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.
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.