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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this has been posted, never mind upvoted by anyone rational. Doing work consumes energy. End of discussion.

(There is an argument that it is easier to eat less than to exercise more, but that is a different debate. Ideally you do both.)

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This is not how homeostasis works (at all). Metabolism is real and so is genetically determined caloric retention. Thin people don't necessarily eat less or exercise more, they sh*t more calories than fat people, who store more. It's not all this, but it is also not zero this. Regardless, it's absolutely not as simplistic as producing and consuming energy, it's a few billion years of evolved genetic diversity of retaining and eliminating calories for homeostasis.

I don't see how any of that relates to the comment you replied to. No matter how your metabolism works, exercising will burn calories, and I think that's all the above comment was getting at.

Now that that's been said, would you happen to have a reference for

>Thin people don't necessarily eat less or exercise more, they sh*t more calories than fat people, who store more.

this? I would be interested in reading about the correlation.

The person you are responding to isn't necessarily wrong about metabolism being real. I wouldn't say fat people "store more", it's just that if you see thin people eating a ton (and not moving much) and being thin the odds are good that they have a very fast metabolism (by which I mean their base metabolic rate is significantly above the average, to the tune of 4k+ kcal per day). I know this because when I was in university we did at-rest calculations with a hood over the head (to calculate oxygen usage, which we used to calculate BMR). Notoriously thin people had outrageous BMRs like I mentioned, while most people were around the average. I don't know about people who are fat, as I didn't have them in my class.

This is not how thermodynamics work and blaming homeostasis sounds a bit too much on the fat apology side rather than real science. Even the fattest person on earth will llose weight at caloric deficit, where deficit is more consumption or less ingestion.

Homeostasis is real. It's not a religion. And its not blame, it's a social observation that people seek validation or feel ashamed about something that is mostly not in their control. It takes more exercise for a genetically fat person to be thin and more food for a genetically thin person to be fat than their genetic counter parts. Proud genetically thin people who congratulate themselves is as annoying as ashamed genetically fat people beating themselves up is sad.

Yup it's just CICO (with some health exceptions). Now enough physical exercise and you can make a significant dent in your daily caloric requirements, but most people drastically underestimate how many calories they are actually burning while working out.

Conversely if you do have an idea how to do long distance, high endurance cardio you probably already understand how much more energy you need to intake to keep up on weight.

Are we repeating these same debunked arguments again and again?

CICO is not true because of just gut microbiome for one, obese people extract more calories from the same food compared to a normal person.

https://www.livescience.com/41954-gut-microbes-make-you-fat....

https://www.newsweek.com/weight-loss-enemy-within-414483

Also metabolism highly varies between people.

You can't make something from nothing.

Faster metabolism? Sure some people have that, eat less. Calories in.

Exercising doesn't burn many calories? Exercise more. Calories out.

CICO may as well be 1+1=2.

CICO is not debunked, stop spreading that myth. Studies such as the ones you linked only indicate that the counting is more complicated than measuring the heat generated by burning a food and slapping the result on a label.

It's how much you store that matters not how many calories in. If the body has a signal mechanism that can be triggered by certain chemicals/event then it's no longer about CICO but it's more about the storage triggers.

Cannot read the article because of the paywall but that's very simplistic.

For example, just taking DNP will burn a lot of calories and will literally cook organs from the inside from the heat. You're not really doing any active work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol

Same with caffeine.

Metabolic rates vary a lot, they found that in people with a lot of weight loss, they burnt less than normal people by about 500 to 600 calories per day.

It's certainly not the end of discussion, it's the beginning of one.

https://outline.com/sSzxbx

I tried it as well and it did not show the full article for me. It gets cutoff at the same spot.

You posted this four times without seeing that it doesn't reveal the rest of the article.

The work being done is the heat generated. "literally cook organs from the inside from the heat" requires active work to accomplish.

That's why its used for diet pills, its a way to get more calories out.

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