> Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.
This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.
He does end this section with "period, full stop".
However the rest of the comment is tangental does nothing to mitigate my response. Weight maintencance is not about calorie count, it's about understanding how our body processes food.
Yes, precisely. But I'm talking about the limits. If you ingest fewer calories than you burn you will lose weight, period. That's the argument that people have been making about weight loss for ages. But the difficulty there is that in reality the range of "thermodynamic calories" that a person can ingest relative to the exercise they do while maintaining a healthy weight can vary across a huge margin.
I recall reading about an experiment where obese mice were injected with insulin regularly after being denied food. The mice starved to death despite still having fat stores.
Of course, mice are not humans, but this implies that diets that stimulate a lot of insulin production (or normal amounts in insulin-resistant populations) would cause a person to not lose fat.
I'm not sure how you looked at the sentence "if you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight" and managed to read "if you eat enough and exercise little enough you will gain weight".
We're not talking about helping sick people gain weight by shoving food down their throats, we're talking about losing weight.
p.s. Pooping out fat is 'calories out'. Several weight loss products even make use of this.
> p.s. Pooping out fat is 'calories out'. Several weight loss products even make use of this.
Not in the sense of what people mean when they say 'calories in equals calories out'. Usually they mean that most calories that are consumed are utilized, and hence anything not burned gets added to your weight. This is of course an incorrect assumption based on both laws of thermodynamics, and also, as you point out above, ignoring the calories that aren't absorbed during digestion.
This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.