On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Ray Audette wrote:

> Caloritic reduction has an abysmal record in producing permanent weight
> loss.  In fact the Harvard Nurses Studies ( 125,000 nurses for 25 years
> actually showed a slightly inverse relationship between calories and weight
> ( the more you eat the less you weigh).

The abysmal record of caloric reduction does not show that weight
loss without caloric reduction has a better record.  Indeed, how
many studies can you adduce that show significant weight loss
without a caloric deficit?  The Nurses' Study certainly shows no
such thing. And it absolutely did not show what you assert, that
"the more you eat the less you weigh." Rather, it showed that
overweight people, on average, eat no more, or a bit less, than
people who are not overweight.  It certainly doesn't show that
eating less made them that way, or that eating more would cause
them to lose weight.  And it definitely didn't show that nurses
are exempt from the laws of thermodynamics.

> Simple thermodynamics does not predict results in complex chaotic systems.

Many people lose weight when they eat less, which is why diets
work.  The problem is that it's difficult to continue eating
less, which is why they don't work.  Some people do not lose
weight when they eat less, instead their metabolism compensates
in other ways, e.g., lowering of body temperature, etc.  This
doesn't show that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to
complex systems, but only that there's more than one way for the
body to respond to caloric reduction.  But we knew that long
before there was fractal geometry.

Back in the 1950s Pennington, working with overweight DuPont
executives, demonstrated that when carbs were reduced, weight was
lost, even though the calories were the same as on the
higher-carb *weight reduction diet* that didn't produce good
results.  That is, on diet A a caloric reduction of 500 cals/day
didn't get good results, on diet B the same reduction did get
results.  The carbs made a difference, but *both diets were
calorically reduced*.  There have been other studies with similar
results, but none of them show that caloric reduction is
irrelevant to weight loss.  At best, they show that it is not a
sufficient condition for weight loss, which is something else.

Energy matters, in linear systems and nonlinear systems.

Todd Moody
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