Of course, it’s not better. There is no way around the laws of thermodynamics. Weight loss is a measure of taking in fewer calories than you burn. That’s the formulae.

That said, intermittent fasting can be a great way for some people to manage their caloric intake. Some people just find it easier to manage their calories by eating once or twice a day and restricting themselves at others.

At the end of the day, though it’s not meant to be a panacea, it’s a tool to be used for those that prefer it to other options.

The one that says you cannot burn more calories than your body uses and you have to burn more calories than food you eat. It’s just tongue in cheek that the amount of energy in a (closed) system is conserved.

Of course one question is, does intermittent fasting somehow cause you to increase your base metabolic rate or cause you to digest your food less effectively per unit of food eaten, which could still satisfy thermodynamic constraints while still having an apparently larger effect. This study indicates that at a macro level, people do not have more success with this strategy vs traditional calorie restrictions, which do not support either hypothesis. They don’t disprove the hypotheses, but you don’t disprove such things, only support them. This doesn’t support them.

What you’ve stated is not a law of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics aren’t tongue in cheek. The first law of thermodynamics, which is the one often misused to tell us that calories are the only thing that matter, states that within an isolated system, the total energy of a system is constant. It’s well defined. The human body isn’t an isolated system.

Our bodies don’t burrn calories, and you are right in saying that we do indeed eat food, not calories.

Sort of. Thermodynamics still definitely plays a role. You cannot have more calories than you ingest, and over time, you cannot perform more work than electrochemically possible; this is true precisely because of the laws described by thermodynamic constraints.

The laws of thermodynamics aren’t tongue in cheek. The poster saying you can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics I took to mean they’re making a tongue in cheek response; in other words, they’re sort of being witty and saying the reason this finding was observed is because of the fundamental laws governing energy consumption and use in the human body. That absolutely is rhetorically meeting the definition of tongue in cheek.

A calorie is a unit of heat energy. We cannot ingest calories since it has no rest mass. It is a ridiculous simplification of our biology.

We have to disagree on the wit of the poster.