Hacker News Reader

Comment by mock-possum | Hacker News Reader

It is literally crazy how many people, (particularly women, just an observation) have told me that they are some sort of special case, where eating less food will not make them lose weight. Earnestly told me to my face that “calories in, calories out” is simply not true for everybody. “Where do you think the matter that makes up your body comes from??” I ask incredulously, already knowing that this is just going to get me into trouble.

Obviously there are dozens of completely legitimate social and physiological complicating factors, but at the end of the day, you are what you eat; but there is a certain segment of the population who refuses to believe it. They hold sacred the food they consume and the weight they gain.

View on HN

I think that calories in calories out is a reasonable heuristic, but biology is more complicated than physics.

1. Different bodies have different abilities to digest different things. For example, you could eat every bit as much grass as a cow that's gaining weight, and you would lose weight (and eventually starve to death). Obviously the variation within humans is less than that between humans and cows, but it's silly to pretend that we all share identical gut biomes and identical abilities to process foods with the same efficiencies. From this, it clearly follows that some people are going to get more calories out of the same food than others.

2. Even ignoring inclination to exercise, people have different resting heart rates and body temperatures. It obviously costs more calories to heat your body to a higher temperature and for your heart to beat faster, so some people are naturally going to gain or lose weight at a caloric intake that keeps other people at the same weight.

You can argue that these differences are minor, at the margins, and unlikely to mean the difference between equilibrium and weight change, and you might be right, but it's silly to pretend that they're physically impossible because of thermodynamics. The human stomach isn't a bomb calorimeter, which is why you can't drink a liter of gasoline and skip eating for a few days.

People know X matters, Y matters, and Z matters, but they do not know how much X matters in relation to Y and Z.

Similarly, a calorie deficit is the biggest driver, and it dwarfs all these other factors you listed.

This one has a super simple answer. They eat too many carbs.

When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.

You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.

You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com