Weight Loss

This was funny:

The story of the formely 400-pound Arkansas inmate now suing the county because he lost 100 pounds in jail that only lets him eat about 3,000 kcal/day . . . has been making the rounds recently. Now, it is certainly astonishing how the physical world behaves the way that the laws of physics predict it does, and thermodynamics is no exception. There are quite a few fat people out there who claim, in all apparent seriousness, that food consumption has no causal relationship to their weight and that they maintain their bulk by eating maybe only 1,500 kcal/day. However, none of these people has ever been able to do this under controlled conditions where they can't sneak in snacks. . . . . And of course doing so would be an instant Nobel prize in both physics and medicine (and Randi prize, and what else) for establishing that a human body is able to generate energy out of thin air, so I'm pretty confident to be that none of these guys will ever do it.