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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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