The Inanity of Overeating (calories and thermodynamics)

"Good Calorie, Bad Calories" was a pivotal book for me. It freed me up. I realised that much of what we're told about nutrition is backed by bad science.<p>Since then I've spent the last few years reading everything I can lay my hands on and I wrote up what I'd found in a document for friends and family: <a href="http://bit.ly/cxZNG9" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/cxZNG9</a><p>I await Taubes' next book with interest.

He contradicts his argument in the first paragraphs.<p>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.<p>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.

I think I might just buy Good Calories, Bad Calories after reading this. It might not tell me anything I haven't learned indirectly through other writers but if it's written as well as this blog post that will justify its value alone.<p>Looking forward to the new book incidentally, and hoping it isn't a content-less and repetitive discussion of magazine clippings as this kind of book can often be (I have no reason to suspect it will be, beyond bad experiences with other books).

TL:DR;<p>Instead of just stating that overeating causes our obesity, we should be asking ourselves why we overeat, which is a much more complicated question.<p>I was disappointed it took that long of a post to reach that point. I was hoping to learn something interesting about thermodynamics in the body.