I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do. I can manipulate my body mass at will, effectively, and to a degree you would, I’m sure, find impossible to accomplish. I learned how to take that “skill” to an extreme any community you’ve survived to be member of has not yet approached. Anyone who teaches that “skill” is immoral.
We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
The heat potential of what we consume is not relevant to the safe (much less effective) regulation of our metabolic machinery; the nutrient density and distributions in what we consume is, but is very hard to summarize in marketing copy to idiot monkeys that want a simple eat / no eat light.
> I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.
Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.
> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.
I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.
> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.
Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.
I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
Ahh, so you’re one of the immoral.
I feel so much sorrow for those you are actively harming. May they survive your naïveté and arrogance.
This is a bit hyperbolic.
Always remember the Prof who lost 27lbs on the convenience food diet:
https://www.acsh.org/news/2010/11/09/food-for-thought-twinki...
Also remember that before the days of tracking apps and watches and services like Zoe, many of us were losing weight, keeping it off and improving athletic performance without any of that stuff.
Always remember that I’ve lost more than 30lbs in a month, more than 150lbs in a year, and well over 1000lbs in a lifetime, never used an app or a service of any sort and without resort to Twinkies. I’m probably in better shape than you, taking age into account… losing weight isn’t hard, at all, all it takes is an eating disorder and a maniacal capacity for self-abuse. The same is true for athletic performance, which is really just as stupid a metric as body mass. Managing a consistently healthy human body over a lifetime of injury and experience, that’s hard, and made harder with idiotic quantitative measures like calories or BMI.
You sound like you have a bone to pick.
No one “resorts to twinkies”. It was a dumb experiment to show that cutting calories really can work. The stupid foods show that you can improve health markers and lose weight by just watching calories.
It’s not the be all and end all of anything. Just a counter point to the silly “calorie is not a calorie” saying.
And I improved all my health markers and my weight by simply starving myself of any food at all. Sure, eliminating calories leads to weight loss, but the point of “a calorie is not a calorie” is that I could have done exactly the same thing by consuming 10,000 kilo-calories of charcoal a day too. A human being does not burn its food via combustion and pretending it does doesn’t even work over the extremely short run, and it certainly never works over the long run. This idiot, I’m sure, didn’t keep that weight off following that same diet… in fact my guess is he’s the same weight or heavier 5 years after the fact. Statistically that’s true of the vast majority of people who lose a significant percentage of their body mass by the means of any dietary or exercise change, BTW.
A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.
And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.
Actively causing harm is telling people things that are demonstrably untrue that will affect how successful they are in improving their health and wellbeing and using your mental illnesses as proof of your authority instead of decades of academic research as well as the decades of practice of different communities all using the exact same methods you claim to be false.
At a certain point, you have to accept that you have no idea what you're talking about, and it's the height of arrogance to assume that you know something with a higher amount of quality evidence than the mountains of evidence that disprove your claims about how things work and your naive and arrogant claims of expertise.