Maintenance Phase Reality Check: "The Trouble With Calories"
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.
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