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Different strokes for different folks, man. I get off on quantification. I hyper focus and I cannot do anything passive.

Dieting? That's passive: it involves not doing something. All I can think about is the fact that I shouldn't be eating, which makes me think about eating, which makes me eat.

Obsessively counting calories? It makes me do something active: strive for a minimal caloric intake for the day (I say minimal but minimal for me is healthy for anyone else).

I need to do the same thing with reading papers. Reading a paper is a passive activity while writing a paper review is active. I try to find at least one major flaw with each paper I read so that I have something active to keep my attention, a goal.

Saying "behavior xyz is silly" is unfair and not super constructive. Each of us has a single data point of human experience. Generalizing from that is kind of silly if you think about it.

If I could curtail my bathroom activity healthily, and if that would lead to a better and happier life, then dammit I'd track that shit in a heartbeat. Ditto for breathing. And unless you are having an unhealthy amount of sex there is nothing to gain from tracking it (except for ego/lack thereof).

The examples you list above all have something in common: there is no benefit to tracking them. For calories, there is an actual benefit.

I meant silly from a species perspective -- like you never see a bear counting calories ;)

There are two kinds of animals that suffer from obesity, modern humans, and animals that modern humans feed. The culprit is clear, it's our interventionist mindset. It's the USDA telling you exactly to eat the opposite of what you're supposed to eat.

The answer is less intervention, not more. Try eating an all or mostly meat diet and I assure you'll feel a lot better and food will go back to being an automatic function for you: http://justmeat.co/

> I meant silly from a species perspective -- like you never see a bear counting calories ;)

You also never see a bear walking on the Moon, or playing Candy Crush Saga.

> The culprit is clear, it's our interventionist mindset.

Or maybe that we no longer live on savanna, and the foods we have available are quite different from what our great-{n}-ancestors had.

> You also never see a bear walking on the Moon, or playing Candy Crush Saga.

If we do something right, like science and engineering, it doesn't mean we're doing everything right. In fact, most people are miserable and suffering from health issues that bears don't suffer from.

> Or maybe that we no longer live on savanna, and the foods we have available are quite different from what our great-{n}-ancestors had.

Although the megafauna are extinct (shame), meat is largely the same and that's what most of what our ancestors ate.

> In fact, most people are miserable and suffering from health issues that bears don't suffer from.

They also don't suffer from health issues that bears suffer from (and that preindustrial humans suffered from, too). As for misery, I can agree about the part caused by stress and ennui, but along most imaginable metrics, humans today are better off than in any other period of history.

> meat is largely the same and that's what most of what our ancestors ate

Technically, meat and fruits are "the same". In practice, meats are heavily processed products of factory farming exercises, and besides that, who buys just meats and fruits? Most food we buy has at least one more level of processing involved.

> who buys just meats and fruits?

An increasing number of healthy people inclusing world record holder atheletes. http://justmeat.co

> There are two kinds of animals that suffer from obesity, modern humans, and animals that modern humans feed. The culprit is clear, it's our interventionist mindset. It's the USDA telling you exactly to eat the opposite of what you're supposed to eat.

There could be a different reason. Getting more food is lot easier for these two animals. Other animals (at least meat eating) need a lot more effort to get their food. It's a natural limiting factor. Non-meat eating animals need to digest a lot of fiber which makes eating a lot quite hard.

I doubt it. Alas, it's not studied yet but a lot of people are going on the carnivore diet and finding that there system reset and find it hard to over or under eat -- they just fall into a natural way of eating. Certainly my experience.

Quantifying doesn't necessarily lead to overwhelming data or questioning.

If you want to improve something it is a good idea to measure it.

Sensible examples might include: repetitions and weights at the gym, body weight, running / walking distance, hours slept, time wasted on social media

Counting calories might not have to be done continuously depending on your diet and goals but definitely helps to realise how much sugar and carbs are in many foods. Calibrating your perception in this way might be enough to convince you to change your habits for good.

Many things can be tracked conveniently or automatically even without the need to go BigData.

A cheap air monitor can detect high CO2 or VOC in enclosed spaces. Without insight a simple fix such as opening a window may not occur to some.

The hope that our bodies can regulate everything intrinsically is not good enough in an increasingly artificial environment and natural is not always healthy.

like when you go to the bathroom, how much sex you have, and perhaps how many breaths a day you take.

If roughly two thirds of the population were at risk of serious health complications from doing any of those things too much, then we would.

Surely there are health complications with all of those things from bowel issues, to STDS, to lung cancer.

You really think those are

a) as widespread as obesity

b) caused by ways that tracking the number of times you go to the bathroom, have sex or breathe would fix?

Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat, so yes, some of us track how much we eat. It's not really that crazy. If you can do that without tracking it, cool, but its pretty damn clear a lot of people can't.

>Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat, so yes, some of us track how much we eat. It's not really that crazy. If you can do that without tracking it, cool, but its pretty damn clear a lot of people can't.

Actually research shows that people who watch WHAT the eat vs how much they eat lose the weight and keep it off. Calorie counting empirically doesn't work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/well/eat/counting-calorie...

Calorie counting empirically doesn't work.

Read the article and study you posted. It doesn't show that, it just shows that you can lose weight without using the calorie counting technique.

Objective: To determine the effect of a healthy low-fat (HLF) diet vs a healthy low-carbohydrate (HLC) diet on weight change and if genotype pattern or insulin secretion are related to the dietary effects on weight loss.

Findings: ...weight change over 12 months was not significantly different for participants in the HLF diet group (−5.3 kg) vs the HLC diet group (−6.0 kg), and there was no significant diet-genotype interaction or diet-insulin interaction with 12-month weight loss.

A study on low fat vs low carb diets has got absolutely nothing to do with calorie counting.

You said "Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat, so yes, some of us track how much we eat" for which research shows that:

a) people on caloric deficit almost always gain the weight back b) people can lose weight without calorie counting

people can lose weight without calorie counting

I didn't say people can't lose weight without calorie counting, just that some of us do use it. Like I said,

If you can do that without tracking it, cool

> I didn't say people can't lose weight without calorie counting, just that some of us do use it

You did. If you're walking back on it then ok, but don't lie straight to my face: "Obesity is directly caused by a failure to moderate how much we eat"

> If you can do that without tracking it, cool

You can too.

moderate != calorie counting. I said we have a failure to moderate what we eat, not we have a failure to calorie count. Nor did I say it's the only way to lose weight.

You can too.

Since I'm at 12% body fat, no, I probably couldn't, and I shouldn't

> at best it leads to a big useless unanalyzed database

For me, rigorously tracking my caloric intake by weighting nearly everything I've eaten with a food scale and recording it in the Cronometer smart phone app has led to a 100 pound weight loss over the last year, and normalizing my blood pressure & triglycerides.

But, you know, at best ... just a useless database. Good grief.

Statistically speaking if caloric deficit is the only thing you did then you're going to gain all that back. Sorry.

However, if you cleaned up your diet too then that might've been the causal factor and not the tracking which is to nerds what prayer is to the pious.

Statistically speaking, you have 1.5 legs and there is no diet that works. (they have about 20% success rate)

Other statistics tell us that calorie deficit is the required and sufficient condition for weight loss.

Frequentist statistics do not apply directly to individual cases.

It seems right that if you have things well handled there's no value in putting a lot of effort into analysis. But what's a good approach if the solution isn't clear?

Many animals with a surplus of food available do not live healthy lives. If you have to expend calories to get food, as most animals do, then you are at equilibrium.