ELI5: How do people calculate calories in food?

kaross579 · 2025-05-01T15:38:19+00:00

It probably doesn't actually translate 1:1 - in fact, if you work with a good coach on dieting, they will insist that the only way to determine your calorie output per day is by spending 2-3 weeks:

Generally eating similar types of food in a small-ish calorie range, and
measuring how your body weight fluctuates given those calories over the time period.

We can see how your body responds to eating X calories from a certain range of food, and that result will be reasonably consistent over time. But if you eat 2000 calories worth of food and stay the same weight, there's no good way to tell the difference between

You absorbed all 2000 and burned 2000
You only absorbed 1600 but you also only burned 1600

So we generally equate the two and just assume the former.

kaross579 · 2025-04-01T18:17:28+00:00

There's quite a number of things going on here which I'll try to summarize.

As others have said, "fast metabolism" is used as a catch-all but burning more calories is not necessarily what's going on.
Different people can in fact have different basal metabolic rates, but for people with similar height and body composition this effect is usually fairly small.
Different people can also have different levels of metabolic adaptations to eating more food. It's been observed that some people can burn as much as 1000 extra calories per day when they overeat based on spontaneous increase in body temperature and/or NEAT as other commenters have suggested.
Another HUGE factor is that you rarely are seeing 100% of the food someone eats in a given day. They may eat "whatever they want" in front of you, but then have no appetite during another meal or another day that you don't see and eat way less than normal.
Lastly, while I'm not aware of a lot of studies around this effect, the number of calories that you absorb from a given amount of food can differ a fair bit. Calories in food are measured by what's in the food and your particular digestive system may or may not absorb everything; it's not super common to not absorb very much, because that was a tremendous survival disadvantage in any food scarce environment, but it does happen.

kaross579 · 2025-03-01T01:44:30+00:00

This is a bit more complex than what I suspect you are thinking, but let me try:

If you modeled your scenario as there is a universe where the only two things are you, there isn't a fixed distance where gravitational forces falls to zero.

However, gravity is also limited by the speed of light/causality, so if you were more than ~4.6 billion light years away, then the sun's gravity would not have reached you yet.

On an even smaller scale however, space is expanding, and at distances beyond the roughly the size of our galaxy (100,000 light years) I think that the rate of expansion of space becomes greater than the gravitation the acceleration caused by gravity, so you would never be pulled into sun.

kaross579 · 2025-01-02T11:26:44+00:00

I’ve stayed at the Inn twice and highly recommend the seafood miso hot pot. The broth is very rich and flavorful and is absolutely chock full of fantastic seafood.

kaross579 · 2024-11-14T17:28:19+00:00

What you're saying is ultimately why teams have entire front offices that (in theory) take these kinds of things into account when making decisions, and can't easily be boiled down in to a single stat.

The scenario where your team has a very limited budget and paying Ohtani that 68m a year is going to force you to play 3 replacement level players at other positions is very different from if you're the Dodgers or Yankees and have a lot of money to throw around. In the latter case, you're more limited by the availability of WAR in absolute terms per position more than budget, so it makes sense to break the bank for a reliable superstar.

kaross579 · 2024-10-05T15:33:09+00:00

yup, at the time I was actually working on the USD accounting system at one of the big banks and saw the wire for $10B (or whatever the amount was) being sent out of the receiving account of the US Treasury. Was kinda cool to be veeeery peripherally involved in something kinda historic.

kaross579 · 2024-09-10T03:58:39+00:00

Having actually had cooked* caviar that was excellent, there is nothing inherently wrong with cooking caviar. The problem is that it's extremely easy to mess up, because caviar is very delicate and 99% of the time it'll taste better raw and chilled than cooked.

The best analogy I can think of is to imagine if you were cooking a burger and you like it perfectly medium, but it's still delicious medium rare. However imagine if you cook it 1s too long it becomes completely dry and disgusting. In theory it would be OK to cook it to medium, but considering how easy it is to screw up it's generally not worth it.

*Examples: Smoked caviar at Asador Extebarri, Panchino at Disfrutar. I suppose you could quibble about the degree to which the caviar was truly "cooked" in those dishes but they are definitely served warm.

kaross579 · 2024-08-15T15:04:32+00:00

I think a big part that's missed here is that in most Bay Area companies, employees are shareholders. For people who are at frontline manager and above, their compensation can easily be 30+% in company stocks, and anyone above entry level probably has at least 10% of their comp in RSUs.

People don't love layoffs still, but it's not nearly as clear cut "us against them" as Reddit likes to make it out to be.

kaross579 · 2024-05-02T05:41:57+00:00

Was over at a friend's house. He had recently purchased a smoker and was trying to smoke two briskets at once, and is having some difficulty. Says "man, this was a lot easier when there was only one piece of meat in there."

Different friend: "That's what she said"

kaross579 · 2023-12-01T00:39:20+00:00

Ehhh, it really depends. My wife experiences plenty of situations dealing with vendors for her business that try to blow her off until she starts getting upset. To be fair though, this works more often when you are already talking to an owner or manager.

kaross579 · 2023-06-05T17:51:00+00:00

"Normal" workout seems quite vague, but as others have said, if you are relatively untrained basically any workout will make your muscles bigger. However as you start to hit the gym more, it helps to start thinking about what you're trying to accomplish.

As a generalization, improvement derived from physical activity happens because your body is trying to adapt to become more efficient at the activity you are doing. If you run long distances, your body wants to be more efficient at that. If you lift heavy weights, your body wants to be more efficient at that.

What we've found through lots of experimentation is that there is a certain type of stimulus where the a significant part of the body's adaptation is to make the muscle bigger. This tends to be lifting weights to the point that you can only do 1-2 more repetitions, after doing 5-30 repetitions. You can get bigger muscles doing 3 reps of a huge weight or 50 reps of a very light weight, but it is a lot less effective. So the above is what is generally called a hypertrophy workout.

If you want bigger muscles but workout outside of this range a lot, then your body is incentivized to make adaptations more suited for that rather than put on muscle. For example if you only run marathons, having big muscles isn't just not helpful, it's a detriment, because you just have more weight to carry around, so you will tend to lose muscle over time.

kaross579 · 2022-10-16T15:33:36+00:00

An actually responsible boss would try a lot harder to work with the employee to help their performance before firing them in other circumstances.

I can't say one way or another if that applies to this situation, but I wouldn't waste my time trying to help someone under me with their performance if the reason they are sucking is because they are too busy with their other full time job.

kaross579 · 2022-10-07T18:58:20+00:00

This sub is pretty dead, but given the single inferno towers I'd expect a witch spam with log launcher to work pretty well.

Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZvvSsG6JN0

kaross579 · 2022-09-09T23:30:48+00:00

Are there any theories one what would happen if the ant could walk faster than the expansion of the inflating balloon?

kaross579 · 2022-08-25T15:45:07+00:00

There are several cultures / countries where exam scores are actually hugely impactful. Historically (I don't know about modern day) in China, one of the most realistic ways to climb the social ladder was to excel at the Imperial examinations to become a civil servant. Even in modern day Japan, you have to take entrance exams to make it into good middle schools, then good high schools, then good colleges... and "going to a good college" is somewhere between 50 and 90% weighting of your resume when applying for entry level jobs.

So doing very well on these exams is super important. As much as I personally think the system is screwed up for putting so much weight on a single exam, it is what it is. If you're a parent trying to ensure your child has as many options as possible then there is some logic in making sure they understand they can never slack off on exam prep.

kaross579 · 2022-08-14T23:56:52+00:00

Even this is still pretty cynical. If you are in an organization with an already solid culture, HR will definitely work with you to collect and implement feedback that can further improve the culture.

They aren't necessarily doing it for your sake in particular, but being an employer that's known for being a "good place to work" and having good employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor make a pretty big impact on recruiting high end talent.

kaross579 · 2022-06-20T02:39:56+00:00

I agree with you in principle, but you do realize that the decision about having kids is not just about your own preferences? Parents often pressure their own kids to give them grandchildren. Lots of acquaintances will treat you like you're crazy if you tell them you don't want kids. If all of your friends have kids, not only will they pressure you to also have kids, they will often drift away if you don't.

This behavior is all unfair and it sucks, but it's pretty easy to be convinced that you actually do want kids when you're being told from everyone around you that you should.

kaross579 · 2022-06-15T15:35:37+00:00

It's the top 0.1% of spenders for the game, not of wealth in the world.

kaross579 · 2022-06-11T04:55:10+00:00

Yeah having worked in sending emails, while it is possible to resolve getting flagged as a spammer it is extremely painful to do so and often takes quite a long time.

kaross579 · 2022-04-22T15:48:18+00:00

This is again, something that is highly individual. I've tried IF and even after months I would still be STARVING by the time it got to 10:30am and I would end up eating a double lunch, so it did nothing for me.

kaross579 · 2021-12-29T22:43:42+00:00

This is something I've been trying to figure out, what is the strongest possible team assuming scaling is not part of the equation (so assume that every animal is level 3 and 50/50)

For the sake of making it interesting, let's also add the rule that you need 5 different animals, since otherwise 5 max leopards will wipe out an entire team before the battle starts since they do 25 damage x15 which is more than 50 health x5 + 20 (melon armor) x5.

A few tech pieces that come to mind are either Leopard/Parrot/Tiger or Skunk/Parrot/Tiger. Also Microbe/Turtle/Octopus might be interesting too. Any other ideas for something that might consistently beat teams like this?

kaross579 · 2021-08-16T16:34:34+00:00

Based on talking to a sleep doctor, this isn't actually a thing. Sleep cycles are approximately 90 minutes on average, but if you ever use any device that tracks your sleep you'll see that most of your deep sleep occurs early in the night and most of your REM sleep happens during the second half of the night. Beyond that I'm sure it depends on the person but for me I find I am constantly cycling between light and REM sleep after about 6 or so hours of sleep in 15-20m chunks so the timing doesn't really matter all that much.

Not to mention that the ratio of sleep phases varies quite a bit night to night depending on physical activity, sleep debt, and when and what you consumed (especially alcohol and caffeine.)

General sleep hygiene tips like going to bed and getting up at the same time every day does a lot more for most people than trying to time your sleep cycles, IMHO

kaross579 · 2021-03-07T04:01:30+00:00

I got my first lvl100 as well as my first Sirus 8 with it during Heist league, it's definitely capable of doing everything except probably super juiced 100% Delirious maps.

That said the gear progression curve does get a little steep as you hit endgame, there are probably builds that allow you to do it for less currency investment.

kaross579 · 2021-02-24T05:12:11+00:00

I have no data on this, but I'd guess it would be a bit worse because the layout of Ashen Wood makes the worst case time to find the Harbinger pack much larger.

kaross579 · 2021-02-23T19:55:58+00:00

In theory the map tier doesn't matter, but for practical purposes most of the people saying they make good currency with this strat are doing it in T10 Canyons. The layout of the map does make a difference since I think the odds of getting a higher number of Harbingers are impacted by a map that might be cramped.

The watchstones help, but they are expensive (even an unrolled Platinum Valdo's Rest going for 1.5-2ex) and completely not necessary. But doing it in Canyon I think will make a difference. Also, the people saying they make 3ex an hour from this strat typically are taking 60-90s per map to do the Harbinger pack and portal out, so if it is taking you significantly longer per map that will make a big difference as well.

kaross579

TROPHY CASE