3 ms·

I certainly can't speak for you, but it has worked quite well for me as I described it, for both gaining and losing weight as needed. I sympathize with people w

by flurie 5y ago

I certainly can't speak for you, but it has worked quite well for me as I described it, for both gaining and losing weight as needed. I sympathize with people who do a poor job of measuring, either through inconsistency or incorrect calculation, but we don't blame the game of chess for people who play it poorly or suggest that they are evidence that it does not provide value to those who do, do we?

mumblemumble 5y ago
I can't speak for you, either. But I'm not talking about individuals' stories here. That's one of those, "the plural of anecdotes is not data," situations. When it comes down to empirical data, it seems to be a bit like the situation with acupuncture: it works just well enough to ensure that there's always someone who will show up and say, "It worked for me!" when the subject of its poor performance in clinical trials comes up, but not well enough to demonstrate practical efficacy under scientific scrutiny. Perhaps that really is because basically nobody is assiduous enough about their calorie counting to make it work. But, even if we take that as true for the sake of argument, insofar as the point I'm making is, "This advice has a terrible track record of helping people lose weight," it doesn't work as a counter-argument. Quite the opposite. It works as a supporting argument, by showing one possible reason for why it has such a terrible track record. I also don't think that it has legs as an idea for how best to reduce the obesity rate. If it were really that easy, then you would expect the population's average BMI to be much higher back when people didn't have the means to effectively calorie count, and it would steadily go down as the means to calorie count more accurately become more widely available. Instead we see that the opposite is true.

3 ms·

I certainly can't speak for you, but it has worked quite well for me as I described it, for both gaining and losing weight as needed. I sympathize with people w

by flurie 5y ago

mumblemumble 5y ago
I can't speak for you, either. But I'm not talking about individuals' stories here. That's one of those, "the plural of anecdotes is not data," situations. When it comes down to empirical data, it seems to be a bit like the situation with acupuncture: it works just well enough to ensure that there's always someone who will show up and say, "It worked for me!" when the subject of its poor performance in clinical trials comes up, but not well enough to demonstrate practical efficacy under scientific scrutiny. Perhaps that really is because basically nobody is assiduous enough about their calorie counting to make it work. But, even if we take that as true for the sake of argument, insofar as the point I'm making is, "This advice has a terrible track record of helping people lose weight," it doesn't work as a counter-argument. Quite the opposite. It works as a supporting argument, by showing one possible reason for why it has such a terrible track record. I also don't think that it has legs as an idea for how best to reduce the obesity rate. If it were really that easy, then you would expect the population's average BMI to be much higher back when people didn't have the means to effectively calorie count, and it would steadily go down as the means to calorie count more accurately become more widely available. Instead we see that the opposite is true.