Feeling a bit … heavy after all that Christmas stuffing?

A question: do we get fatter because we ‘overeat’?

Is the statement "I took in too many calories and so I got fatter" logically meaningful?

Or is it just vacuous logic, a statement which is true but says nothing of explanatory importance, a trivial rehashing of Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics??

For an energetic and interesting look at both Fatitude and Logic read the Inanity of Overeating by Gary Taubes:

Now, if you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year.

Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned – roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number…

So now the question: if all you have to do to become obese is store 20 extra calories each day on average in your fat tissue — 20 calories that you don’t mobilize and burn — what does overeating have to do with it? And why aren’t we all fat?

Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, a swallow or two of soda or fruit juice or milk or beer. It is an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, but to store as fat instead…

Gripping. Read the whole thing.

Then go for a long walk before you continue packing boxes uuurgh.