[FatActor]

Who generated the heat that you measured in the calorimeter?

Gut biome bacteria consumed an amount of those calories. How many? It varies from person to person.

So calories in = calories out, but we don't know how many were used by the person, how many by the gut flora, and how many were excreted do to inability to metabolize. Ergo, hardly basic physics.

Reductionism is only useful if you know how to apply it.

[asdff]

You don't need to know all of these things if you are measuring input (calories in) and your output (weight on the scale every week). It hardly matters then how efficient your gut is. These are all relative values. Of course 2000 calories will look different for different people. What matters is if you have an understanding of how much calories you are putting into your system, you can now make changes and measure a response, like cutting down some calories and seeing how that affects your weight over a few weeks or months. You don't need to know all of these rates to do that.

[FatActor]

I agree with that, as do most people. What I object to is that calories-in-calories-out is the ONLY thing at play, and people claiming "simple physics" are working against any deeper understanding of the issues. I think this side of the argument is "Just eat less and you won't be fat. Duh." What they don't understand is that if a body has a hormonal anomaly, it might need to 5000 kcal/day just meet the 1500kc/day basic metabolic rate because the other 2500 kcal is being metabolized into fat by a broken endocrine system. If they drop down to 1500 kcal/day, only 300kc of that is going towards keeping the body running. It is completely out of their control how the calories are used due to their bodies, so CIn=COut is meaningless. The obesity epidemic is not completely about eating too much (which is part of it), but is about the environmental factors impacting how bodies actually work. If it was just Cin/Cout, gastric bypass would solve the problem, but that is not available to people that are suffering such hormonal disruptions because they would just die or be eating nonstop.

[sn9]

More is more and less is less.

If this wasn't the case, you'd have discovered a solution to famine.

And gastric bypasses are one of the most effective interventions available for people with such disorderd eating that lifestyle changes can't stick.

[FatActor]

Again, black and white thinking doesn't solve the problem. It just alienates people, and sometimes worse.

[sn9]

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

It is an objective fact that caloric surpluses and deficits are fundamental to manipulating bodyweight.

Any solution will be about getting people to maintain a surplus or deficit long enough to reach their goal weight.

There are many ways to communicate that to people, but pretending or trying to convince others that it isn't true is factually incorrect and literally counter-productive to their goals.

[FatActor]

You keep saying less is less more is more. That's a truism which is completely orthogonal to the point, yet you seem to be hung up on it to the exclusion of everything else every other commenter has said to you. Consider that just for a moment.