For a much more accurate and interesting read, check out Good Calories, Bad Calories.
It takes a species more than 100 odd years or so to get rid of that "eat whatever the frak you can and store as much of it as you can because there is a good chance that you're not going to find much other than grass for a WHILE".
Your body is NOT going to just "discard" (poop out) "un-needed" calories.
The other thing that bothers me is people talking about "starvation mode". That just sounds like a buzzword (because it is). If you stop eating, you're going to start getting tired. THIS is the mythical "starvation mode". If you tell your body to just fuck off, and go jogging or whatever anyway (omg free will!) you are going to lose weight really really quickly.
Are you sure of that? I'll offer myself up as a datapoint. My weight is exactly (to the kg) the same as it was 12 years ago. I do not exercise, at all, and eat pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want (and that's a lot.) For comparison purposes, my sister-in-law runs a few miles every day, and consumes less than half the calories that I do-- and her weight has also remained constant for the past decade.
Her incoming calorie-count is much less than mine, and her calories expended is much higher than mine. If my body does not discard un-needed calories, how is it that she's not losing weight, and I'm not gaining weight?
(By the way: I worked for Ben & Jerry's for several years, and ate a pint of ice cream every single day. No weight gain, and only a marginal rise in my cholesterol count.)
science mag and a lot of others thought he was worth listening to...
the argument is that it's not something simple like calorie in, calorie out (seen this argument on hn a few times), but rather how certain calories trigger certain behavior with insulin in our bodies.
After all, if he's right - it quite changes how we approach the problem, and considering the backing this research has from other reputable sources - it's quite foolish to just ignore such a paradigm shifting idea like that. perhaps it was worth ignoring before the guy wrote a giant book looking at one study after the next....before he presented such a good case for the argument...but at this point, obviously wrong is not true.
if you've got a good reference, a link to an article perhaps, to why Gary Taubes is wrong -- I'd love to see it.
The flaw in the understanding of this equation as written in "The Hackers Diet" and many other sources is that the components on the right side of the equal sign are not independent variables. They are dependent variables. If one eats less, the rate of metabolism falls to compensate. If one exercises more, the appetite increases, and one eats more to compensate. http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/more-braying-...
Here's another article that explains this: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/metabolism/thermodynamics...
(Though I think this effect is dominated by the manipulation of the satiety set point by other mechanisms, which the naive (in the math sense) calorie-in-calorie-out rhetoric ignores.)
so:
Change in Calories Stored = Calories In - (Calories Excreted + Calories Burned)
As someone else said, though: these variables are not independent.
If you eat less and exercise more and still aren't losing weight, I guess that means you are excreting less.