alt Hacker NewsIt does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things:
1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function
2. Consume as many calories as your body will need to function
3. Consume fewer calories than your body will need to function
When you consume more energy than you require, your body stores the remainder as fat. When you consume less energy than is required, your body converts your fat into usable energy.
Now obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation of nutrition. What you eat, when you eat it, how efficiently your body converts food to energy, and other factors will determine the little details. But the explanation I've provided is not nearly as over-simplified as "it just doesn't work."
To make a comparison, it would be like suggesting that the financial advice "earn more money than you spend" just doesn't work as a method of saving money, on the grounds that some % of Americans who try to save money end up in credit card debt.
Replies
> choose
You're letting that word do some very heavy lifting.
> To make a comparison
I think the comparison is very weak, very superficial. The human body is way more complex than CICO. But your comparison does have some intuitive value -- there are more than a few people who consistently spend every penny they make, and sometimes more, just trying to survive. We don't see a lot of them on Hacker News, to be sure.
So if understanding the equation about how humans can obtain and maintain a healthy diet/weight is as simple as you present here. Why doesn't everybody just do that?
You say yourself, it couldn't not work. And yet there's hundreds of thousands of people that say it didn't work. Explain them, are they lying?
I'd assert, the oversimplified explanation is misleading. It's only true in the same way that drinking cold water will help you lose more weight than warm water. True or not, reality seems to strongly suggest it's irrelevant