The problem with this, engineering POV (and I subscribed to it until recently, most of my adult life), is that it doesn't explain why a person is eating more calories then they need. Having some stored body fat is a survival strategy. But there is diminishing returns from having too much fat when it comes to survival in a hunter/gatherer world. As the saying goes you only need to be faster then the slowest (overweight) person in the tribe if a bear is after you.rdcrags wrote:I think some of you and other experts are making losing weight far too complicated. An excerpt from one of my essays:
The rest of us are on our own. Engineers understand the concept of calories in and work out. We are able to compare our bodies with manmade machines where such things are calculated routinely. We even know about storing excess energy input into batteries when the intake is greater than the output. In our bodies, the receptacle of that surplus energy is called “fat.” Yet, some engineers still eat too much and/or exercise too little. The basic unit of expending energy is the foot-pound. It means lifting one pound against the force of gravity a distance of one foot. The foot-pound is convertible to other units, including calories and Btu’s. If you pump iron by lifting a weight of 100 pounds a distance of one foot, and do it ten times, doing so is equivalent to eating food containing 650 calories, equivalent to a typical dinner. The latest statistic that I heard is, if you eat one M&M, you need to walk 3 blocks to burn the equivalent number of calories."
there ought to be a feedback loop that regulates the accumulation of body fat. Leptin is the hormone that tells the brain the body has enough fat stores. But excess insulin competes with leptin in the brain. Which is probably why people who cut out the carbs find that their appetite goes down until their weight normalizes.
Keeping with the mechanical paradigm, the problem with the simple calories-in, calories-out is that the body is not a simple desktop lab experiment. It's a complex biochemical factory with feedback loops.
I posted links to Gary Taubes (a physicist-science journalist) and to Dr Peter Attia (an engineer turned medical doctor). Both take issue with the calories-in, calories-out paradigm.
Peter Attia:
I'm not going to quote the entire article. Taubes gives the same logic
http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/revi ... of-obesity" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Below is the First Law in its simplest form. It states that energy cannot be created or destroyed – that is, the change in energy of a system (blue term) is equal to the energy entering the system (red term) less the energy exiting the system (green term). To make this specific to our question, let me state it this way: the change in fat mass of a person is equal to the difference between the energy consumed and the energy expended.
No one disagrees with this point (except maybe folks who think the world is flat or that the sun rotates around the earth). Here is where the trouble starts…
Most obesity “experts” assume (erroneously) that the big equal sign between the blue and red terms implies a direction of causality. In other words, they assume that an increase in fat mass (the blue side gets bigger), was CAUSED by the red number being bigger than the green number.
To reiterate, I am not for a moment suggesting that energy balance or thermodynamics are being violated. I’m saying they do not tell you WHY our bodies choose to accumulate fat instead of burn it. Think about the examples I give in the video interview in response to the question, why we get fat (http://eatingacademy.com/weight-loss/wh ... -fat-video" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)? The growing child is consuming more energy than he is expending (which allows him to grow), but this is not the CAUSE of his growth, it’s the RESULT of his growth. The pregnant woman isn’t gaining fat during the pregnancy BECAUSE she is eating more energy than she’s expending. She’s creating a positive energy balance BECAUSE her hormones are driving her to create this energy balance so she can support the fetus.
