Harry Veeder wrote: >>> His hypothesis is that you always eat more to compensate for exercise. >>> Apparently he has never met manual laborers. > >I've seen fat manual laborers. >Perhaps you mean people in forced labour camps?
I meant old fashioned manual laborers such as the people who built the transcontinental railroad, or Japanese farmers before the 1950s. Modern laborers have machinery to do most of the heavy lifting, digging and so on. Someone else commented that the phenomenon Taubes described is real: people do tend to have a "setpoint" weight they go back to. That has been widely observed. Taubes is partly right, and for that matter some of his claims about sloppy cold fusion experiments were right. It is a matter of emphasis. Taubes seems to believe that it is a law of nature that you cannot lose weight by exercising. It NEVER works. This is an absurd exaggeration. He wrote a whole book about a fact that I can summarize in a paragraph: When you exercise you get hungry. Some people respond by eating more, so even though they exercise, they do not lose weight. So, if you are exercising to lose weight, you need to watch your diet as well. This is not a profound revelation. Taubes also noted that eating lots of protein makes you thin -- the Atkins diet works. This has been common knowledge for a long time. It isn't good for you, and the obverse claim, that eating nothing but bread, potatoes or rice makes you fat, is absurd. Peasants are not fat. The other point he fails to realize is that if you work hard enough, for many hours a day, you will get thin no matter how much you eat. Fat soldiers in basic training always lose weight. One hour a day may not do it, but 8 to 12 hours sure will. His comments about the body "compelling" bicycle riders to exercise are simply ridiculous. Anyone can be a fat slob, and anyone can be motivated to exercise. All prehistoric people in natural circumstances were thin. - Jed
