[pohl]

The first thing that jumped out at me is that weight is the wrong metric in the first place. I'd rather be the same weight but have more, and better proportioned, muscle mass. (Muscle burns calories even when you're resting...it's a much better knob to tweak than the number of calories burnt during exercise.)

The author might be better off by giving away his bathroom scale and thinking about his body as a system.

[absconditus]

The article does address this to some extent. For example:

"According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight."

[kreneskyp]

It does not address the fact that when you convert 10 lbs of fat to muscle, you weigh the same but are ultimately in better shape.

This is a problem for a lot of people especially for men, who tend to build a lot of muscle as they exercise. Focusing on weight will mislead you and set yourself up for disappointment. A better solution is to take a front and side photo of yourself once a month to compare physical transformation.

[jodrellblank]

Assuming a direct conversion of calories in to fat, as you do when you talk about eating 40 calories, leads to this quote:

"If you eat 2,700 calories per day, that's roughly 1 million per year, 10 million in a decade. ~12 tons of food in a decade. To maintain your bodyweight to within 5lbs in a decade would require an accuracy of 0.1% in your calorie counting. Under this model, the question isn't why do people get fat, it's how does anyone avoid it?" - Gary Taube's Big Fat Lies lecture.

[gaius]

This Gary Taube is an idiot. Here's how it actually works: you notice yourself getting fat over a period of weeks, and then you correct it over a period of weeks. It's a process of continual adjustment. You don't weigh yourself once every 10 years!

[StrawberryFrog]

No, but I think that you're missing that he's pointing you at that conclusion - that the system is self-regulating to a large degree.

[kingkongrevenge]

The "muscle burns calories" idea is a popular myth, as you explain.

The value of muscle mass is that it buffers glucose and insulin. Muscle forms and stores glycogen that would otherwise go right to fat cells. These glycogen stores then also help control appetite, fending off acute snack attack hunger pangs that a scrawny person accustomed to a high carb diet gets when blood sugar wanes.