> Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out". ...as well as torturing you and trying to trick y

> Similarly, if you try to reduce your "in", your body will lower its metabolism to try to reduce your "out". ...as well as torturing you and trying to trick you into gorging. The "calories in / calories out" people make me angry too. There's an old joke that goes: "Q. How do you carve a statue of an elephant? A. Take a big stone, and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." Technically true, completely useless in practice. What people need is methods which take into account these regulatory mechanisms. Fasting one day a week (dinner until breakfast the day after) may give you the same calorie deficit as eating 300 less calories per day than you're burning, but it's a heck of a lot more pleasant to have 1 day of complete abstinence and then 6 days of homeostasis, than spending 7 days a week wrestling millions of years of evolution, and being blamed as having "no willpower" when you inevitably fail.