I really appreciate this, because as somebody who had Anorexia as a teenager and became very underweight, I know that you can indeed continue to lose weight if you restrict your calories, and I had the same thought when I listened to this episode. I get what they were trying to do with this episode. I felt like they were trying to explain why people who say to fat people "calories in and calories out!" are incredibly unhelpful (which they are, it's factually correct, but actually counting calories and working out how many you need for a deficit is somewhat complex), but their logic seemed confused. They're right that people oversimplify the factors which affect the calories you consume and expend. Some people don't seem to know about RMR / BMR at all, and think you have to actually burn off every calorie you consume through activity. There's a lot of misconception. But I don't think this episode helped with that, because as you point out, it's not the science that's wrong here, it's the interpretation that ordinary people make.
The other thing is that they are WAAAAAY off the mark with their own estimates of how much energy people need to take in. And maybe most of America is, which is why we have the rates of obesity we do. Saying that it is an observable fact that 2350 calories per day is below what is needed for the average man or woman needs to take in????? really? I think all you have to do is look around and you can observably see that most people are taking in more than they should and have no idea just how low it is if you are in a sedentary job and lifestyle. I just did my resting metabolic rate after gaining a few lbs of muscle. It has come up from in the high 1100s to 1218 calories per day. Yes. That's what my body needs to tick over. And if all I do in a day is get up, walk the dog around the block, go to work (Nurse Practitioner, so I mostly sit), drive home, and maybe another short walk, and lets say I don't do any recreational exercise that day. Just make dinner, light housework, watch TV and bed. Basically, if I am over about 1400 calories and do that consistently for a few weeks - the pounds will start packing on. You can ask any bodybuilder who is trying to gain muscle and has to calculate how much they need to eat to gain and has the opposite of usual problem. Energy Balance IS a thing.
Nice post! I'm not a Maintenance Phase listener, but I have seen some online discourse about this particular episode and was googling around to see if anyone had bothered to address some of the claims from the episode that didn’t make sense to me. I hope to make some time to check out the sources you cited here.
One thing I did want to point out is that I’m fairly certain that Hobbes and Gordon are actually technically correct when they say that the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to open systems like the human body (I’m saying this based off of what I half-remember from my only semester of thermodynamics, and what I’ve read on Wikipedia), in the sense that the first law is only even really *defined* for closed systems.
However, what they seem to be getting at is that the principles of thermodynamics in general, and conservation of mass and energy in particular, don’t apply to open systems, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Not really related, but thing that you quoted from the episode, and I thought was bizarre, was Hobbes' statement that: "The amounts of weight that people are able to keep off over the long term are relatively small. It's like people that have lost 10% to 20% of their body weight."
In what world is 20% loss of body weight not significant?? I’m 5’10” and about 200 lbs, so losing 15% of my body weight (down to 170 lbs) would bring my BMI from upper end of “overweight” to upper end of “normal”. Now, I don't think BMI is a very useful metric for individual people, but that amount of weight loss would have a very substantial impact on how my body looks and feels! I’m not particularly interested in losing weight at the moment, but the claim 10-20% is a “relatively small” amount makes very little sense to me. This wasn’t really related to anything you wrote, but seeing you quote it reminded me what an odd statement it was to begin with.
Anyhow, thanks for digging into the claims made into the episode. I’m looking forward to making time to read more of your Substack posts.
Hey thanks for reading and for commenting! I am not a physicist so I defer to what Kevin Hall and other experts say about this but I agree with you that this first law of thermodynamics thing is a strange debate that is mostly gish gallop. People throw it out there as part of an attempt to discredit CICO, but they don't explain how a system could possibly create matter out of nothing. Like, it's quite literally impossible for the body to create fat out of nothing. Just because it is hard to measure precisely the energy in and the energy out does not mean that the law of energy balance does not hold!
And yes, one of the things that Hobbes does (quite effectively, really) is to say things that are totally normal in a way that makes them sound absurd or to take things that are actually quite substantial and minimize them. He could say the same thing with different vocal intonation and convince his fans of two different things depending on which they hear. It's wild!
Thank you so much for this. I listened to this podcast as it came highly recommended and found myself sputtering and yelling at my phone especially at this episode . You have articulated my sputtering far more thoroughly than I ever could have.
And now serious yet stupid question! “Metabolism is complex but also well understood.” - is it really? I don’t know, but was under impression that it’s something still mysterious and that’s why set-point theory emerged, to explain irregularities
This is a good question! I think this is where we get into the difference between understanding the mechanisms and understanding individual variance. Scientists for sure know a lot about the chemical processes that we call "metabolism", but that doesn't mean that we can explain exactly why it varies from human to human. This is partly because there is some randomness inherent in anything biological. I suppose it's possible that some day we will be all-knowing to the extent that we can say exactly why one person's metabolism differs from another, but I think that's highly unlikely. It's akin to predicting the future, in my mind!
On emotional level it’s sort of relief to learn that losing weight is possible after all. It’s like I can accept myself as fat person (and I do accept myself as fat person), but there are very objective reasons why I’d prefer to not be fat, like: moving is harder, I take more space. Like with any disability activism, social model of disability doesn’t answers all struggles, because some are intrinsic to condition. I don’t understand why Michael and Aubrey completely cut their viewers off hope that change is possible.
I agree with you! It doesn't have to be either/or. We can work to end discrimination against fat people while still allowing that there are some reasons why some people might want to lose weight for health reasons. Just because weight =/= health does not mean that there may be health benefits for some people to losing weight. And, most importantly, if we truly believe in bodily autonomy, people choosing to do things to lose some fat is not for Aubrey or Michael to judge!
Learning a lot from your substack and it’s opening my eyes about MP’s level of “expertise” … but I have to defend them here in that they often say explicitly that it’s not for them to say or judge if anyone should lose weight. That this is an individual decision.
Your analogy to a financial consultant at the end is great - it perfectly captures why “CICO” is correct but not always very helpful. I wish MT could handle this level of nuance!
Thank you!! I think analogies are really good tools for explaining concepts, so I am really glad to hear that it worked for you! I similarly wish that MP could handle this level of nuance.
Came here from She's A Beast, great debunking. I do not follow this podcast, but I was curious because in my home country, Romania, there are plenty of folks that spread such misinformation online. Everyone skims an article, they get to the Discussions (maybe) part of it, then Conclusion, wrap it up and present it to you as factual evidence.
I recently listened to a gym enthusiast advertising focusing solely on calories when eating - because the oatmeal that you prepare with milk and put some banana in, coupled with a spoon of honey will in fact be less healthy (= more calories) than a proteic bar from Aldi that has 50 unknown ingredients, toppled with some protein shake made with ultraprocessed "milk" (almond milk exists, but how much of the one we drink is actual almond milk?)
The misinformation they advance in the name of health is absurd.
Thank you for reading! She's A Beast is awesome. I'm really glad she's out there creating such quality content. I totally agree with you about skimming an article or just reading the abstract. Yikes, that gym enthusiast sounds familiar, which is pretty telling! I'm hoping we can start to repair the disconnect between science and the public which is enabling all of this health misinformation to spread.
Really great critique of their podcast. The only comment I have is that I would have liked timestamps for where you quoted the hosts so readers can jump immediately to that point in the episode. Looking forward to more posts, especially about the Ozempic episode.
The study you cite about long term weight loss being possible for about 20% of people seems strange. It appears to say that long term weight loss means "10% of body weight off for 1 year". One year does not seem particularly long term at all.
Agreed! This is the definition that Aubrey and Michael stated in a previous episode. The problem is we don't really have a definition of "successful weight loss" that is clinically agreed upon, so it makes it hard to measure. I wrote about this in the previous post, actually!
Seems arbitrary to correct the 1 liter vs 1 kilogram when the density of water means they’re the same thing?
Fair enough! The 1 liter vs 1 kg equivalence is temperature and pressure dependent. But I agree it's a trivial correction. :)
I really appreciate this, because as somebody who had Anorexia as a teenager and became very underweight, I know that you can indeed continue to lose weight if you restrict your calories, and I had the same thought when I listened to this episode. I get what they were trying to do with this episode. I felt like they were trying to explain why people who say to fat people "calories in and calories out!" are incredibly unhelpful (which they are, it's factually correct, but actually counting calories and working out how many you need for a deficit is somewhat complex), but their logic seemed confused. They're right that people oversimplify the factors which affect the calories you consume and expend. Some people don't seem to know about RMR / BMR at all, and think you have to actually burn off every calorie you consume through activity. There's a lot of misconception. But I don't think this episode helped with that, because as you point out, it's not the science that's wrong here, it's the interpretation that ordinary people make.
Thank you for commenting and sharing your experience! I am glad that you found this helpful and I totally agree with everything you said here!
The other thing is that they are WAAAAAY off the mark with their own estimates of how much energy people need to take in. And maybe most of America is, which is why we have the rates of obesity we do. Saying that it is an observable fact that 2350 calories per day is below what is needed for the average man or woman needs to take in????? really? I think all you have to do is look around and you can observably see that most people are taking in more than they should and have no idea just how low it is if you are in a sedentary job and lifestyle. I just did my resting metabolic rate after gaining a few lbs of muscle. It has come up from in the high 1100s to 1218 calories per day. Yes. That's what my body needs to tick over. And if all I do in a day is get up, walk the dog around the block, go to work (Nurse Practitioner, so I mostly sit), drive home, and maybe another short walk, and lets say I don't do any recreational exercise that day. Just make dinner, light housework, watch TV and bed. Basically, if I am over about 1400 calories and do that consistently for a few weeks - the pounds will start packing on. You can ask any bodybuilder who is trying to gain muscle and has to calculate how much they need to eat to gain and has the opposite of usual problem. Energy Balance IS a thing.
Nice post! I'm not a Maintenance Phase listener, but I have seen some online discourse about this particular episode and was googling around to see if anyone had bothered to address some of the claims from the episode that didn’t make sense to me. I hope to make some time to check out the sources you cited here.
One thing I did want to point out is that I’m fairly certain that Hobbes and Gordon are actually technically correct when they say that the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to open systems like the human body (I’m saying this based off of what I half-remember from my only semester of thermodynamics, and what I’ve read on Wikipedia), in the sense that the first law is only even really *defined* for closed systems.
However, what they seem to be getting at is that the principles of thermodynamics in general, and conservation of mass and energy in particular, don’t apply to open systems, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Not really related, but thing that you quoted from the episode, and I thought was bizarre, was Hobbes' statement that: "The amounts of weight that people are able to keep off over the long term are relatively small. It's like people that have lost 10% to 20% of their body weight."
In what world is 20% loss of body weight not significant?? I’m 5’10” and about 200 lbs, so losing 15% of my body weight (down to 170 lbs) would bring my BMI from upper end of “overweight” to upper end of “normal”. Now, I don't think BMI is a very useful metric for individual people, but that amount of weight loss would have a very substantial impact on how my body looks and feels! I’m not particularly interested in losing weight at the moment, but the claim 10-20% is a “relatively small” amount makes very little sense to me. This wasn’t really related to anything you wrote, but seeing you quote it reminded me what an odd statement it was to begin with.
Anyhow, thanks for digging into the claims made into the episode. I’m looking forward to making time to read more of your Substack posts.
Hey thanks for reading and for commenting! I am not a physicist so I defer to what Kevin Hall and other experts say about this but I agree with you that this first law of thermodynamics thing is a strange debate that is mostly gish gallop. People throw it out there as part of an attempt to discredit CICO, but they don't explain how a system could possibly create matter out of nothing. Like, it's quite literally impossible for the body to create fat out of nothing. Just because it is hard to measure precisely the energy in and the energy out does not mean that the law of energy balance does not hold!
And yes, one of the things that Hobbes does (quite effectively, really) is to say things that are totally normal in a way that makes them sound absurd or to take things that are actually quite substantial and minimize them. He could say the same thing with different vocal intonation and convince his fans of two different things depending on which they hear. It's wild!
Thank you for commenting and engaging! I love it!
Thank you so much for this. I listened to this podcast as it came highly recommended and found myself sputtering and yelling at my phone especially at this episode . You have articulated my sputtering far more thoroughly than I ever could have.
Hah, welcome to the club! I'm glad you found this and glad that it articulated your thoughts!
And now serious yet stupid question! “Metabolism is complex but also well understood.” - is it really? I don’t know, but was under impression that it’s something still mysterious and that’s why set-point theory emerged, to explain irregularities
This is a good question! I think this is where we get into the difference between understanding the mechanisms and understanding individual variance. Scientists for sure know a lot about the chemical processes that we call "metabolism", but that doesn't mean that we can explain exactly why it varies from human to human. This is partly because there is some randomness inherent in anything biological. I suppose it's possible that some day we will be all-knowing to the extent that we can say exactly why one person's metabolism differs from another, but I think that's highly unlikely. It's akin to predicting the future, in my mind!
On emotional level it’s sort of relief to learn that losing weight is possible after all. It’s like I can accept myself as fat person (and I do accept myself as fat person), but there are very objective reasons why I’d prefer to not be fat, like: moving is harder, I take more space. Like with any disability activism, social model of disability doesn’t answers all struggles, because some are intrinsic to condition. I don’t understand why Michael and Aubrey completely cut their viewers off hope that change is possible.
I agree with you! It doesn't have to be either/or. We can work to end discrimination against fat people while still allowing that there are some reasons why some people might want to lose weight for health reasons. Just because weight =/= health does not mean that there may be health benefits for some people to losing weight. And, most importantly, if we truly believe in bodily autonomy, people choosing to do things to lose some fat is not for Aubrey or Michael to judge!
Learning a lot from your substack and it’s opening my eyes about MP’s level of “expertise” … but I have to defend them here in that they often say explicitly that it’s not for them to say or judge if anyone should lose weight. That this is an individual decision.
I agree they do say that!
I like calories labels, because I want to know how much and what food should I eat to not be hungry
I think that's a great point! Knowledge is power!
Your analogy to a financial consultant at the end is great - it perfectly captures why “CICO” is correct but not always very helpful. I wish MT could handle this level of nuance!
Thank you!! I think analogies are really good tools for explaining concepts, so I am really glad to hear that it worked for you! I similarly wish that MP could handle this level of nuance.
Came here from She's A Beast, great debunking. I do not follow this podcast, but I was curious because in my home country, Romania, there are plenty of folks that spread such misinformation online. Everyone skims an article, they get to the Discussions (maybe) part of it, then Conclusion, wrap it up and present it to you as factual evidence.
I recently listened to a gym enthusiast advertising focusing solely on calories when eating - because the oatmeal that you prepare with milk and put some banana in, coupled with a spoon of honey will in fact be less healthy (= more calories) than a proteic bar from Aldi that has 50 unknown ingredients, toppled with some protein shake made with ultraprocessed "milk" (almond milk exists, but how much of the one we drink is actual almond milk?)
The misinformation they advance in the name of health is absurd.
Thank you for reading! She's A Beast is awesome. I'm really glad she's out there creating such quality content. I totally agree with you about skimming an article or just reading the abstract. Yikes, that gym enthusiast sounds familiar, which is pretty telling! I'm hoping we can start to repair the disconnect between science and the public which is enabling all of this health misinformation to spread.
Really great critique of their podcast. The only comment I have is that I would have liked timestamps for where you quoted the hosts so readers can jump immediately to that point in the episode. Looking forward to more posts, especially about the Ozempic episode.
Thank you! And that's a great suggestion. I was working directly with the transcript, but I think I could figure out how to add the time stamps, too!
The study you cite about long term weight loss being possible for about 20% of people seems strange. It appears to say that long term weight loss means "10% of body weight off for 1 year". One year does not seem particularly long term at all.
Agreed! This is the definition that Aubrey and Michael stated in a previous episode. The problem is we don't really have a definition of "successful weight loss" that is clinically agreed upon, so it makes it hard to measure. I wrote about this in the previous post, actually!
It's also nearly 20 years old. We should have way more information from that registry by now. Do you know what happened to it?
It's ongoing! Still putting out research. http://nwcr.ws/Research/default.htm
They published a follow-up in 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24355667/). I can email you the pdf if you don't have access!