Blood and Guts and Ice Cream Dreams

Fat Haters & Thermodynamics…a troll ask

fatbodypolitics:

thisisthinprivilege:

I’m a physicist, and you’re fucking wrong. Sorry. The metabolism is a complex system with many variables. Efficiency of the system varies not only from person to person, but throughout someone’s life. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, the one that governs chemical reactions. You’re hung up on the first law, which is just a conservation law (bookkeeping).

Humans aren’t lawnmowers. God I hate educating you trolls. Spend three seconds thinking about this instead of copying a paragraph from your thermo 101 book. Do you really think a teenager has the same metabolic efficiency and rate as a 70 year-old man? A pregnant person as a non-pregnant person? Someone with a healing wound as is dieting)? 

The metabolism isn’t perfectly understood, definitely by people like you, and even by researchers. There are theories out there about a bodyweight setpoint around which a body fluctuates, but towards which a bodies tends, mostly programmed by genetics and partially by history and environment. This means the metabolism resists weight loss below a certain point, and it also resists weight GAIN above a certain point. 

Also, fat people haven’t been shown to, in general, eat any differently than thinner people. Which mean’s they’re not consuming a giant amount of food to make their bodies bigger. And 95% of diets fail long-term, which means  your little “it’s easy, eat less move more!” prescription doesn’t work, which, if you’re a scientist (please I hope you’re NOT), points to some kind of fatal flaw in your theory. 

Here’s a list of resources compiled by Michelle at the Fat Nutritionist. Which you probably won’t read, if you’re ignorant enough not to understand how the laws of thermodynamics apply to chemical reactions and human metabolic systems. But my readers are sharp and reflective folks (not literally, freshman!), so they might appreciate it.

(made rebloggable by request)

I seriously think people need to stop pretending they know how the theory of thermodynamics works. Every time you make this argument you prove you don’t. As it was stated above,

People are not lawnmowers.