It’s gotten harder to lose weight and not for the reasons you think

same story yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309249

study relies on SELF REPORTING, need I say more?

"Weight management is actually much more complex than just ‘energy in’ versus ‘energy out."

No, it's not. Maybe it's more difficult to measure calories (that salad ranch dressing has more calories than that hamburger), but people should be encouraged to balance their calorie intake everyday. For what it's worth, here's why Americans are obese:

50 extra calories / day x 365 days / year x 1 lb / 3,500 calories = 5 lbs / year

Multiplied by 10 years, and you get 50 lbs over weight. In twenty years you are 100 lbs over weight.

Bottom line is that people are eating just a little too much every day, and that adds up over time. My advice for losing and maintaining weight: Have 5 x 400 calorie meals each day and exercise for 30 minutes. The chore of finding 400 calorie meals is well worth the effort because you'll see just how many calories each item you consume contains.

It's not so simple. People are different. Some people won't need your plan because they stay at low weight no matter what they eat. Others won't be able to follow your plan because it would require superhuman willpower.

I'm an example of the first category. I'm 6'2'' and 160 lbs, and have been like this for years. At age 27 I spent a whole year working from home, eating at McDonalds 1-2 times every day, going to sleep at 5am, and not exercising at all. Resulting weight gain? About five pounds, which I promptly lost after joining a gym. More recently, at age 32, I took a two-week vacation and literally spent it all in bed, playing video games and eating large amounts of chocolate and pastries. Resulting weight gain? Zero (actually a slight loss). This happened last month.

Since I'm at one extreme end of the scale, it's very easy for me to believe that there are people at the other end, who won't be able to follow your plan at all. Restrict them to 2K calories/day, and they just won't fall asleep unless they get a snack. They need a different way.

The laws of thermodynamics are true as far as they go, but they don't have anything to say about genetics, metabolism, hunger, or willpower. These are the real important factors in weight loss. The sooner we move away from a virtue-based worldview, the sooner we can start actually solving it.

Its the psychological problem. Quitting smoking, for example, would be pretty easy without the addiction aspect. Likewise, considering low carb for example, losing weight is really easy when your appetite almost entirely disappears and a world full of candy bags and giant size corn syrup sodas has no similar instant gratification for low carb'ers. People who are used to neopuritan joys of dieting such as agonizing craving don't understand that the main point of low carb is not feeling hungry leads to imploded 'energy in' as you state etc.

Also when I fall off the wagon for a day and eat a ton of bread or b-day cake or whatever I can't tell the difference between indigestion due to systemic shock of my digestive system vs the stereotypical "binge and fall asleep on the couch" I remember from my self and observation of others. A pizza makes me lay on the couch in a tired state like many other people I've observed, but I can eat a steak then go to the park with kids full of energy no problem.

While you're certainly right that from a thermodynamic sense it is definitely a case of energy in vs energy out, you're presenting it in very simplistic terms and I think you're missing the point of the article.

There's all sorts of poorly understood processes happening in our body that affect the amount of energy stored as fat. That "1 lb / 3500 calories" figure you quoted isn't an absolute law, but more like a rule of thumb. What we don't fully understand is to what extent things like gut bacteria, environmental toxins, sleep cycle etc alter that figure. The body's a hugely complex system.

The recent study explicitly says that people on the same diets today are fatter than they were 40 years ago. Assuming their finding is true, that means that either metabolisms are slower or the rate at which bodies gain fat from excess calories is higher than it used to be.

We as a society have been filling the world with all sorts of never-seen-before chemicals which our bodies and the huge interdependent ecosystem we live in are unable to deal with. We've spent the last 60 years pumping our livestock full of drugs to make them bigger and live longer. It's not outwith the sphere of possibility that one or a combination of these contribute to changes in the way humans store fat.