4 ms·

Humans aren't robots. If humans had infinite willpower and could simply do whatever they decided to do then the world would be a much different place. It's easy

Humans aren't robots. If humans had infinite willpower and could simply do whatever they decided to do then the world would be a much different place. It's easy to get rich if you have infinite willpower. Easy to get in shape. Easy to climb mountains, run ultra marathons, cure cancer, swim the English channel, sail around the world, and so on. With enough willpower. But that's not how humans work. If you have to choose between two diets with equal caloric intake but one of them is easier to stick to, then that one will be in practice a much more effective form of weight loss. You see a lot of people go on diets in January, you see a lot of people in the gyms in January, all those new years resolutions. And a lot of those folks seem to be very serious about it, they spend a lot of time in the gym, they put in a lot of effort. But this is one of those tortoise/hare situations. A modest diet/exercise regime that you can stick to for the rest of your life is far more valuable than one which is more effective on paper but won't be adhered to in practice. Additionally, the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. Sure, if you eat few enough calories and do enough exercise you'll lose weight, and if you eat too many calories and do too little exercise then you'll gain weight. But within the boundaries there is a lot of complexity. There are regions where what you eat, the composition of your diet, and the kind of exercise you do will tip the balance one way or the other in a region of maybe a few hundred calories or so a day, and that too can make a big difference in how easy it is to maintain a diet or exercise regime and how effective it is.

parliament32 9y ago
>the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts. Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective. But, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296
- beagle3 9y ago
  > It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field It's true only in the useless tautological sense, where your definition of "consume" and "burn" are so convoluted as to be useless. Wood pulp is carbohydrates, which you can confirm in a bomb caloriemeter releases ~4kcal/g when burnt. But when people consume it, they derive ~0kcal/g. If you think people don't consume wood pulp, you might want to look at [0] and at the wikipedia entry for microcrystalline cellulose. Gasoline is even denser at ~12kcal/g, but still provides only ~0kcal/g. There are much subtler examples, where at atwater factors have been shown to be ~30% different in in different measurements (between population and even for the same individual in different times). Which means that the difference between "what you consume" and "the energy you derive" is actually a random variable, with very significant variance. And that's just the food intake; just sitting in a cold room requires much more energy than sitting in a warm room; And consuming a liter of ice cold water actually costs you ~36 kcal after your body temperature renormalizes. So, really, it's very broad strokes. [0] https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-burgers-wood-pulp/ https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-b...

parliament32 9y ago

>the thermodynamic argument (calories in vs calories out) is only mostly true in broad strokes, as a trend. It's not "mostly true". It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field. If you consume X calories more than you burn you are _guaranteed_ to gain Y weight.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
I'm sorry to hear that a network malfunction prevented you from reading the remainder of my post. To reiterate, it's true only in broad strokes, human metabolism is not precisely linear, there is a non-trivial amount of "slop" in the balance. You can "consume more calories than you burn" and yet still lose weight, and you can consume fewer calories than that while "burning more calories" and end up gaining weight. If you consume many more calories or many fewer calories then you will inevitably gain or lose weight. But to maintain a healthy weight, or to maintain consistent weight loss if you are over weight, the details of what you eat are just as important as the calorie counts. Taken together, there is very strong evidence that diets which concentrate on what you eat versus those that concentrate on calorie counting are vastly more effective. But, you don't have to take my word for it: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296
beagle3 9y ago
> It's literally the only concrete truth in this whole field It's true only in the useless tautological sense, where your definition of "consume" and "burn" are so convoluted as to be useless. Wood pulp is carbohydrates, which you can confirm in a bomb caloriemeter releases ~4kcal/g when burnt. But when people consume it, they derive ~0kcal/g. If you think people don't consume wood pulp, you might want to look at [0] and at the wikipedia entry for microcrystalline cellulose. Gasoline is even denser at ~12kcal/g, but still provides only ~0kcal/g. There are much subtler examples, where at atwater factors have been shown to be ~30% different in in different measurements (between population and even for the same individual in different times). Which means that the difference between "what you consume" and "the energy you derive" is actually a random variable, with very significant variance. And that's just the food intake; just sitting in a cold room requires much more energy than sitting in a warm room; And consuming a liter of ice cold water actually costs you ~36 kcal after your body temperature renormalizes. So, really, it's very broad strokes. [0] https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-burgers-wood-pulp/ https://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-b...