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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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!".

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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.

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