If you consume calories that you do not burn, you store them for later use in fat. Is that simple answer incorrect or do people refuse to believe it because they don't want to increase output or consume less?
This is a subject of irrationality I have trouble understanding. The answer is there and known, but it isn't believed or accepted or something. Or do we accept it, but we just have a greater desire to avoid manual labor than change our habits.
"If you consume calories that you do not burn, you store them for later use in fat."
This is completely and utterly not true. There is significant caloric content in excrement, and countless factors that determine how much of the food you consume is absorbed or excreted. Many weight-loss drugs (e.g., orlistat) exert their effects by preventing absorption rather than consumption.
If I change the word "consume" in my comment to "absorb" then the point is the same. I'm not really one to care to argue about particular words used in the discussion, but more the point of the discussion.
If you consume fewer calories, you also absorb fewer calories. Is that not true?
Your comment only reinforces my point, which is that people would rather consume more, that is, pay for a doctor to prescribe a drug, pay for the drug, consume the drug on a regular basis, than simply consume less food or do more work. I'm sure orlistat has a huge list of side effects. It probably does stuff to your body they don't even know about. It would be better to consume less food or burn more calories than to consume a drug to enable the overweight person to consume more food than they need. And think of the moral implications of over-consumption. Doesn't it seem odd that we are selling people pills to enable them to consume more than they need? What about those who need more than they get?
Yet, people choose to consume the drug. The question is, Why? and you didn't even come close to answering that question, but rather focused on a semantic issue that doesn't move us any closer to understanding.
At one point, I too was overweight. I ate 3 big meals a day, I sat behind a computer all day. I never exercised. Then I started eating less and exercising and I lost weight and became healthier.
I'm not involved in any great moral war between discipline and sloth. I'm a civilian. I'm sorry for making you waste your bullets.
The factors that determine how much of one's food intake passes through the body undigested are numerous, and the overall effect is far from negligible. In addition to possible effect of eating speed discussed in the article, caloric absorption is impacted by food's flavor intensity, its texture (particularly whether it's wet or dry), how readily the food can be converted to glucose (glycemic index), whether the flavor has been previously associated with elevated glucose in the the subject, what time of day the food is consumed, how long it's been since the previous meal, how much food is consumed in a sitting, whether the food is consumed along with flavored beverages (even calorie-free ones), and whether consumption is followed by physical activity, rest, or sleep.
Your point was that weight-gain is simple. It is not.
Sure, it's simple. A newborn baby doubles it's weight in a month. Why? Because it's eating a lot. A woman gets pregnant and puts on 30 pounds? Why? Because she's eating a lot. A teenager goes through a growth spurt and puts on 20 pounds? Why? He's eating a lot. A cancer patient loses 20 pounds quickly. Why? He's not eating much.
But this might not be the most useful level of abstraction to look at. It's sort of like looking at this comment and thinking that it's on your screen because your computer fetched it from your wireless router.. true, but not very useful or informative. You might want to step back and ask why these people are eating so much or so little. Surely it isn't just willpower (whatever that is). There are plenty of slender people who can't bring themselves to do things like study for an exam.
Every HN thread on diet mentions Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories, so I'll be the first to do it here.
The book makes a strong case that the key you mention is in fact a fallacy. There is a correlation between calorie surplus and weight gain, but saying the first caused the second is like saying (to use an example from the book) that alcoholism is caused by drinking too much — tautological, and not useful in fixing the condition.
Taubes goes on to argue that because of an underlying metabolic condition (induced by a carb-heavy diet, as it turns out), your body decides to gain weight and so makes you eat more calories than you burn. So it's not that you gain weight because you eat too much, it's that you eat too much because you're gaining weight.
Edit: sorry to rsheridan6 for using the "true, and not useful" turn of phrase without having realized someone else beat me to it. Guess that means it's a good one here.
It takes superhuman willpower to go to bed hungry every day when you have the option not to. That's why people on low-calorie diets so frequently (read: almost always) put non-trivial weight back on within a few years.
Your brain tells you to eat n calories. Your brain will make damn sure that you eat every bit of n. Telling a person who can't eat less than n that they're lazy is like telling a schizophrenic that they should just snap out of it.
Will is an exhaustible resource, most people don't have enough to overcome the desires of the body. It's not as simple as calories in calories out; it never has been.
> This is a subject of irrationality I have trouble understanding
That's because you are utterly, terribly wrong, and like you millions of people, including doctors. And that's why so many people have trouble losing weight. You think you have THE TRUTH, your truth is not working, then blame the world.
This is a subject of irrationality I have trouble understanding. The answer is there and known, but it isn't believed or accepted or something. Or do we accept it, but we just have a greater desire to avoid manual labor than change our habits.