Weight Gain: You Can’t Deny It -- It’s the Diet

Re “The Real Skinny: Dieting Is Baloney,” by Sandy Szwarc, Commentary, July 21: I am a thin person. I run five days a week and eat a sensible but certainly not meager diet. I witness daily, however, the eating behaviors of overweight people, and guess what -- they eat a lot. They go back for a second plate at the buffet. They graze on fatty snack foods. They fill their plates with twice as many calories as they need.

People gain weight when they eat more calories than they burn; they lose weight when they eat fewer calories than they burn. Period.

Szwarc would have us believe that obese people, unlike everything else in the known universe, are able to defy the laws of physics. She should read up on the laws of conservation of mass/energy. Szwarc’s contention that fat people eat the same number of calories as thin people (and get as much exercise) is more than counterintuitive. It’s baloney.

Frances Segal

Laguna Niguel

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What on Earth possessed you to publish the ludicrous commentary by Szwarc alleging that diet has nothing to do with weight? I am a veteran of the diet wars, having lost 85 pounds two years ago and keeping it off so far. I lost weight using a scientific method of caloric intake control, and I can assure anybody that there is a 100% correlation between caloric intake and caloric output in exercise and a person’s weight.

I could predict almost to the ounce what my weight would be on the day of the week when I attended the clinic based on what I had eaten and how much I exercised.

Unfortunately, all the denial in the world can’t change the laws of thermodynamics.

Julia Dunphy

Pasadena