Some weight-loss physics...
Having recently embarked on a weight-loss plan to shed those unwanted Christmas kilos (or pounds if you're so inclined) I wanted to share a couple of physics related notes about dieting that I've picked up that help me to realise my goals.
E=mc^2 - An equation we've all seen, but few of us have understood. To give you the skinny (<- pun intended), it implies that mass and energy are interchangeable. This means that if your Energy delta for the day i.e. Energy In - Energy Out, is negative, then that leads to a reduction in mass, and vice-verse for those trying to gain weight e.g. bodybuilders. This is why it is so hard to gain a large amount of muscle at the same time as losing fat. You can't have your cake and eat it too (depending on your diet). The point of this is to show you that no matter what you eat, no matter how many supposed superfoods you put in your body, inevitably, it all comes down to simple physics. Corollary: Burn more energy than you consume to lose weight.
Mass is mass is mass - How many times have you heard someone say (or said yourself) "Urgh, that meal was so fatty, I'm gonna put on 2kg just from eating it..." Well... physically speaking, unless that meal had a mass of 2kg (which if so, congratulations, because that must have been hard to eat), then you could not have put on 2kg. Physics tells us that mass can't just be created, only transferred, and from my last point, you can see energy is related to mass... therefore mass can't just be created (so to speak). Simply speaking, if you stand on the scales with a burger in your hand, that's the absolute maximum you can weigh after eating it (I say maximum because most of it's mass will be converted to energy and used). So this leads me to my point that tiny cheats in your diet, shouldn't derail you, and aren't an excuse to quit, they just mean that you might not lose weight that day if it was energy-dense enough to balance your exercise. Corollary: Don't think that eating that one Tim-Tam (if you don't have these where you live, you need to Google them) is going to set your diet back a week, you aren't going to put on significant weight after eating one biscuit. N.B. This is not an excuse to pig-out, this is merely a reason not to get overly discouraged if you have a cupcake.
So with these couple of factoids in mind, go out and think about your diet a little differently, and let the simplicity of food wash over you and allow you realise that you can't argue with the laws of physics (unless you're Hawking of Einstein, they made Physics their bitch)