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Comment by citeguised | Hacker News Reader

Oh, so the laws of physics changed? Wow!

No but seriously, this is a terrible article.

As soon as you read »…a professor of _kinesiology_ and health science…« you know the statements are coming from people who believe in esoteric pseudoscience.

If your burn more energy than you take in, you lose weight.

Everything else doesn't make sense.

You can get fat by eating 5000 calories worth of paprika every day.

Statements like these only help people who have weight-problems to have an excuse not to do anything about it.

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I don't especially want to defend the article but this whole first-law-of-thermodynamics approach to explaining weight gain is definitely the most useless idea that somehow always rears its head around here. It's not only useless on its face since how much we eat is moderated by satiety mechanisms rather than weights and measures, but it also ignores the complexity of nutrition and metabolism and the fact that weight has only a loose correlation to overall health.

As much as you're not going to fix your health by reading superficial linkbait articles, you also will not do it by taking a smug reductionist view that allows you to dismiss the subtleties of nutrition which still remain frustratingly beyond the reach of conclusive hard science.

> how much we eat is moderated by satiety mechanisms

No, it's moderated by our fork. It also means being hungry a lot and keeping exact track of your calories, just like poor people need to track their expenses.

(Been there done that with both money and weight)

The »subtleties of nutrition« don't matter if you are huge (BMI > 30) and want to get down to a healthy level. Once you are there you still can optimize and find out what works best for you.

I see, so fat people just need to knuckle down and starve themselves until they are reasonable weight and only then start to pay attention to the overall function of the human organism and their particular incarnation of it? That seems utterly backwards if not willfully ignorant.

Keeping a calorie deficit doesn't mean starving yourself. You need 3000 calories a day? Eat 2000, you'll lose about 1 kg in a week. At least it works for me and lots of other people I know. Sure it's hard to keep 2000 when you usually eat 3000-5000, but health is worth it.

If your overweight is life-threatening you'll want to lose body-fat asap, which you will not achieve if you first try to understand every detail of digestion and nutrition. See it as kind of first-aid.

I know that losing weight is very hard and that the behavioral change is the key, not the unknown details of nutrition. I just wish people (especially my doctors and family) pushed me much earlier to the right behavior.

You don't need to know ever detail, but the metabolic effects are super important. If you eat the same amount of calories of Snackwells (or some other supposedly "healthy" processed snack food option) compared a steak, you are going to need an insane amount of willpower to avoid overeating when you come down from the glycemic rollercoaster.

How we measure the calorific value of food doesn't seem to give us the number of calories a body can extract from food.

There are several reasons for this. One promising area of research is gut flora. Someone could have a gut flora that makes it harder to absorb calories. Someone else could have a gut flora that makes it easier to absorb calories.

Here's one paper that links gut flora to anorexia. (Read carefully, they have human samples buried in there) http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp201498a.html

> Statements like these only help people who have weight-problems to have an excuse not to do anything about it.

No. Statements like this are an effort to help fat people to lose weight by creating treatments that work rather than just yelling judgemental but useless advice at them. "Eat less food" does not work on populations. "Exercise more" does not work across populations.

> How we measure the calorific value of food doesn't seem to give us the number of calories a body can extract from food

Of course not but if we stick to the maximum we still can use this value to calculate our intake when we try to lose weight. If the body extracts fewer calories, even better for the weight loss. I'm not talking about people who need to optimize a few % body-fat; I'm talking about BMI > 30.

> Statements like this are an effort to help fat people to lose weight by creating treatments that work rather than just yelling judgemental but useless advice at them

Why is "eat less" judgmental? If somebody wants to stop smoking, would you consider "stop smoking" judgmental?

The laws of physics say you can't burn energy you don't have.

If you're restricting calories and your body isn't doing a good job of mobilizing energy from fat reserves, then one way or another you'll burn less energy. You'll fidget less, think poorly, turn up the thermostat, lack the motivation to exercise, and if you do get a little exercise you won't be very vigorous about it. No amount of willpower can overcome thermodynamics.

Yes I had the same problems when I started counting calories. It's very hard of course, and if I stop keeping track there is also the danger of eating again like I always did, thus gaining back all the 20 kilos.

The thinking poorly/lack of motivation part was over two weeks after starting, thankfully.

Restricting your diet is no fun at all, that's why you need to know what your motivation is. (mine is Dad's/Granddad's Diabetes)

Why the dismissal of kinesiology? It seems to be closely related to what you say in the next sentence: "If your burn more energy than you take in, you lose weight".

You are right, I think I confused the scientific Kinesiology with the esoteric one.

http://skepdic.com/kinesiologist.html

thanks for your comment! Unfortunately I can't edit the original post.

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