Calories in calories out what science says

geebusuk

Here's a study for you all to dissect. Happy New Year!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22215165

Still CICO.

There were no significant differences between energy intake and energy expenditure between the 3 diets. We can account for all excess energy consumed through energy stored in fat and in protein or expended in higher total energy. With the low protein diet, more than 90% of the extra energy was stored as fat. Because there was no change in lean body mass, the 6.6% increase in total energy expenditure reflects the energy cost of storing fat and is close to the estimate of 4% to 8% for fat storage derived by Flatt.31 With the normal and high protein diets, only about 50% of the excess energy was stored as fat with most of the rest consumed (thermogenesis). The high total energy expenditure probably reflects the higher cost of protein turnover and storage.

(Taken from the full report.)

delicious_cocktail

The "nutshell" confuses the conservation of energy with the conservation of mass. A closed system can lose or gain energy without changing mass. The only way to lose weight through a loss of energy is through an atomic reaction. Those are not happening in your body (unless you are very unlucky).

From wikipedia,
"In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system cannot change"

I hope this helps.

duffypratt

In classical physics, there was a law of the conservation of energy, and a law of the conservation of mass. Special relativity merged these two laws because in atomic reactions matter can turn into energy. Atomic reactions don't occur in the body.

In the body, there are physical (mechanical) changes, and there are also chemical reactions. In either of these, mass is conserved.

On the mechanical side, when you ingest food and when you inhale, you gain weight. When you excrete waste, sweat, and exhale, you lose weight. On the one hand, stuff that was outside of you is now inside of you. And then, stuff that was inside of you is outside of you.

At the chemical level, you don't lose weight. Instead, what you do is convert stuff that you put inside of you into stuff that becomes waste and then gets put out of you. One of the main ways that we do that is by burning glucose, which is the fuel that cells use in aerobic metabolism. Here is the simple glucose reaction:

6O2 + C6H12O6 ---> 6CO2 + 6H2O

The oxygen molecules get into the body by breathing. The glucose enters the body by eating (and then may go through some other conversions before being burned, because we rarely eat anything like pure glucose). During the reaction, all mass is preserved, so no weight loss occurs. The Carbon dioxide gets exhaled, and its heavier than the oxygen that was inhaled. The water gets retained or excreted through urination.

There are all sorts of ways to lose weight. A quick way, but one that most people seem not to prefer, is simply to cut off your legs. But we're not interested in losing weight, we are mostly interested in reducing stored fat. Lots of diets work to begin with because people lose water weight, and again thats not what we are interested in. Other diets work in a way that burn lean tissue along with excess fat, and we don't want that. Instead, we are looking for ways to make it so that the above reaction occurs and the source of the glucose in the reaction is largely our stored fat tissue.

And for what its worth, what I've said should probably be very troubling to the OP.