[kalleboo]

> What's the elephant in the room? Metabolism!!

The stuff I've seen says that metabolism can only account for about 300 kcal/day difference, until you get into extreme cases like "starvation mode" where the body starts to shutdown (women's periods stop, etc). In the end there's no way around the first law of thermodynamics.

Most anecdotes about "but he eats the same stuff I do!" are just the extremely common cases of people under and overestimating caloric value.

[dllthomas]

"In the end there's no way around the first law of thermodynamics."

The first law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system, and doesn't automatically have much of anything to do with whether something as complex as a body stores fat or not.

[speeder]

300kcal a day is a lot...

For example my mom only managed to lose weight (and very slowly) after having a very strict diet of 1500kcal

This 300kcal for her would be 20% more than she needs.

Mind you, my mom already exercised regularly when she adopted that diet.

[joevandyk]

If I were to eat 300 extra calories a day and all that surplus was stored as fat, I'd gain 31 pounds every year.