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Comment by thras | Hacker News Reader

Uh, yeah. That's somewhat obvious. How else would I have gained the weight? Magic?

Now comes the million dollar question: Why was I so hungry that I ate 470,000 extra calories? Could carbohydrate driving insulin driving fat explain it?

Homeostasis in the human body doesn't just fail without a reason.

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I was stating the conclusion of the theorem I read you as criticizing. If you set a diet plan at say 3000-3300 calories per day, you can just choose not to deviate from it? There's all manner of things I would like to do that I just choose not to do. You just set out that amount of food, say to yourself OK this has all the nutrients I need and no matter how hungry I get, it's not going to kill me... and then you just don't deviate. The real question is why did you feel your hunger was so severe you could not suppress it? How about a lifetime of bad habits caused a psychological reversion to previous bad habits and it was nothing but eating hundreds of calories extra per day? It is possible that for some people, some kind of a strange mechanism is at work, but occam's razor tells me that it is more likely just a series of small bad choices and that the standard model for human nutrition applies. I don't know you, maybe you are the corner case where the model breaks down because hunger signals are amped up or something? In my experiences of my own life, negative results are much more likely to be a result of a series of my small bad choices than on account of me being a corner case. I just have studied human nutrition, I believe the macronutrient model (fiber+protein+carbs) + micronutrient model works and that proteins and fats are both broken down to glucose at particular rates, with particular byproducts. I believe carbs breakdown to glucose "better" than protein or fats with less side effects due to the structure of the molecules (particularly noting the ammonia [I think it is] byproduct of chemical reactions breaking down protein into glucose. I think fat is just about having excess glucose in the blood and carbs just offer efficient means of getting sugar. Look, I completely believe the average diet is hugely overcarbed - once I started watching nutrition most of my intake is veg.

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