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Comment by throwawaylaptop | Hacker News Reader

It's insane to me that people keep talking about the energy in part. Forget that.

Realize that WHAT you put in can change what energy out is.

If I gave you 1800 calories of vodka at 8am, would your use the same amount of energy during the day, and even make it to your 7pm gym? No.

Ok, well sugar isnt exactly the same obviously, but it can also affect what you do that day, how your body acts, your brain even.

Your energy out gets totally messed with after you have tons of alcohol for obvious reasons. Something similar happens on sugar/spiked insulin levels. Can you willpower through it and increase your energy out by running til you drop dead and lose weight? Sure. But it's not easy.

What's way easier is not having the insulin spike in the first place.

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Yes it can affect what you do. That's the calories out part of the equation.

Nobody claims that the quality of what you eat has no effect on you, but every study shows that if you maintain the same calorie intake and expenditure it doesn't really matter how you consume the calories or how you expend it.

Well then luckily that shows you hopefully how bad studies are. Because I assume that you agree that eating 100 calories of Pop-Tarts per hour for 18 hours for 30 days, would give you a different result than eating 3 days worth of Pop-Tarts in a few hours once every 3 days for a month.

To not understand that would mean that while believing some studies, you completely ignore all the studies that have been done on insulin and weight gain.

> Because I assume that you agree that eating 100 calories of Pop-Tarts per hour for 18 hours for 30 days, would give you a different result than eating 3 days worth of Pop-Tarts in a few hours once every 3 days for a month.

I agree that you would feel very differently in those situations and it's likely you wouldn't spend the same amount of energy unless you really make an effort to do it.

I don't agree that if you do make an effort to spend the same amount of energy you would have different results with regards to weight loss.

Two weird assumptions here...1, that massive amounts of constant blood sugar/insulin don't affect metabolism.

2, that in the face of crazy long term insulin/hormone disruption, people will continue to be just as active as if they had a sane diet of mostly meat and vegetables.

I'm starting to see why everyone is so unhealthy.

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