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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

Well that doesn't make sense... calories in, calories out, thermodynamics, it's as simple as that, right?!?

Edit: Seems I've inadvertently demonstrated Poe's Law...

I know you are being facetious, but the attitude you are making fun of is pervasive across the internet. In this specific case, people are not considering that lesser and greater amounts of ingested calories are excreted depending on how much was absorbed during the digestion process. More generally, people cargo cult some scientific sound bite and then stubbornly defend it without considering that they may be wrong since they are backed by "science".

Measuring calories burnt and calories consumed is trickier than it looks reading nutriction facts and calories/hour tables.

Also, your body is much smarter than you in adapting to changes to calories getting in and out. If you accept that human body do a lot more to influence your behavior than your consciousness realize, you have to admit that not all things depends solely on one's will. Calories consumption are one of those things.

Also, you can study large groups of people for macro influences of a diet at humand body. But individually is known to provide a lot of diversity. Two people on the exactly same diet and exercise routine won't have the exactly same body effects. Much of that was put in the account of DNA. But maybe some of this is due to gut bacteria. That's a possibility worth researching.

your body is much smarter than you in adapting to changes to calories getting in and out

I'm not entirely sure if you're alluding to it but starvation mode is a myth.

I would also suggest subscribing to /r/loseit or /r/progresspics for a while and seeing how many of the success stories involve anything more than "I stopped eating so much and now I'm thin!". Sometimes it's "I started keto/paleo, which meant I wasn't eating many calories and now I'm thin!".

While you can apply calories to those situations, at best calories is an incomplete model. A can of tuna and a can of coke both have 120calories. Yet its obvious that those are going to effect the bodies systems in different ways.

Also, weight is just one measurement. People that eat paleo and other diets often improve all their health numbers like blood pressure and other stuff. So there is a bigger picture to grasp.

Why is it obvious? These are the exact questions that nutritionists are trying to answer without the benefit of being able to force people to eat what they want to test because they're in a Nazi death camp.

Do you know, for example, that poor Japanese in the navy used to just eat rice. Nothing else. Just plain rice:

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...

Some had to be forced to eat protein by chopping it up into the rice.

Or that someone did a twinkie diet and it worked:

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...

What worked? Losing weight eating twinkies isn't the healthiest option, I think obviously. I did know they ate only rice actually, and what I would say is to even use that as a point makes my point more clear. You are surprised that those food sources work because inherently you know they aren't the traditional mumbo jumbo. So like my comment says, more to it than weight, thats just a single measurement to go by.

We're talking specifically about weight loss and the accuracy of CICO in weight loss, not nutrition in general.

I'm not at all sure what your point is in that context.

> I'm not entirely sure if you're alluding to it but starvation mode is a myth.

I'm curious if you know this as a fact with proof, I'd be very interested in how that might be proven.

No one is overweight/obese because of gut bacteria. There may be marginal effects, but it's a bit like optimizing the tires on a soccer mom's mini-van.

Marginal effects can add up quite quickly over a lifetime.

Take someone 100 pounds overweight. That is 350000 Kcal more consumption in their lifetime than they should've had. Let's spread that over 10 years, or 35000 Kcal a year. That works out to about a 100 Kcal difference per day. Over 20 years, it would be about 50 Kcal.

Now, they could've made different choices, and there are some people who stay a healthy weight by making different choices. But I would not dismiss small changes as being irrelevant because given the time scale, those changes do add up.

It doesn't work quite like that, because there is a negative feedback loop. When you increase in weight your metabolism goes up. If you are at a steady weight and increase your consumption by 50 kcal a day, you will reach a new steady weight where your metabolism is 50 kcal more.

50 kcal extra a day means steady state weight increases by about 3 pounds or 1.5 kg.

Just because its more complicated than calories in calories out doesnt mean its not true.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/woman-becomes-...

I find your metaphor agreeable but not your argument: I'd wager that many minivans are running far below optimal gas efficiency because their tires are under-inflated.

No one is overweight/obese because of gut bacteria.

That is an excellent baseless assertion you have there!

Care to back that up with facts?

Or should we just take your word for it?

The issue is that humans are not deterministic machines. We are often presented with internal urges and cravings. We are faced with stresses that lower our ability to maintain discipline. We have different needs, so you can't just adopt a one size fits all plan. And we do have different microbiomes that will create all sorts of issues with respect to our ability to make decisions, exercise and recover.

So while it is fundamentally true that a calorie deficit will lead to weight loss, it's not trivial to create a consistent deficit while maintaining good nutrition.

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/02/04/Woman-becomes-obes...

35 pounds gained from changing her stomach bacteria.

Metabolism?

Doesn't matter that much for the majority of people:

http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...

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