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Comment by cschneid | Hacker News Reader

The other big thing that people end up missing is that most of your weight isn't from the food you eat. That's just where the energy came from. Your weight is oxygen / carbon / water / etc.

Also note: a giant tree doesn't dig out a giant hole where it grows in the ground. The dirt isn't the bulk of the tree's wood.

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I'm not sure I follow you here. Aside from a medical condition you're not gonna accumulate water. And I'm not sure " breath less" would be a popular or effective diet technique. Yes, your body needs water and oxygen as part of using food, and turning into muscle or fat, but it's the food that does all the damage. A very brief evidence of this fact are those that exercise all the time (hence have both elevated breathing and water intake, and yet don't gain weight.)

Regarding the tree, you're absolutely right. If only you were a tree that would be a useful comment. Unfortunatly the metabolic process of a tree (all plants) is different to that of an animal. A plant requires water, carbon dioxide and sunlight. Throght the process of photo-synthesis (which only plants can do) carbon is removed from the atmosphere using sunlight as the primary fuel. So, if you like a plant "breaths" sunlight, "eats" air and defecates oxygen.

The fact that a tree builds itself out of thin air is one of my favorite tidbits of knowledge. However, this kind of metabolism is only used by plants. Humans, as all animals, gets their building blocks from what they eat and drink. All the oxygen we use from the air we breathe is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

This is actually pretty interesting point of view. In essence, you should try to breath out all the carbon you ingest. Measuring the carbon dioxide output would be a pretty accurate measure of the actual energy consumption in the body.

I wonder if you could proxy your carbon dioxide output off of your breathing, with some calibration? When I run, I breathe harder; am I expelling more or less carbon dioxide per breath than when I am sitting in a chair? Counting breaths seems pretty technically feasible.

Maybe your heartbeat could also work; that's also pretty easy to collect.

It'd be awesome to have a running total of how many calories I'm burning at all time.

Polar heart rate monitors give you an estimate of the burned calories based on your pulse. That can't be too accurate though, because some people have bigger hearts which pump more blood per beat.

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