Then I encountered the “calories in = calories out” theory, which says that the only thing you need to do to lose weight is to make sure that you burn more calories than you eat.
And I thought to myself, “yeah, obviously.”.
On one hand, yeah, obviously.
On the other hand, “burning calories” is not an elementary action. Suppose I tell you to burn 500 calories now; how exactly would you achieve it? If your answer is that you would exercise or do something physically demanding, such actions spend ATP in the cells, so what if you don’t have enough ATP in your muscle cells; what is your plan B for burning calories? From the opposite side, you can limit the intake of calories. What if your metabolism is such that if you don’t provide enough calories, you will gradually fall in coma and die.
Your metabolism can make it impossible for you to reduce the “calories in” or increase the “calories out”, if it is somehow set up in a way that does not convert the calories into useful energy in your muscle cells, and it starts damaging your organs if the calories are missing in general. So while the theory is almost tautologically true, it may still be impossible to use it to lose weight. And the problem is that the proponents of “calories in = calories out” usually smugly pretend that it is an actionable advice, instead of mere description.
The actionable advice needs to be about how the metabolism works. And the things that impact it, such as what you eat, and who knows what else. Also, if you have some hormonal imbalance, or alergy, or whatever, your metabolism may differ from other people even if you eat the same things and try to live the same lifestyle. So, while e.g. eating less refined sugar would probably help everyone, no advice would guarantee a perfect outcome for everyone.
You make a good point—even if my belief was technically true, it could still have been poorly framed and inactionable (is there a name for this failure mode?).
But in fact, I think it’s not even obvious that it was technically true. If we say “calories in” is the sum of the calorie counts on the labels of each food item you eat (let’s assume the labels are accurate) then could there not still be some nutrient X that needs to be present for your body to extract the calories? Say, you need at least an ounce of X to process 100 calories? If so, then one could eat the same amount of food, but less X, and potentially lose weight.
Or perhaps the human body can only process food between four and eight hours after eating it, and it doesn’t try as hard to extract calories if you aren’t being active, so scheduling your meals to take place four hours before you sit around doing nothing would make them “count less”.
Calories are (presumably?) a measure of chemical potential energy, but remember that matter itself can also be converted into energy. There’s no antimatter engine inside my gut, so my body fails to extract all of the energy present in each piece of food. Couldn’t the mechanism of digestion also fail to extract all the chemical potential energy of species “calorie”?
Yes, there are many steps in the metabolism that are not under your conscious control. I am not an expert, so I don’t want to speculate too much about the technical details, but I think that gut bacteria probably also play a role. Simply, not everything you put in your mouth ends up necessarily in your bloodstream, and not everything that you absorbed is necessarily available in form of muscle energy.
is there a name for this failure mode?
I don’t know any standard name. Seems to me the problem is confusing “rephrasing of the desired outcome” with “an algorithm that actually get you there”. Something like:
Q: How can I get lot of money?
A: Become a millionaire!
Like, yeah, technically, everyone who successfully followed this advice ended up with lots of money, and everyone who didn’t can be accused of not following the advice properly, but that’s simply because those are two ways to describe the same thing.
Q: How can I lose weight?
A: Get rid of the extra atoms! I mean, extra calories!
Charitably, the advice is not absolutely bad, because for a hypothetical completely clueless listener it would provide some little information. But then, using this advice in practice means insinuating that your target is completely clueless, which is probably not be the case.
On one hand, yeah, obviously.
On the other hand, “burning calories” is not an elementary action. Suppose I tell you to burn 500 calories now; how exactly would you achieve it? If your answer is that you would exercise or do something physically demanding, such actions spend ATP in the cells, so what if you don’t have enough ATP in your muscle cells; what is your plan B for burning calories? From the opposite side, you can limit the intake of calories. What if your metabolism is such that if you don’t provide enough calories, you will gradually fall in coma and die.
Your metabolism can make it impossible for you to reduce the “calories in” or increase the “calories out”, if it is somehow set up in a way that does not convert the calories into useful energy in your muscle cells, and it starts damaging your organs if the calories are missing in general. So while the theory is almost tautologically true, it may still be impossible to use it to lose weight. And the problem is that the proponents of “calories in = calories out” usually smugly pretend that it is an actionable advice, instead of mere description.
The actionable advice needs to be about how the metabolism works. And the things that impact it, such as what you eat, and who knows what else. Also, if you have some hormonal imbalance, or alergy, or whatever, your metabolism may differ from other people even if you eat the same things and try to live the same lifestyle. So, while e.g. eating less refined sugar would probably help everyone, no advice would guarantee a perfect outcome for everyone.
You make a good point—even if my belief was technically true, it could still have been poorly framed and inactionable (is there a name for this failure mode?).
But in fact, I think it’s not even obvious that it was technically true. If we say “calories in” is the sum of the calorie counts on the labels of each food item you eat (let’s assume the labels are accurate) then could there not still be some nutrient X that needs to be present for your body to extract the calories? Say, you need at least an ounce of X to process 100 calories? If so, then one could eat the same amount of food, but less X, and potentially lose weight.
Or perhaps the human body can only process food between four and eight hours after eating it, and it doesn’t try as hard to extract calories if you aren’t being active, so scheduling your meals to take place four hours before you sit around doing nothing would make them “count less”.
Calories are (presumably?) a measure of chemical potential energy, but remember that matter itself can also be converted into energy. There’s no antimatter engine inside my gut, so my body fails to extract all of the energy present in each piece of food. Couldn’t the mechanism of digestion also fail to extract all the chemical potential energy of species “calorie”?
Yes, there are many steps in the metabolism that are not under your conscious control. I am not an expert, so I don’t want to speculate too much about the technical details, but I think that gut bacteria probably also play a role. Simply, not everything you put in your mouth ends up necessarily in your bloodstream, and not everything that you absorbed is necessarily available in form of muscle energy.
I don’t know any standard name. Seems to me the problem is confusing “rephrasing of the desired outcome” with “an algorithm that actually get you there”. Something like:
Q: How can I get lot of money?
A: Become a millionaire!
Like, yeah, technically, everyone who successfully followed this advice ended up with lots of money, and everyone who didn’t can be accused of not following the advice properly, but that’s simply because those are two ways to describe the same thing.
Q: How can I lose weight?
A: Get rid of the extra atoms! I mean, extra calories!
Charitably, the advice is not absolutely bad, because for a hypothetical completely clueless listener it would provide some little information. But then, using this advice in practice means insinuating that your target is completely clueless, which is probably not be the case.
But atoms aren’t similar to calories, are they? I maintain that this hypothesis could be literally false, rather than simply unhelpful.
Okay, it’s not the same. But the idea is that the answer is equally unhelpful, for similar reasons.