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Comment by goostavos | Hacker News Reader

There is only calories in and calories out. Did you go a week without losing any weight? You consumed too many calories. Whether you chalk that up to "muh metabolism" or some kind of magical universe defying intervention, the end result is that you consumed to many calories to lose weight. Dial things back by 500 and see what the scale says next week.

No amount of mocking "the first law of thermodynamics, man" makes it not true. For everyone complaining about the complexity of losing weight, the gym bros just keep weighing out their chicken and broccoli to great result.

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See, you are a perfect example of what I was talking about. You seem to know just enough to be very confident in what you are saying, but you are very, very wrong. Another user in an above thread lays out some of the minutia that comes into play.

Calories in: What kind of calories? When you eat them, how fast you cut them, how your body reacts to the restriction, how your gut biome reacts, how your brain and willpower reacts, how your family and friends react....

Calories out: what is your actual resting burn, how does that change as you adjust calories in, how does it change as you adjust the type of calories in, how does your resting burn react long term to weight loss....

It's as simple as calories in, calories out, just like the theory of relativity is as simple as e=mc2.

One test is worth a thousand opinions. Again, for everyone championing the theoretical complexity of theoretical weight loss, there are "dumb" gym bros, of whom I am among, who somehow defy all Complex Science™ and continuously gain and cut weight.

No amount of saying "it's complicated" makes it actually more complicated than just cutting another 500 cals from your meal plan.

Sure, you can always start cutting until you lose weight, but how much you have to cut and how difficult it will be to do so is all a part of it. I can easily drop 20 lbs in a few months by cutting. But it is not easy and as of yet, it has proven impossible to keep off as I have bounced back to my original weight 4 times over a 10 year period. As I reach that 20 lbs lost, I find my willpower begins to wane just as my metabolism starts to settle on the new caloric intake levels. Which means to continue weight loss, I will need to cut even more.

In contrast, I have a skinny brother that just doesn't "really feel hungry that often" and drinks multiple tall glasses of grape juice every day and eats ice cream every night.

Not all calories are equal. Calories from carb rich food are metabolized different than calories from “healthy“ fat rich food. Metabolism of former also raises insulin + glucose in blood stream, which influences obesity more than later.

The only way those differences really matter, as long as you are getting enough protein that you arent catabolizing muscle mass, is in what they do to how much you eat and perhaps exercise. Even if an insulin spike makes you crave junk food and not want to go for a walk, it's all still CICO to more than a first approximation.

Not to mention how different foods might affect different hormone levels and even the microbiome in your gut which seems to have a lot of affect on the brain as well as other systems.

But the body is supposed to regulate calories in and calories out automatically. You aren't supposed to know how many calories you are inputting or outputting. So pointing at this just means there is something wrong with the control loop built into the human body.

I think more likely our modern food system is causing this. We have all these calorie dense foods and methods of processing them that make them more and more delicious and calorie dense.

Take ice cream for example. It needs to be over-sweetened so that when you eat it, and the cold dulls your senses, it still tastes sweet. Most people find melted ice cream to be sickly sweet. But we have tricked our taste buds into eating a lot of it due to the cold. Same thing happens with lots of sweet foods that are offset with sour or salty flavors.

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