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Comment by LeCow | Hacker News Reader

"but journalist Gary Taubes believes we need to rethink this idea"

Ah, the journalist believes thermodynamics is wrong.

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You could only dismiss this with that much arrogance if your body digested every single calorie of food you ingest with 100% efficiency, which it doesn't. And you need to conclude that people are all motivated by food to exactly the same extent, which is also not true.

(It might still be wrong, but the debunking needs to be less pithy and more thorough).

And you need to assume that food type doesn't affect how satiated you feel or how energetic you feel and thus how much exercise you do.

I am neither a journalist or a scientist, but experiments done on my own body for the last 20 years (body hacking, you could call it) has led me to conclude pretty much the same thing as described in this article. I.e. it works on my own body - I dont know what works for others.

The point is not that overweight people somehow gain more fat from the same caloric input.

It is that there are other issues that mess up their body’s mechanisms for eating just the right amount of food.

Twin studies and adoption studies show that obesity comes at least in half from genetics.

> The conventional approaches don’t work because while we can sustain eating less for a while, eventually the hunger gets us because we’re semi-starving ourselves.

I interpreted him as saying it is a viable approach scientifically, but one that does not practically work because people get hungry while taking that approach and quit.

we get hungry because we are over stimulated. from sight to smell to sounds..every one of our sensory organs is primed to consume more food for the experience. not necessarily for calories.

There is a difference between "hungry" and "hungry". Doing some fasting will teach the difference. One is a feeling of withdraw, not unlike from an addiction, we know there is food available and that it is pleasurable and our mind tells us to go and grab it. The second one is more physiological, a very different sensation and comes from the core/stomach. You feel like a black hole in your core.

When you eat at very specific hours you'll get an urge to eat around that same hour even if you took a big meal a few hours before. That's the addiction speaking.

What you are mentioning is the first one, cravings, these can be biased/manufactured by society and ads. I suspect that if we only really ate when we are physiologically hungry there wouldn't be any overweight issue.

Dieting has to be combined with a disciplined lifestyle.

Eating on time isn’t as effective as combining it with having a scheduled life with activities as well as sleep and resting on time.

He's arguing for eating different types of foods (fats instead of carbohydrates). I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but there would be no violation of the laws of thermodynamics if it did work. (Admittedly headline is awkwardly worded)

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