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Comment on The Inanity of Overeating (calories and thermodynamics)

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He contradicts his argument in the first paragraphs.

1) Obese people tend to be weight stable for long periods of their life, just like lean people. So when they’re weight stable, the obese and overweight are obviously in energy balance.

2) If you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every two years. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories.

There is no contradiction. The second paragraph is just paraphrasing the standard calorie-in->energy-out theory of weight gain and averaging the 'graph' of weight gain for analytic purposes. Ie. he never states that you are storing exactly 19 calories per day, simply that over 20 years, you are storing an 'average' of 19 calories per day. This is a very normal way to discuss these numbers. For example, a scientist might describe the PHV (pubertal height velocity) of a typical male as 9cm/year but these are growth spurts and are not actually continuous.

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