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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31646 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I don't like trading citations, we both have access to search engines.

The simple problems with calorie counting:

  1. Effort and thinking. Counting up calories consumed and burned is tedious and annoying. This results in people dropping the diet. Dropping the diet tends to reverse all weight losses.
  2. Not all calories are equal. 500 calories of soda vs meat vs vegetables all have very different effects on hunger levels, digestion, and nutrients. Other diets have more success in reducing calories consumed through simple rules like "no sugar".
  3. Metabolic adjustment. Even if someone does everything right, keeps balanced meals, and puts in the effort their body may adjust and render the efforts useless. Caloric expenditure comes in lots of forms, exercise is known, but your brain is an energy hog and so is just being awake vs being asleep. You have strict control of your intake but you absolutely do not have strict control of your expenditures. You can end up just being far less alert, sleeping more, and having less energy overall.

Your body is not a simple calorie machine. It has a complex digestive system that has evolved over the entirety of our evolutionary history. It's designed to work whether or not an animal can count. Fat in the body does not just serve a single purpose, it's not just energy storage. It's a form of protection and heat retention as well. The body works to maintain a certain level of fat, because having having too little in bad weather is just as much of a death sentence as being too hungry.

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