks somewhere.

Saibikinoraion, how’d you pick your handle? “3 lions”.

I would like to endorse the notion that this is all about how much you eat. The rest is BS.

Since I have lived in Japan for five years, I am now amazed by the way westerners eat. On my last overseas holiday in Germany, my partner ordered the smallest schnitzel in the pub (“M” size – what’s that about?) and it was clearly big enough to feed a whole Japanese family for two nights running. Why? When I’m in London I have to argue with cafe staff to get a small (i.e. normal) size coffee – many chains start their sizes at basically what to any sane person is a large. Australian food servings are easily twice what an adult needs to eat. Why? Also, you can’t get cheap, healthy fast food anywhere: in Japan the standard cheap food is onigiri (100 yen) and oden (80 yen a pop) at any convenience store – for 3 or 4 US dollars you get a full meal of calories with zero fat or sugar. The equivalent in the west would be – a bag of chips.

I think it’s a combination of straight out gluttony (much of it related to a colonial notion of “rights”) and a pernicious view that if you’re paying for food, the only measure of value is the amount you get – even if 50% of it is going to be wasted as fat you don’t need.

Of course, all of this is structural. You can’t change it individually (well, you can, but it’s a huge effort). Basically, we in the west need to change our food culture and the way we design our cities. We also need to return to a cultural expectation of thinness, rather than a culture of passive-aggression about fat. But that’s not going to happen. Which is why everyone is getting fat.

Incidentally, 250 Watts sustained output are quite a bit of power, and not something a normal person can sustain for longer periods of time. For professional cyclists, peak output for short periods can be as much as 300-400 Watts, but that’s pretty much it for humans.

Sustained output for running etc. is probably more on the order of 100 Watts, not 250 Watts, I’d say.

I’ve used the ‘pants size’ approach for 3+ decades and it works for me. I only buy one size waist in clothing and I refuse to go up (there is a cheap-skate factor invovled as well).

When the pants get a little snug the feeling of ‘snug-ness’ is the positive reinforcement I need to eat less/eat better or exercise more as time and opportunity allow. The more I do, the quicker my pants fit right. By the same token, sometimes I find the pants getting a little loose and that lets me know its ‘ok’ to have dessert.

My exercise is mostly walking/treadmill. I have only 2 diet rules 1) is “no snacking” when I feel a little hungry between meals, a small handful of lightly or un-salted nuts or chewing gum suffices and:
2) portion management (Faustnotes was dead-on above)…stop eating when you’re full, not when the plate is empty. People are raised on “cleaning their plate” and “not wasting food because of the starving kids in China”…if you can’t eat it, throw it out and send money to UNICEF (or whomever) for your soul.

In scientific terms – I’ve established my equilibribum body weight around my clothing size and the positve/negative reinforcements are registered every time I need to buckle my belt.

Figures that a Keynesian would believe “Energy used – energy consumed = fat burnt.”

(It’s just a joke, people).

In the spirit of human beings are not wood stoves, the regulatory functions, which keep a person’s weight to some “norm”, sometimes malfunction, and this can be a factor in weight gain/weight loss.

I think the anomaly (or “paradox”) of a statistical correlation between life expectancy and being somewhat overweight may be due to the frequency with which chronic disease conditions call on the body to gain weight in defense. Emphysema (or more generally, COPD) is particularly dramatic. At the outset of emphysema, weight loss is quite a common response, and correlates strongly with dramatically reduced life expectancy — we’re talking about something close to a decade of life, compared to similarly situated person, who gains weights or remains somewhat “overweight” (by a BMI standard, which standard is, of course, stupid applied prescriptively in such a case).

Hypothyroidism, untreated, can cause rapid and dramatic weight gain. Chronic hypothyroidism is debilitating enough that it eventually gets diagnosed and treated, but the weight gain is not reversed, just by the administration of synthetic thyroid hormones. Transitory hypothyroidism may be quite common and rarely diagnosed or treated.

There are medical regimens, which could, logically, be used to reverse the weight gain induced by hypothyroidism, but they are never prescribed. The hormone, hcg, is used in a popular diet promoted by parts of the the multi-billion-dollar diet industry, to create an almost mirror-image of the processes that drive the weight gain in hypothyroidism. (The marketing of fraudulent, homopathic “hcg” has attracted FDA attention, which is just one of hundreds of examples of how the free market works to confuse everyone and everything.)

I would echo some of what other comments have highlighted, concerning the subversive effects of some food choices, on the body’s regulatory mechanisms. The body does not do a good job of registering calories in drinks — they don’t reduce appetite as much as calories in solid food. Sugars and starches should probably be reduced dramatically as a proportion of diet, especially as calories consumed per day dip below 3000; too much sugar in the diet is hard on the insulin system, which is one of the principal regulators of metabolism and appetite. The huge excess of hfcs in American diets, as activity levels declined, certainly has a lot to do with weight gain across the population, as well as rising levels of Type 2 diabetes. Many people adopting even modest long-term weight-loss goals would be well-advised to familiarize themselves, less with calorie-counting, and more with the glycemic index. For people, consuming less than 2000 calories a day, eliminating bread from their diets might be a highly effective strategy for losing a modest amount of excess weight.

@Yarrow: I probably should have said “not well trained person”.

I looked up my comparisons again: If you are well-trained, you can indeed sustain 250 W, but above that even well-trained people go into the anaerobic regime which you cannot sustain continuously. Even for well-trained people the maximum short-time power tops out at at most 500 W.

I really only wanted to make the point that 250 W is already quite a bit of power, and not the output that you need to for normal running, which John seemed to suggest.

@ John Quiggin

“evident success in reducing weight to a healthy level and sustaining it, I suggest looking at runners/triathletes”

Just to picturize this here, I have seen “very healthy” people in my company, younger than me, dying from a heart attack after the second marathon run in a month.
Plenty of stories of folks with knee operations, ruined joints in general, in those desperate desires to adjust to some socially required body norms.

Where do you know from, that what these guys are doing is “healthy” as in “increased life expectancy”?

As Bruce Wilder mentioned here already, somewhat indirectly,

correlation is not causation

For the general overall public average there is a weak link between weight and life expectancy.

But that does NOT mean that weight reduction, especially not by drastic means, is healthy.

Oops–the earlier paper was from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Mortality vs. BMI is a U-shaped curve. Different studies will show it bottoming out at a different BMI, but 22.5-25 seems common. This is very different from “overweight is good for you”.
For an example, see http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1000367#t=articleTop

By the way, that last paragraph in my link above–“Since the 3/4 law appears to exist throughout biology, Brown says, it should be considered one of a few known fundamental unifying theories of life. He says the law is further evidence of a common ancestor, and additional support for Darwin’s theory of evolution. “–seems like a non-sequitur to me. Why would it support Darwin? It seems more like an engineering constraint, something that would pop up no matter how organisms came to be. Not that I’m a creationist.

And this wikipedia article disputes the reasoning of the previous link on why the 3/4 power law is true–

Kleiber’s law

There is an error in my previous post. It should have read:
“My hdl’s are between 45 and 55 (<40 is considered dangerous) my triglycerides average 60 (150 is considered dangerous) …”

I think Donald Johnson @72-73 is the most interesting contribution to this thread so far. Allometries are cool!

@ Hugh Loebner

thank you for bringing up the cardio check toy! Looks like something I would buy on occasion : – ) Disadvantage is that each measurement point costs 3 x 3 dollar, or ?

I am a physicist/ engineer, and I love measurement tools. I have of course a weight scale, heart pressure monitor, blood sugar, even an oximetry 24 h tool (comes at less than 100 Euro nowadays, with some ), a heart beat string to be used with a smart phone, just to mention the health related stuff : -)

All little nice toys you play with for a few weeks, before they go to a box, to collect some dust. And for less than 100 they provide more fun than an opera ticket.

@Yarrow
The link to the runners world is interesting, but it is a meta analysis of existing data sets, not new data. That the BMI optimum is <= 25 for perfectly healthy folks, I believe.

What is unfortunately missing, is an analysis for the interaction between physical activity and BMI, which is somewhat surprising, because they go into significant detail with multi levels for smoking. And as "better a little heavier but active" seems to be mostly agreed upon now, certainly not some absurd side question.

From my present knowledge, also mentioned by others above, more physical activity should shift this optimum to higher BMI levels (I have recently seen a study, where my BROAD maximum 15 minutes daily activity sentence above came from, I have to find it). What is further worth to mention, if you look in the appendix (page 18) of the study, that as a former smoker, my optimum would be around BMI 30 : – )

And again, if higher weight is a healthy reaction of the body to whatever reasons, attempts to lower it not by living healthier, like more moderate activity & healthy food, but by other or more agressive means, it is likely counterproductive.

All these studies do NOT show that certain specific diets are healthy in any way.

My post 72 wasn’t clearly written, I see now–never post when I first wake up. But I’m glad people enjoyed the links. From John’s 2.5 link it turns out that the BMI isn’t really based on any detailed analysis of health, height and weight, but is only a computationally convenient (in the days before calculators) way of taking into account that tall healthy people tend to be skinnier-looking than short healthy people. I should have known.

John Quiggan @ 79: AFAICT the extension down to 18.5 was recent, US-specific and not evidence-based.

That seems not to be the case. According to
this table from a history of U.S. criteria for overweight and obesity in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the U.S. had a hodgepodge of various standards (which mostly ignored underweight) until 1998 when it started adopting the World Health Organizations’s 1997 Consultation on Obesity standards, including its 18.5 cutoff for underweight.

(A BMI below 17.5 is apparently one criterion in diagnosing anorexia, which underscores the weirdness of treating 18.5 as normal. That’s kind of like saying 25 is normal and 26 is morbid obesity.)

No argument on “not evidence-based”. I mean really — aren’t all those numbers suspiciously round? 25, 30, 25, even 18.5? According to the AJCN article, when the U.S. was transitioning away from life insurance tables to a BMI-based scheme, 27.8 was too heavy for men and 27.3 for women (with no gradations between overweight, obesity type 1, type 2, and so forth). That was the 85th percentile of people aged 20-29 in the NHANES II study. “The rationale for selecting this age group as the reference population was that young adults are relatively lean and the increase in body weight that usually occurs with age is due almost entirely to fat accumulation.”

Now you can see those BMI numbers as sort of evidence-based, if you look at them sideways and squint hard. If we take on faith the idea that having more fat than the average young adult is always bad (which now seems to be false), but that being within one standard deviation from the mean is safe, then it makes sense to say “if you’re a woman with BMI over 27.3 or a man with BMI over 27.8, you might want to look into that.”

On the other hand, using 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 seems reasonable for a research program, when you’re just trying to see what makes sense. But clearly those numbers were pulled out of someone’s butt and cry out for calibration. Moreover it seems unlikely that the best weight/height ratio for, say, women between 180-190 cm and 25-30 years would be the same as the best weight/height ratio for men between 160-170 cm and 65-70 years.

Having a PhD in physics myself,

I fully support the statement of Hektor Bim.

@ Mao,

I think you misunderstand something here.

I am an infidel in many things, and I did try to run things down this conventional “physical” model. With calculations, spreadsheet, a box full of gizmos, and spending for a time something like 3 hours a day with physical activity.

And after some time, you look at the data, what it is and what it should be.
And believe me, if I am scolding at least 2 times a month somebody for looking at data the way they want them, I took significant effort to not fall myself into the same trap.

Those animal bodies like ours are damned clever little robust beasts, much more complicated than my usual physics/ engineering stuff.

Mao,

Just for the record, I eat just about the same number of hamburgers now as I did before my diet change, that is less than 2 a year. So I once again reiterate that it is substantially more complicated for most people then you seem to think.

“Those animal bodies like ours are damned clever little robust beasts”

But all that complexity is irrelevant to the energy in/energy out approach.

In general, the internal complexity doesn’t rule out the possibility of simple control. The car you drive is an extremely complicated machine, full of sophisticated electronics, valves, loop-back mechanisms. These days it might even have two engines, one electric and one internal combustion. And yet you control its speed with just one pedal. You don’t need to be aware of any internal intricacies.

Mao,

I am very aware of our nice physics conservation laws, I dont need to know the intracies of a machine, to know, that perpetuum mobiles dont work.

One example (carbon mass conservation), which is surprisingly difficult to accept for many people:
if the thickness of the humus (mud) underneath the rain forest doesnt increase, it will in the long run not be a net CO2 absorber, no if, else, or but : – )
No matter what Greenpeace says.

Of course, some of our physical laws are hard, absolute laws. But, just as Hektor says, in the very most cases, people invoke them, in different, not so hard cases.

But you will not be able to draw down your body weight along those lines.
It will revolt.

Compared to that, the likelyhood that if somebody promises you very consistent very high returns on some investment, that there is something wrong, is a soft law.
Very likely, but not totally impossible.

And since I am at it. If you measure long enough enough parameters of your body, you will find something, and some specialist will recommend some stuff. Be very careful to get real information, about what is “normal”, and for your age, weight, etc.

Beyond that, on a lighter side, I have 3 pedals, gas, brake, clutch, and the gear, to control my speed : – )

if you want to lose weight, you just have to eat less. What else is there to talk about?

I guess naked aggression is par for the course on a health thread, but wow. I can just see you spitting this while standing half an inch from Hektor’s face, giving ’em a methhead stare. What else is there to talk about, bitch? Huh? What else is there to talk about?

Well, there’s this: Even at fairly healthy weight, while consuming below 1000 kCals / day long-term you’re risking severe heart complications, and at below 500 kCals / day you’re risking brain damage even in the short term. (These are fairly conservative estimates; 1200 kCal is the usually-cited threshold for DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT MEDICAL SUPERVISION.) Worse still, these numbers are not constant with respect to weight.

Not that I expect you to care about other peoples’ risk of health degradation or organ damage, given that you basically advocated mistreating one’s pets for the sake of casual experiment. (I can already see you getting all excited, ready to (1) protest that nobody could have possibly taken you literally, and (2) tell me about how all those stupid people are already risking even more horrible fates by not doing what you propose.) And at this point there’s no hope that you’ll come around to understanding anything even as simple as “substantial changes in eating habits prompt changes in metabolism that are not reliably predictable and that vary considerably from person to person,” given that that would get in the way of your opportunity to be self-righteous about How Simple It Is.

You must get exasperated with other people a lot. Those silly people. It’s all so simple. How can they not understand. And you’ve tried so hard to explain and they won’t listen. You even shove cold obvious logic in their face, and they still don’t concede your point!

@ all,

Since some folks here are familiar with scientific papers with respect to weight / health:

What is your favourite / convincing study, that (substantial) weight loss in which way is good for your health, as in “lower mortality”?

Because when I look stuff up, like
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2012/niddk-19.htm
you find that they have stopped it, that the benefits of weight loss werent there,

and that a certain type of ideological demgagogues then nearly always try to reinterpret the findings. e.g. ” this study and others ”
“modest weight loss has been shown to prevent or delay developing type 2 diabetes”

No, this study did not show this, the folks had already diabetes 2 going into this study.

And this systematically dishonest behavior of the hunger fanatics is extremely typical.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2010.02227.x/pdf
In fact they have to carefully sort out the many cases of “reverse causation”

“Weight loss is associated with particularly high mortality risk even when the typical BMI change is from obesity to overweight.”
http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/12/28/geront.gns164.full.pdf+html

But I am interested to hear from the other side.

Mao,

you came across as pretty arrogant. Not that this would ever happen to me … LOL.
And sometimes this triggers reactions, like from Salient.

And since we are at the 7 deadly sins, you might not indulge in gluttony, but beyond your self admitted vanity I also definitely detect superbia : – )

Your loose talk, and the similar from many others, drives millions every days to unhealthy weight reduction efforts. You dont see most of that in a university mensa with 20 somethings. But go into a company cafeteria with folks in the 30ties – 50ties, and also look at energy levels in meetings before and after lunch. So many people, who try to conform to some supposed social norm, stirred by comments like

Your “Difficult for some, not so hard for others, and it also depends on your priorities”.

You deserve the ear wash, you got from “salient” : – )

100. Well, Mao, it’s not pleasant to go back and explain a statement I regretted sending as soon as I clicked, so, I apologize for #97 as unnecessary/inappropriate reaction to perceived aggression, but I’m standing by #98 completely.

You’ve been encouraging (by providing arguments for) starvation diets as panacea, you’ve responded dismissively to people who pointed out how/why that’s bad logic supporting a bad idea by suggesting they can see your logic in action by intentionally under-feeding their pets, and you’re telling people who repeatedly try and explain why starve-until-you-lose is a terrible idea that “all that complexity is irrelevant.” I don’t believe you literally want people to intentionally under-feed their pets, but it’s still an awful thing to say, and does nothing to further your point. (If you don’t see how it’s awful, consider if you had replaced pets with children. Telling people “if you don’t believe me, go commit this atrocity and see what happens” is plainly aggressive.)

You’re repeating the shaming motto “if you want to lose weight, you just have to eat less,” and making the shaming explicit by stating those who don’t follow your dictum must “prefer to indulge in gluttony at the expense of vanity.” (Contrast with what JQ has said, which takes pains to avoid shaming.) The contextualization you’re pushing is a pretty low blow to people who are struggling with health, and it’s an especially low blow to people who are struggling with an unhealthy predisposition to psychologically compelling vanity. (The folks on the ‘vanity’ side of your spectrum being, obviously, anorexics and bulimics.) To make the shaming more explicit, in case you’re honestly unmindful of it, here’s what you’re saying: If you really want to lose weight, just eat less and put up with the suffering this causes you, you delicate little flower. If you don’t do that, you must not really want to lose the weight, so just admit you’d rather be an overfed fat fuck already, geez.

The conceit is this: there’s nobody on your proposed spectrum that’s trying to develop a more able body or healthier lifestyle. (Contrast with JQ’s plainly stated interest in how to improve health/athleticism.) If you acknowledged that the vast majority of individuals contemplating weight loss are seeking to maintain or even improve their body’s health, the entirety of your proposal immediately falls apart completely in every meaningful way. It’s very very easy to devise a plan to lose weight, but for people already struggling with health conditions — including obesity — it’s damned difficult to do so in a way that will improve their short-term health without compromising their long-term health, and it’s extra damned difficult to do so if they’ve been using food as a form of medication for pain or stress.

The logic you are arguing for has led a lot of people to compromise their health by failing to understand the consequences of undernourishment. It’s a pernicious line of argument. And that’s the whole point, that’s what people have been trying to get you to understand, with remarkable patience and kindness (except me).

All that as it is, what pushed me to respond: You responded to the very patient “Your body unlike your car can spontaneously change its efficiency in response to the wide variety of nutrients available” with So what? “What else is there to talk about?” Obviously, how the body changes its efficiency in response to the wide variety of nutrients available is the already-given answer to your question. When you respond to information by demanding that information, that’s only coherent as an act of aggression — you’re not honestly asking, you’re using the question rhetorically as a replacement for SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

And the last time I recall that rhetorical tactic being used, it was druggies literally getting in the face of other Occupy Assembly folks, literally standing half an inch from people’s faces spitting ‘The Assembly has been following all the agreed-upon rules for financial disclosure. What else is there to talk about, b–? Huh? What else is there to talk about?’ If you honestly asked that question hoping to learn what else is there to talk about, instead of to aggressively assert that there is nothing else to talk about shut up shut up shut up, then I’ll retract my entire reaction with apologies (and with a lot of genuine puzzlement; you’re not in terribly good rhetorical company, and people have been trying to provide answers to that question before you asked it.) On the other hand, if you weren’t asking with genuine curiosity and interest–which still seems like the more plausible interpretation, to me–then I don’t feel terribly bad about my latter comment (#98), and hopefully this comment helps answer your question about what compels a person to say the kind of thing I said in the kind of context in which I said it.

103. Ah. Yes, I am, in fact, a puppy-eating zombie Nazi, but that doesn’t negate the laws of physics.
…except maybe for the zombie part.

And your hatred for me, for what the society made me, is … despicable.

Argleblarg. But eating the puppy would increase your body mass!

It’s a relief that we’re at the making fun of ourselves / mistaking exasperation for hatred stage of disagreement, where we get to use adjectives and then give it a rest. So. Under the almighty laws of immutable physics, the quickest way to lose weight is to lose body mass, so, I dunno, just take a chainsaw to your midsection, or, if you prefer for the lost energy to be used for something, self-immolate. That is a completely consistent application of the physical laws you are citing, and both options are considerably faster at reducing your body mass than the slow drain of starvation (or the far slower drain of nonzero-but-lowered calorie intake).

If we’re going to take biology/physiology/medicine into account, and discuss only health-improving forms of weight loss, then nonzero-but-lowered calorie intake is definitely in the suite of reasonable options, buuuuut, you really don’t want to rest your case for it on a line of supporting argument that works even better for advocating a chainsaw or immolation mass-loss plan. Argleblarrrg!