Metabolism is _significantly_ more complex than CI/CO, from experience.
- a physics-breaking thermodynamic anomaly
- a food addicted person is lying about their consumption
200 kcal a day.. yeah sure. A human body needs more than that just to breathe and pump blood. Even comatose a skinny person needs 5 times as much.
Overweight people have a significantly higher metabolic base rate. Just breathing can easily be 1000kcal a day if your lungs have to move 30 kilos of upper body fat 10 times a minute. They also have more muscle mass compared to the average person their size, even when not physically active, which increases MBR as well.
Weight loss and gain is a solved problem, but self control and human behavior is not.
Perpetuating myths of impossible weight loss is not beneficial for our society and moves us further away from solving the underlying issues.
Yes, eventually eating every other day I did lose weight, but we're talking a steady glide of 1-2lbs a week nothing as severe as people would expect a severely overweight person who only ate half the week to lose.
CI + hormones --> CO (that's an alternative hypothesis)
Semaglutide and tirzepatide address the self control and human behavior problems. They stop you from wanting to eat more.
That's about the level of a typical household LED, which at most feels slightly warm to the touch.
At that energy level you could not sustain weight while maintaining body temperature let alone having a healthy metabolism. That's just a plain fact.
You will lose weight long before you reach 200kcal/day.
E=MC^2 is basic physics too. So eat a pea and have enough calories for the rest of your life and then some?
To illustrate a single 37.5g snickers is slightly below 200kcal. I probably get that number of calories just from the milk in my coffee in an average day.
CI/CO is a thing.
Proponents of naive thermodynamics model tend to assume that only "excessive" energy is stored into bodily fat, once all the other tissues have had their fair share.
That is not really true in insulin resistant people, whose storage may be excessive and leave the rest of the body unsatisfied and hungry, which drives them to eat more than a healthy person would.
To us, this looks like deliberate overeating, to them, it is a result of constant hunger caused by the fact that some part of the energy consumed is being immediately locked away in fat tissues by dysregulated metabolic processes.
Notably, it isn't easy to "correct" this situation by just eating less, because that will leave those people feeling really starved. Insulin sensitivity must be restored first, then the fat stores will give up their excess willingly and that person won't suffer.
I.e. calories on the label vs what the body can actually access.
Like drinking smoothies (high availability) vs raw fruit (lower availability)
Dr. Greger (Nutrition focused) discusses some of this on calorie density and some referenced studies here if interested:
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-to-lose-weight-eating-mo...