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Comment by majkinetor | Hacker News Reader

You are simply wrong.

Calorie counting is impossible to do right and meaningful. All that experience you mention is simply a chance and has a tone of confouding variables.

Your internals are not fixed like a machine, parts of the system can be shut down (such as reproductive system) and parts of it can demand more energy at specific times (like immune system) and parts of it can appear (like cancer). There are also other factors like hyperinsulinemia which is more like logistics problem (some parts of body get bunch of energy while others are starving). With this kind of dynamic, relying on calorie counting is simply usless as all people are on various states on this system.

Sure, when you bring calories down to 0 you will certainly di of wasting but that has 0 practical value.

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Calorie counting is well supported by the studies in which people stay in metabolic wards and are fed a controlled calorie-counted diet. This is close enough to regular life experience to be meaningful, and would disprove your assertion that it's simply chance. You, on the other hand, bring up a lot of fairly extreme situations (immune system fighting an infection, cancer, shutting down the reproductive system), which simply do not happen nearly often enough to be relevant here. So the comment you're replying to is not "simply wrong".

It is not close enough to real life. The controlled calorie counted diet given to you by doctor is also designed to contain all iron you need, all vitamins of all kinds you need, fiber and so on. It is not random person food minus whatever that person finds easy or reasonable to kick out.

The people in metabolic wards are also not expected to be performing in work simultaneously, they are not expected to perform family duties or handle stressful situations reasonably. That also makes it massive difference against normal life where needs like this contribute to peoples failure to keep perfect diet.

watwuf already said it nice, that is anything but real life. Not counted in is that there is also very serious selection criteria (so, not random people).

On the other hand what you call extreme situation is nothing like that - most people have some type of chronic problem.

The most improtant aspect is certainly longevity of treatment - callorie restriction can not be followed - it can for some time, but soon enough (months or years) you will sucumb. Its simply not a normal way to have a life. It must be sustainable life practice, not something you apply from time to time.

Out of curiosity, what is your proposed alternative?

If you’re saying that calorie counting is not 100% accurate, that’s absolutely true, you’re right. It always has been more like 80%-90% accurate for average normal people. So what would it mean to count calories “right”?

It’s a given that there are some people in more extreme situations to which the rules of thumb do not apply, but what should an average normal healthy person do to control weight, if not count calories? (By average normal, I mean someone who’s near the middle of the bell curve in terms of physiology and metabolism.)

It's still far from this to "calorie counting is useless". There's very specific health issues you should probably clear with your doctor and there's inaccuracies. But how far off can calorie counting be for simply losing weight? 10%? 20%? It still serves as a good estimate.

Its temporary fix. That makes it not useless. Its not what people generally want tho - they generally don't want to game body building stats or look nice on beach in 2 weeks but not be fat all the time, and for that, its useless.

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