It’s just that effective diets typically reduce hunger, causing an automatic/involuntary reduction in calorie intake.
That sort of thing is precisely why conservation of energy does not imply that calorie restriction must be an effective means of weight control. You have to know the causal relationships, not merely the correlations, even when the correlations follow from fundamental physics.
Fun anecdote: there was a period in my life, lasting several years, when I ate—had to eat—literally twice as much as I do nowadays (and I only use “literally” to mean “literally”, never “hyperbolically”). I only weighed about five pounds more. If you want to imagine where it all went, go right ahead. (Yes, there was something seriously wrong. I got better, thank you.)
Yes, but people confuse “counting calories isn’t a good strategy for losing weight” with “effective weight loss must occur by some mechanism that doesn’t involve changes in calorie intake and expenditure- such as metabolizing different foods at different efficiencies.”
I’m trying to clear up that confusion- calorie balance is critical to understand what’s going on physiologically when people lose weight, however it’s not very useful to track numerically when actually trying to lose weight.
That sort of thing is precisely why conservation of energy does not imply that calorie restriction must be an effective means of weight control. You have to know the causal relationships, not merely the correlations, even when the correlations follow from fundamental physics.
Fun anecdote: there was a period in my life, lasting several years, when I ate—had to eat—literally twice as much as I do nowadays (and I only use “literally” to mean “literally”, never “hyperbolically”). I only weighed about five pounds more. If you want to imagine where it all went, go right ahead. (Yes, there was something seriously wrong. I got better, thank you.)
Yes, but people confuse “counting calories isn’t a good strategy for losing weight” with “effective weight loss must occur by some mechanism that doesn’t involve changes in calorie intake and expenditure- such as metabolizing different foods at different efficiencies.”
I’m trying to clear up that confusion- calorie balance is critical to understand what’s going on physiologically when people lose weight, however it’s not very useful to track numerically when actually trying to lose weight.