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Comment by alexgieg | Hacker News Reader

There are three levels to this. One are individuals with bodies that gain weight regardless of what the person does.

The second is psychological, people whose bodies work normally and they do everything wrong on their own.

The third is structural. Countries in which a huge part of the population is obese while other similar countries don't have that problem, have systemic issues that cause that. In the US it's the fact policies all around favor food that cause obesity and make healthy food be extremely expensive, which is the opposite of what countries where obesity is uncommon do.

Fix this last issue, wait two to three generations, and you'll see obesity fall to normal levels, at which point, yes, bringing up the moral argument for some of the few remaining cases may even become valid.

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"One are individuals with bodies that gain weight regardless of what the person does."

Physically, that's not possible. If calories consumed is less than calories burned, the body cannot add weight. It doesn't have access to zero-point energy.

Physically, it is possible, and you noted it in your comment. “Calories burned” - what could possibly make you think this is fixed across all humans?

There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy. Whether it be physical disability that prevent movement, or diseases that dis-regulate your metabolism.

There are many people who eat sufficient food and are perpetually lethargic. Their body has the energy, and chooses not to use it.

When I did chemo, I actually put on weight, despite eating almost nothing. I had pretty bad nausea despite my 4 anti-emetics, so food was difficult to eat. Even drinking water was hard.

So how could I have possibly put on weight? Well I was sleeping 16+ hours a day, not moving at all, and my hormones plummeted. I lost most of the muscle on my body. I obviously don’t know what my basal metabolic rate was, but it must have been incredibly low. Even my brain, which uses a lot of calories, didn’t work right. I couldn’t think right.

If you didn't use energy, you would not need to breath: breath is driven by the CO2 accumulation and the CO2 is a byproduct of the body extracting energy from organic matter. And if you believe you use energy but very little compared to the lucky individuals with god-like metabolism then you would be able to breath very infrequently (and your heart rate would also be low) compared to them.

This is a very surface-level and primitive analysis. Of course the amount of energy you use varies based off of your activities and the state of your body. Never did I say I used "zero energy", you're fighting ghosts here.

Rather, my point was simple: calories-in and calories-out is correct, but the mistake evangelists of this ideology make is assuming calories-out is fixed or even a simple equation. It's not, and this is what pushes your narrative from "science" to "ideology".

>Never did I say I used "zero energy"

Indeed, you said this instead:

>There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy

Now, grammatically it makes no sense, but I thought "and" was just a typo and then sentence read as: "There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body to not use energy" to witch I responded.

The way bodies burn energy varies. Different diseases and genetic conditions regulate that. For some their bodies may burn most of the energy they take in, storing very little as fat in the process. For others their bodies store almost everything.

I provided some details about my specific case here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942780

To sum it up: my DNA is trash when it comes to this. Everything my body could do wrong, it does.

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