Let me put it this way, on pg. 278 of "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
there is a reference to a study by Francis Benedict. In this study of
basal metabolism, men who weighted roughly 175 lbs consumed daily
sixteen to twenty-one hundred calories. That five hundred calorie is
approximately equivalent to a quarter pounder w/ cheese from Mc Donalds.
Those 175 pounders who ate the five hundred calories more, didn't gain
weight.

The point is that our bodies handle calories differently. An obese
person may or may not over eat, when compared with the general
population. Strictly speaking, it isn't the calories, but how the
calories are processed.

In article
<4393431b-d640-418d-ab68-d8a81b455f4a@o9g2000vbj.googlegroups.com>,

Don't do it on my account.
What I am saying, and you have such difficulty understanding, is that if
two people eat the same number of calories and one stays within the
recommended guide-lines and the other one becomes obese, while they
expend comparable calories, THEN it ain't the calories causing one of
them to gain weight.

And what is her motivation, and what kind of resources does she have
available?

And what was their motivation, and what kind of resources did they have
available?

Since you can't attack the message, you attack the messenger?

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science
of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/14000334
62/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261766861&sr=1-1

p.252
Chapter Fifteen
HUNGER
Khrushchev, too, looks like the kind of man his physicians must
continually try to diet, and historians will some day correlate these
sporadic deprivations, to which he submits "for his own good," with his
public tantrums. If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably
be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.
A.J. Libeling, The Earl of Louisiana, 1961

In October 1917, Francis Benedict, director of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington's Nutrition Laboratory (located, as it happens, in
Boston), put twelve young men on diets of roughly fourteen hundred to
twenty-one hundred calories a day with the intention of lowering their
body weights by 10 percent in a month. Their diets would then be
adjusted as necessary to maintain their reduced weights for another two
months, while Benedict and his colleagues meticulously recorded their
psychological and physiological responses. A second squad of twelve men
was studied as a comparison and then they were put on similar
calorie-restricted diets. The results were published a year later in, a
seven-hundred-page report entitled Human Vitality and Efficiency Under
Prolonged Restricted Diet.

Benedict hoped to establish whether humans could adjust to this lower
nutritional level and thrive. His subjects lost the expected weight, but
they complained constantly of hunger ‹"a continuous gnawing sensation in
the stomach," as described by the Carnegie report ‹ and of being cold to
the extent that several found it "almost impossible to keep warm, even
with an excessive amount of clothing." They also experienced a
30-percent decrease in metabolism. Indeed, Benedict's subjects reduced
their energy expenditure so dramatically that if they consumed more than
twenty-one hundred calories a day‹a third to a half less than they had
been eating prior to the experiment ‹ they would begin to regain the
weight they had lost. The men also experienced significant decreases in
blood pressure and pulse rate; they suffered from anemia, the inability
to concentrate, and marked weakness during physical activity. They also
experienced "a decrease in sexual interest and expression, which,
according to some of

HUNGER 253

the men, reached the point of obliteration." That these phenomena were
caused by the diet itself rather than the subsequent weight loss was
demonstrated by the experience of the second squad of men, who
manifested, according to the Carnegie report, "the whole picture .. .
with striking clearness" after only a few days of dieting.

"One general feature of the post-experimental history," the Carnegie
researchers reported, "is the excess eating immediately indulged in by
the men." Despite repeated cautions about the dangers of overindulgence
"after such a strict diet, the men " almost invariably over-ate." As the
Carnegie report put it, "the circumstances militated against" any
acquisition of  "new dietetic habits." In particular, the cravings for "
sweets and accessory foods of all kinds,"‹i.e., snacks‹were now free to
be indulged, and so they were. Perhaps for this reason, Benedict's young
subjects managed to regain all the lost weight and body fat in less than
two weeks.

Within another three weeks, they had gained, on average, eight pounds
more, and came out of this exercise in calorie restriction considerably
heavier than they went in. &quotIn practically every instance the weight
prior to the beginning of the experiment was reached almost immediately
and was usually materially exceeded," Benedict and his collagues wrote.

In 1944, Ancel Keys and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota set
out to replicate Benedict's experiment, although with more restrictive
diets and for a greater duration. Their goal was to reproduce and then
study the physiological and psychological effects of starvation of the
kind that Allied troops would likely confront throughout Europe as the
continent was liberated. Thirty-two young male conscientious objectors
would serve as "guinea pigs," the phrase Keys used in this context.

These volunteers would eventually spend twenty-four weeks on a
"semi-starvation diet," followed by another twelve to twenty weeks of
rehabilitation.

The subjects consumed an average of 1,570 calories each day, split
between two meals designed to represent the daily fare of European
famine areas. "The major food items served," the researchers noted,
"were whole-wheat bread, potatoes, cereals, and considerable amounts of
turnips and cabbage. Only token amounts of meats and dairy products were
provided."* This diet provided roughly half the calories that the
subjects had been consuming to maintain their weight. It was expected to
induce an

*The diet constituted roughly 400 calories a day of protein, 270
calories of fat, and 900 calories of carbohydrates.

254 OBESITY AND THE REGULATI ON OF WEIGHT

average weight loss of 20 percent ‹ or forty pounds in a two-hundred-
pounder ‹ aided by a routine that required the subjects to walk five to
six miles each day, which would burn off another two to three hundred
calories.

Keys's conscientious objectors lost, on average, a dozen pounds of fat in
the first twelve weeks of semi-starvation, which constituted more than
half of their original fat tissue, and they lost three more pounds of
body fat by the end of twenty-four weeks. But weight loss, once again,
was not the only physiological response to the diet. Nails grew slowly,
and hair fell out. If the men cut themselves shaving, they would bleed
less than expected, and take longer to heal. Pulse rates were markedly
reduced, as was the resting or basal metabolism, which is the energy
expended by the body at rest, twelve to eighteen hours after the last
meal. Reflexes slowed, as did most
voluntary movements: &quotAs starvation progressed, fewer and fewer
things could stimulate the men to overt action. They described their
increasing weakness, loss of ambition, narrowing of interests,
depression, irritability, and loss of libido as a pattern characteristic
of' growing old.'" And, like Benedict's subjects, the young men of the
Minnesota experiment complained persistently of being cold. Keys's
conscientious objectors reduced their total energy expenditure by over
half in response to a diet that gave them only half as many calories as
they would have preferred. This was a reasonable response to calorie
deprivation, as Keys and his colleagues explained, "in the sense that a
wise man reduces his expenditure when his income is cut."

More than fifty pages of the two-volume final report by Keys and his col-
leagues, The Biology of Human Starvation, document the "behavior and
complaints" induced by the constant and ravenous hunger that obsessed
the subjects. Food quickly became the subject of conversations and day-
dreams. The men compulsively collected recipes and studied cookbooks.
They chewed gum and drank coffee and water to excess; they watered
down their soups to make them last. The anticipation of being fed made
the hunger worse. The subjects came to dread waiting in line for their
meals and threw tantrums when the cafeteria staff seemed slow. Two
months into the semi-starvation period, a buddy system was initiated,
because the subjects could no longer be trusted to leave the laboratory
without breaking their diets.

Eventually, five of the subjects succumbed to what Keys and his col-
leagues called "character neurosis," to be distinguished from the "semi-
starvation neurosis" that all the subjects experienced; in two cases, it
"bordered on a psychosis." One subject failed to lose weight at the
expected rate, and by week three was suspected of cheating on the diet.

In week eight, he binged on sundaes, milk shakes, and penny candies,
broke down "weeping, [with] talk of suicide and threats of violence,"
and was committed to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital.
Another subject lasted until week seven, when "he suffered a sudden
'complete loss of willpower' and ate several cookies, a bag of popcorn,
and two overripe bananas before he could 'regain control' of himself." A
third subject took to chewing forty packs of gum a day. Since his weight
failed to drop significantly "in spite of drastic cuts in. his diet," he
was dropped from the study. For months afterward, "his neurotic
manifestations continued in full force." A fifth subject also failed to
lose weight, was suspected of cheating, and was dropped from the study.
With the relaxation of dietary restriction, Keys avoided the dietary
overindulgence problem that had beset Benedict's subjects by restricting
the rehabilitation diets to less than three thousand calories. Hunger
remained unappeased, however. For many of the subjects, the depression
deepened during this rehabilitation period. It was in the very first
week of rehabilitation, for instance, that yet another subject cracked ‹
his "personality deterioration culminated in two attempts at
self-mutilation."

Even during the last weeks of the Minnesota experiment, when the
subjects were finally allowed to eat to their hearts' content, they
remained perversely unsatisfied. Their food intake rose to "the
prodigious level of 8,000 calories a day." But many subjects insisted
that they were still hungry, "though incapable of ingesting more food."
And, once again, the men regained weight and body fat with remarkable
rapidity. By the end of the rehabilitation period, the subjects had
added an average often pounds of fat to their pre-experiment levels.
They weighed 5 percent more than they had when they arrived in
Minneapolis the year before; they had 50 percent more body fat.

These two experiments were the most meticulous ever performed on the
effects on body and mind of long-term low-calorie diets and weight
reduction. The subjects were selected to represent a range of
physiological types from lean to overweight (albeit all young, male, and
Caucasian). They were also chosen for a certain strength of character,
suggesting they could be trusted to follow the diets and remain
dedicated to the scientific goals at hand.

The diets may seem severe in the retelling, but, in fact, fourteen to
sixteen hundred calories a day for weight loss could be considered
generous compared with the eight-to-twelve-hundred-calorie diets that
are now commonly prescribed, what the 1998 Handbook of Obesity refers to
as "conventional

256
OBESITY AND THE REGULATION OF WEIGHT

reducing diets." Nonetheless, such diets were traditionally known as
semi-starvation diets, a term that has fallen out of use, perhaps
because it implies an unnatural and uncomfortable condition that few
individuals could be expected to endure for long.

In both experiments, even after the subjects lost weight and were merely
trying to maintain that loss, they were still required to eat
considerably fewer calories than they would have preferred, and were
still beset by what Keys and his colleagues had called the "persistent
clamor of hunger." Of equal importance, simply restraining their
appetites, independent of weight loss, resulted in a dramatic reduction
in energy expenditure. This could be reversed by adding calories back
into the diet, but then any weight or fat lost returned as well. One
lesson learned was that, for the weight reduction to be permanent, some
degree of semi-starvation has to be permanent. These experiments
indicated that would never be easy.

Obese patients also get hungry on semi-starvation diets. If they have to
restrict their calories to lose weight, then by definition they are
forcing themselves to eat less than they would otherwise prefer. Their
hunger is not being satisfied. As with lean subjects, their energy
expenditure on a semi-starvation diet also "diminishes proportionately
much more than the weight," as the Pittsburgh clinician Frank Evans
reported in 1929 of his obese subjects. This same observation was
reported in 1969 by George Bray, who was then at the Tufts University
School of Medicine in Boston, and who entitled his article, for just
this reason, "The Myth of Diet in the Management of Obesity." "There is
no investigator who has looked for this effect and failed to find it,"
the British obesity researcher John Garrow wrote in 1978.

The latest reiteration of these experiments, using obese subjects, was
conducted by Jules Hirsch at Rockefeller University, and the results
were published in The, New England journal of Medicine in 1995. Calorie
restriction in Hirsch's experiment resulted in disproportionate
reductions in energy expenditure and metabolic activity. Increasing
calorie consumption resulted in disproportionate increases in metabolic
activity.

Hirsch and his colleagues interpreted their observations to mean that
the human body seems surprisingly intent on maintaining its weight‹
resisting both weight gain and weight loss ‹ so that the obese remain
obese and the lean remain lean. As Hirsch explained it, the obese
individual appears to be somehow metabolically normal in the obese
state, just as Keys's and Benedict's young men were metabolically normal
in their lean or overweight states before their semi-starvation diets.
Once Hirsch's obese subjects took to restricting their calories,
however, they experienced what he called "all the physiological and
psychological concomitants of starvation."

A semi-starvation diet induces precisely that‹semi-starvation‹whether
the subject is obese or lean. "Of all the damn unsuccessful treatments,"
Hirsch later said, "the treatment of weight reduction by diet for obese
people just doesn't seem to work."

Over the course of a century, a paradox has emerged. Obesity, it has
been said, is caused, with rare exceptions, by an inability to eat in
moderation combined with a sedentary lifestyle. Those of us who gain
excessive weight consume more calories than we expend, creating a
positive caloric balance or a positive energy balance, and the
difference accumulates as excessive pounds of flesh. But if this
reconciles with the equally "indisputable" notion that "eating fewer
calories while increasing physical activity are the keys to controlling
body weight," as the 2005 USDA Dietary Guidelines/or Americans suggest,
then the problems of obesity and the obesity epidemic should be easy to
solve. Those few individuals for whom obesity is a preferred condition,
such as sumo wrestlers, would remain obese through their voluntary
program of overeating, and the rest would create a negative energy
balance, lose the excess weight, and return to leanness. The catch, as
Hirsch pointed out, is that this doesn't happen.

The documented failure of semi-starvation diets for the obese dates back
at least half a century. It begins with Albert Stunkard's analysis of
the relevant research in the mid-1950s, motivated by his desire to
resolve what he called the "paradox" between his own failure to reduce
obese patients successfully by diet at New York Hospital and "the
widespread assumption that such treatment was easy and effective."
Stunkard managed to locate eight reports in the literature that allowed
for an accurate assessment of whether semi-starvation diets worked. In
1959, he reported that the existing evidence confirmed his own failures:
semi-starvation diets were "remarkably ineffective" as a treatment for
obesity. Only 25 percent of the subjects discussed in these articles had
lost as much as twenty pounds on their semi-starvation diets, "a small
weight loss for the grossly overweight persons who are the subjects of
these reports." Only 5 percent successfully lost forty pounds. As for
Stunkard's own experience with a hundred obese patients, all prescribed
"balanced" diets of eight to fifteen hundred calories a day, "only 12%
were able to lose 20 Ib., and only i patient lost 40 Ib. ... Two years
after the end of treatment only two patients had maintained their weight
loss."*

* Though Stunkard's analysis has widely been perceived as a condemnation
of all methods of dietary treatment of obesity, the studies he reviewed
included only semi-starvation, calorie-restricted diets.