|
|
|
|
|
|
by Zanfa
740 days ago
|
|
|
> Each group was given meals with the same number of calories and instructed to eat as much as they wanted, but when participants ate the processed foods, they ate 500 calories more each day on average. The same people's calorie intake decreased when they ate the unprocessed foods. Your own Harvard link supports the calories in/out theory, but argues against counting calories. Different things. |
|
|
Calorie in / calorie out isn’t a theory, it’s a thermodynamic corollary. I compare it to flat eartherism because “things go down” is similarly a corollary of gravity. The missed link with the latter is that down isn’t what it intuitively means. The missed link with colloquial energy-balance interpretations is “calorie in” and “calorie out” don’t mean what people think it does.
If you have a healthy metabolism, cutting calories and increasing burn—cereris paribus—should spike a starvation response. That has some perks. But it should also reduce your resting metabolism, sometimes below even maintenance levels; it should increase your absorption and sequestration of energy; it should alter your taste to make calories more appetising, and increase existential anxiety around the procuring of those. (Counterfactial: I’m someone who is fine being hungry. )
Just as one can design short bridges on a flat-earth model and be fine, one can deploy this simplistic model (it’s not a theory, that’s the vastly more complex energy-balance model) to make short-term gains. But it’s fundamentally wrong in that it builds the wrong intuitions. Similar to how thinking of our brains as a steam engine or microcomputer sort of works, in some cases, or if you’re trying to be punchy in internet comments, but is fundamentally wrong and misleading.