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You did a fairly decent job of discrediting your "the same thing will 'work' for everybody" statement. My "same thing works for everybody" is, in other words,

by Evgeny 11y ago

You did a fairly decent job of discrediting your "the same thing will 'work' for everybody" statement. My "same thing works for everybody" is, in other words, "every person has a number of calories N, eating under which he will lose weight". I think I stayed pretty consistent. And yes, N may vary over time, but it still exists. the question is, is is the caloric content that is actually extracted the same for all people I can only restate that yes, it is different and no, it is not very important if our goal is weight loss. Suppose I extract 1500 calories from a meal, and you 1800 calories from the same meal. But the "thing that works for everyone" remains: you track your calories and weight, I track mine, maybe my weight is stable at 2000 calories per day, yours at 1700 calories per day. Then we just respectively start lowering our intake until we reach the desired rate of weight loss. Algorithm remains the same, we just plug in our own numbers. which is a subset of the question does the same thing work for everybody No, I can't see relevance. For lack of better example, all homes are different, some may have only rectangular rooms, some have oddly shaped rooms etc. So kind of "everyone is different". And still, anyone can easily calculate the space in square meters, or at least achieve a very close approximation for all practical purposes. So it does "work for everybody".

mistermann 11y ago
My argument is that the calories in (eaten) / calories out (exercise) explanation, and the idea it is just that simple and if you're not losing weight you're cheating on your diet or lying about your exercise is wrong. You seem comfortable with the idea that different individuals have differences in caloric uptake (Suppose I extract 1500 calories from a meal, and you 1800 calories from the same meal), but I don't think others are comfortable with that idea. And if it varies across individuals, why is it impossible to vary with one individual over time, or change drastically in a short period of time? Can the physiology of your body change to (for example) start extracting more calories from food than it normally does? It doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea to me, and if it can do this (as anecdotal evidence suggests), then it makes weight loss strategies much more complicated, and it makes the simple calculations no longer work under all scenarios. This doesn't seem like a terribly controversial idea to me.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  You can't extract more calories from food than their are. Calories are measured by actually incinerating the food and measuring how much heat it gives off. That is literally how much energy there is. So if you eat 2000 calories of food energy, you can not (if you are obeying the laws of thermodynamics) gain more energy than that. You can only absorb less. Similarly, as I said in a message above, there is a lower limit for how much energy your body must burn in order to maintain body temperature. You will find if you look at the rate at which corpses lose heat to ambient temperature that it is very, very close to what is listed on those base metabolic rate charts. Again, I have to stress this: you can not burn less than that without decreasing your temperature and dying. It is a physical impossibility. There are obviously variations, of course, but they must (by physical necessity) be on the up side. So you can easily eat 3000 calories and not gain any fat, even though you don't exercise, if you have a thyroid problem, or if you have a digestive problem that causes food to shoot through you before you can process it. On the other hand, you can not (due to the laws of physics) eat less than the number of calories required to maintain body temperature and not lose weight. This is conservation of energy. And as I said, the minimum amount of energy required to maintain your temperature is very close to those base metabolic rate charts. Sure you can be off by 100 calories a day. You can't be off by 1000. It just isn't possible. So if you are in deficit for several hundred calories a day and you aren't losing weight it is necessarily because you have measured your exercise or diet incorrectly. As I stated several times, this usually occurs because companies outright lie about how many calories you can burn through exercise (and are often off by 1 or 2 binary orders of magnitude). It is also because people completely overlook high calorie foods, even if they are otherwise very careful.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    > Similarly, as I said in a message above, there is a lower limit for how much energy your body must burn in order to maintain body temperature. You will find if you look at the rate at which corpses lose heat to ambient temperature that it is very, very close to what is listed on those base metabolic rate charts. Do you happen to know a typical range for this? For caloric maintenance level, there is: * Body temperature maintenance * Operating bodily functions (pumping blood, breathing, etc) * Basic "non-exercise" movements For all of these, calories consumed (eaten) must take into consideration: * caloric extraction (basically, net of calories remaining in excrement) * caloric consumption efficiency (of those retained, how efficiently are they converted into heat & kinetic energy) There are actually two sets of numbers for the first three points: actual literal calories required, and then the set that takes into account the last two points. How different are these numbers? I wonder, assuming this "weight plateau" while still in what is thought to be caloric deficit is actually real, could the general understanding of the last two points not be correct in all situations? As discussed, it seems some people extract more calories from the same food (for whatever reason), although how true is that? The other alternative is that they have similar bodily behavior as someone with a thyroid problem (calories are uptaken (I think?) but not stored as fat - not sure how this works then, are they excreted?), but if on a strict diet, the body could change causing a plateau. I don't think I'm doing a very good job of explaining myself.

by Evgeny 11y ago

mistermann 11y ago

My argument is that the calories in (eaten) / calories out (exercise) explanation, and the idea it is just that simple and if you're not losing weight you're cheating on your diet or lying about your exercise is wrong. You seem comfortable with the idea that different individuals have differences in caloric uptake (Suppose I extract 1500 calories from a meal, and you 1800 calories from the same meal), but I don't think others are comfortable with that idea. And if it varies across individuals, why is it impossible to vary with one individual over time, or change drastically in a short period of time? Can the physiology of your body change to (for example) start extracting more calories from food than it normally does? It doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea to me, and if it can do this (as anecdotal evidence suggests), then it makes weight loss strategies much more complicated, and it makes the simple calculations no longer work under all scenarios. This doesn't seem like a terribly controversial idea to me.

mikekchar 11y ago
You can't extract more calories from food than their are. Calories are measured by actually incinerating the food and measuring how much heat it gives off. That is literally how much energy there is. So if you eat 2000 calories of food energy, you can not (if you are obeying the laws of thermodynamics) gain more energy than that. You can only absorb less. Similarly, as I said in a message above, there is a lower limit for how much energy your body must burn in order to maintain body temperature. You will find if you look at the rate at which corpses lose heat to ambient temperature that it is very, very close to what is listed on those base metabolic rate charts. Again, I have to stress this: you can not burn less than that without decreasing your temperature and dying. It is a physical impossibility. There are obviously variations, of course, but they must (by physical necessity) be on the up side. So you can easily eat 3000 calories and not gain any fat, even though you don't exercise, if you have a thyroid problem, or if you have a digestive problem that causes food to shoot through you before you can process it. On the other hand, you can not (due to the laws of physics) eat less than the number of calories required to maintain body temperature and not lose weight. This is conservation of energy. And as I said, the minimum amount of energy required to maintain your temperature is very close to those base metabolic rate charts. Sure you can be off by 100 calories a day. You can't be off by 1000. It just isn't possible. So if you are in deficit for several hundred calories a day and you aren't losing weight it is necessarily because you have measured your exercise or diet incorrectly. As I stated several times, this usually occurs because companies outright lie about how many calories you can burn through exercise (and are often off by 1 or 2 binary orders of magnitude). It is also because people completely overlook high calorie foods, even if they are otherwise very careful.
- mistermann 11y ago
  > Similarly, as I said in a message above, there is a lower limit for how much energy your body must burn in order to maintain body temperature. You will find if you look at the rate at which corpses lose heat to ambient temperature that it is very, very close to what is listed on those base metabolic rate charts. Do you happen to know a typical range for this? For caloric maintenance level, there is: * Body temperature maintenance * Operating bodily functions (pumping blood, breathing, etc) * Basic "non-exercise" movements For all of these, calories consumed (eaten) must take into consideration: * caloric extraction (basically, net of calories remaining in excrement) * caloric consumption efficiency (of those retained, how efficiently are they converted into heat & kinetic energy) There are actually two sets of numbers for the first three points: actual literal calories required, and then the set that takes into account the last two points. How different are these numbers? I wonder, assuming this "weight plateau" while still in what is thought to be caloric deficit is actually real, could the general understanding of the last two points not be correct in all situations? As discussed, it seems some people extract more calories from the same food (for whatever reason), although how true is that? The other alternative is that they have similar bodily behavior as someone with a thyroid problem (calories are uptaken (I think?) but not stored as fat - not sure how this works then, are they excreted?), but if on a strict diet, the body could change causing a plateau. I don't think I'm doing a very good job of explaining myself.