Re:Counting Calories Is Not the Key to Weight Loss, New Stud...
by Gibbon1 on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @03:34AM
(#16427896)
The best comments I've seen about this is when you look at cumulative storage needed over time to gain weigh vs the total amount of energy consumed, the 'imbalance' is an accounting error.
Simple physics says one thing, simple engineering says another which is anything controlled that finely is under hormonally driven feedback control.
Frankly I think in the 20th century, particularly in the US and Britain there was a strong cultural imperative to assign psychological causes for conditions medical 'science' wasn't able to explain. So fat people are gluttons, erectile dysfunction is physiological, ulcers are caused by physiological stress. Heart disease is caused by a 'type A personality'.
No one is going to track of how much mass they breathe in and out, how much mass they lose through sweat, excretion, urination, how much mass they eat and drink or how much energy they gain or lose through radiation. You would have to track all of those things to model weight loss based on laws of thermodynamics.
If you are trying to predict weight loss based on the calorie count on the back of your food boxes and based on your level of activity, the laws of thermodynamics aren't going to be very helpful. The calorie count on the box of food is only a very rough approximation of how much usable energy your body is able to extract from the food. That amount will not be consistent for every person or even for a single person in differing scenario.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful", so why be pedantic about one model being more right when it is also much less useful in the scenario and still is not a completely accurate model of reality?