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SoullessAutomaton comments on Akrasia and Shangri-La - Less Wrong
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Bullshit.
There's a hundred factors being identified that e.g. control how fast energy gets sucked up by fat cells leaving you weak and still hungry, versus how long energy is left available in the bloodstream leaving you feel strong and ready for running. Or e.g. how much nutrient that passes into your mouth is absorbed in the intestinal tract. Or e.g. when exercise creates new lean muscle that burns more calories on its own.
The fact that change in fat equals fat stored minus fat consumed is technically true but useless: I deny its connotations. The idea that the calories you take in through your mouth are the "input" and that the exercise you do to burn them is "output" and that the balance between the two is all that matters is false but appealing bullshit that plays hell with the bodies and feelings of every poor fat person who tries to live that lie. Between input and output there is a giant complicated machine and yes the exact form of the input and the exact form of the output and what you ate as a kid and all sorts of other things affect it.
Well, if you manage to consistently gain weight while consuming fewer calories than you expend, this has interesting consequences for thermodynamics.
It's not bullshit, but it's also a red herring for the actual question, which is how to actually reduce body weight in a sustainable, healthy manner.
There's a difference between "false" and "bullshit". You could argue that the equation is bullshit without saying that it was strictly false.
The thing is, it's both bullshit and strictly false. There's always some amount of food energy that goes in your mouth and comes straight out the other end, and this varies based on a host of poorly-understood factors.
Edit: I'm arguing against the extremely common assertion that energy eaten = energy expended + weight gain, which is what your original comment looked like. If you're talking strictly about fat cell behavior, you're right, but this is rather useless information for the purpose of weight loss. What SoullessAutomaton said was energy eaten >= energy expended + weight gain, which is indeed true.
If you have diabetes mellitus you lose a lot of glucose in your urine. Certainly that simple case complicates the energy in energy out dogma.
"out" would have been a better word than "expended" - to cover all the ways that energy can leave your body, including glucose in the urine.
Fair enough, but I think making the distinction explicit is important, and that Eliezer's edited post is better for it.
Call me superstitious, but I prefer to avoid anything that might get the Laws of Thermodynamics angry. You don't wanna mess with those guys.
Nah - they're cool
Edited to make clear the difference.