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"A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#31

Post by mannicken »

keeptrying wrote: post #26
ugh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply counting calories will reduce your weight. I can pretty much confirm that now. Over the last eight months I tried to stay below 1900 calories per day and I have lost 17 kilo. As much as I wanted to, I did not manage to change my diet in any meaningful way, I’m just eating less. I didn’t even manage to keep up a regular sports routine. But my fallback – mercilessly tracking my weight and counting calories – sav…

If you simply cut out carbs you will lose a ton of fat. But yeah if you want to eat carbs and be healthy you have to basically count calories for the rest of your life.

Not necessarily. I went from counting calories on a sheet of paper to mentally keeping track of balances in my caloric regiment and keeping track of my weight everyday.

Perhaps it's a diet of coffee/cigarettes (appetite suppressants) that made me go from 200 lbs to 172 in a year but oh well.

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#32

Post by Groxx »

keeptrying wrote: post #29
Groxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... did you read the article? The only mention of carbohydrate's effect is because it's chosen as a large, easy number to reduce in favor of raising the protein amount, raising the overall inefficiency of the system. They listed, in Atkins-like diets, that shifting from 55% carbs to 8% carbs (with the change going to increased protein intake) results in about 140kcals less useful energy. That's it. From where in t…

Its not in the article but its a very well know phenomenon. If you research "low-carb diet" or "paleo-diet" you'll find more information. As soon as your insulin spikes due to high amount of carbs ingested, your body immediately starts to convert excess carbs into fat. I've done very low carb diets and easily lost 20 lbs in a month even though I've never weighed over 200lbs. Its pretty difficult though.

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just pointing out it has nothing to do with the article.

After stating that the now-great-great-grandparent had missed the point of the article, they proceeded to talk entirely about things not at all contained in the article. I'm sure there's a better term for it, but the post is pretty blatantly contradictory in that way.

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#33

Post by Confusion »

Groxx wrote: post #32
keeptrying wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not in the article but its a very well know phenomenon. If you research "low-carb diet" or "paleo-diet" you'll find more information. As soon as your insulin spikes due to high amount of carbs ingested, your body immediately starts to convert excess carbs into fat. I've done very low carb diets and easily lost 20 lbs in a month even though I've never weighed over 200lbs. Its pretty difficult though.

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just pointing out it has nothing to do with the article. After stating that the now-great-great-grandparent had missed the point of the article, they proceeded to talk entirely about things not at all contained in the article. I'm sure there's a better term for it, but the post is pretty blatantly contradictory in that way.

You are right that clp is incorrect in his suggestion that he criticizes his parent. Rather, he amends the information there with things unrelated to the article, but very much related to the general subject and, frankly, indispensable for anyone seeking to understand weight gain/loss.

Upvoted y'all :)

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#34

Post by teyc »

ugh wrote: post #28
keeptrying wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you simply cut out carbs you will lose a ton of fat. But yeah if you want to eat carbs and be healthy you have to basically count calories for the rest of your life.

Changing my diet never worked for me. Counting calories does. Also: I do love pasta. Counting calories is not that hard. I can do it in my head by now. Tracking my weight (which, I think, is equally important, especially for motivation) is more or less a reward and not a chore by now.

There is also some research that suggests fasting being beneficial in modulating insulin resistance. I try not to consume food after a certain time at night. It is not too difficult to do, and definitely stops short any thoughts of a late night snack.

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#35

Post by regularfry »

ugh wrote: post #22
run4yourlives wrote: post #12

"A calorie is a calorie" is good enough, however. People aren't fat because they are consuming 2500 calories from a Big Mac and Fries rather than 2500 calories from carrots. People are fat because they are consuming 6000 calories and burning off 1300. The message is simplistic, sure. For a large majority of overweight people though that's all that is required. Somewhere between reducing caloric intake and becoming fi…

Simply counting calories will reduce your weight. I can pretty much confirm that now. Over the last eight months I tried to stay below 1900 calories per day and I have lost 17 kilo. As much as I wanted to, I did not manage to change my diet in any meaningful way, I’m just eating less. I didn’t even manage to keep up a regular sports routine. But my fallback – mercilessly tracking my weight and counting calories – sav…

Surely this is just an application of the maxim "Anything measured improves," rather than anything specific to weight control?

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#36

Post by janjan »

jvdongen wrote: post #25

The car/fuel analogy is a bad one. High-test fuel only makes sense if the engine in which you intend to burn it is designed to actually make use of its qualities to reach higher efficiencies (e.g. a higher compression ratio). If not, you're just burning more expensive fuel at the same efficiency. That said, what really interests me is the mechanisms behind addictions. Why do smokers smoke, knowing full well by now th…

> That said, what really interests me is the mechanisms behind addictions. Why do smokers smoke, knowing full well by now that it will kill them earlier than non-smokers? Why stuff obese people themselves, knowing full well that it will cause serious health issues down the line.

Let's take this one step further: Is the reason/mechanism a smoker smokes the same why I browse reddit and HN all day instead of working on my PhD?

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#37

Post by lionhearted »

ugh wrote: post #22
run4yourlives wrote: post #12

"A calorie is a calorie" is good enough, however. People aren't fat because they are consuming 2500 calories from a Big Mac and Fries rather than 2500 calories from carrots. People are fat because they are consuming 6000 calories and burning off 1300. The message is simplistic, sure. For a large majority of overweight people though that's all that is required. Somewhere between reducing caloric intake and becoming fi…

Simply counting calories will reduce your weight. I can pretty much confirm that now. Over the last eight months I tried to stay below 1900 calories per day and I have lost 17 kilo. As much as I wanted to, I did not manage to change my diet in any meaningful way, I’m just eating less. I didn’t even manage to keep up a regular sports routine. But my fallback – mercilessly tracking my weight and counting calories – sav…

Experiment with healthy foods you can pre-cook. Rice cooker with rice and beans takes 5 minutes to put on and feeds you all day. Leave it soaking in water overnight and it's 5 minutes of cleaning in the morning.

Can hard boil eggs with minimal attention (set the alarm on your cellphone), can make 6 or 12 at a time and those will last you a couple days.

Get some vegetables that require minimal preparation - I used pickled vegetables and like them, but canned would be fine too. Maybe tuna or sardines, try them all and see what you like.

Then you've got rice+beans, and you add on some vegetables to it, and then either hard boiled eggs, tuna, or sardines - fast, cheap, healthy.

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#38

Post by colomon »

Udo wrote: post #27
kenjackson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I learned this in nutrition class about 20 years ago. It's something that clearly has been known for a long time, yet its never been popuar in the common discourse.

Exactly. I also believe it doesn't really matter, because the inefficiencies of converting sugars to body fat are pretty much irrelevant. Proteins may have a more significant inefficiency, but it's hard find food where they are the majority component. When people overeat grossly, those 5% won't make much of a difference. On my binge days, I consume upwards of 5000 kcal and it doesn't really matter if it's actually ju…

Huh? Just because one can binge so much that the difference is irrelevant hardly means that the difference isn't important in general.

The study this cites early on suggests that a low-carbohydrate diet with N calories a day is roughly equivalent to a low-fat diet with only 70% of N calories a day. So a 2000 calorie-a-day low-carbohydrate diet is equivalent to a 1400 calorie-a-day low-fat diet. That result is huge. (And makes me regret having had pasta three times this week!)

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#39

Post by Geee »

acon wrote: post #16
cschneid wrote: post #14

The other big thing that people end up missing is that most of your weight isn't from the food you eat. That's just where the energy came from. Your weight is oxygen / carbon / water / etc. Also note: a giant tree doesn't dig out a giant hole where it grows in the ground. The dirt isn't the bulk of the tree's wood.

The fact that a tree builds itself out of thin air is one of my favorite tidbits of knowledge. However, this kind of metabolism is only used by plants. Humans, as all animals, gets their building blocks from what they eat and drink. All the oxygen we use from the air we breathe is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

This is actually pretty interesting point of view. In essence, you should try to breath out all the carbon you ingest. Measuring the carbon dioxide output would be a pretty accurate measure of the actual energy consumption in the body.

Re: "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics

#40

Post by stcredzero »

Here is an example that one of the best "rocks to look under" (as in pg's "What You Can't Say" essay) is the misapplication of fundamental laws:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254906

The researchers who wrote this paper looked under that rock. (In this case, pop-science application of fundamental physical law. It's hard to get more fundamental than thermodynamics.)

(An example for you entrepreneurs out there, I'd suggest looking under Kerchoff's Law. Yes, it's a great principle to keep in mind when designing security tools like ciphers and cryptographic protocols. However, I contend it's applied in a counter-productive way when people think about real-world systems -- those have boundaries that are way too complicated for the application of Kerchoff's Law. Often, this is just an opportunity for someone to show they understand crypto theory, then throw up their arms and declare nothing can be done. However, the truth is that security often works or doesn't work because of the economics!)

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