I think you may have misunderstood me. Note that I'm not saying his method
is bad. Seems interesting, and probably works for many people. (Whether or
not it works seems to be much more a question of personality than anything
else.) But he's discrediting other methods based on his "system
engineering" -- which I think is not good enough to tell anything about
many of the other methods. His model is not good enough to explain why his
method works (he doesn't really use it for that either) and it definitely
does not explain why the others should not work. So I'm not talking about
the method (which is what you are describing), I'm talking about the model.

His "method" doesn't use his model at all. Basically, he measures weight,
and if it's too much, he reduces the intake. It's as simple as that. This
done rigorously can probably be quite effective. But it has not much to do
with his model. And I'm pretty sure that pretty much everybody could tell
you that this could work, without any system engineering background.

A number of other methods are based on assumptions about digestion and
metabolism (responsible for what happens with incoming matter) -- whether
that matter gets transformed into energy (which gets used), whether it gets
"stored" (that is, weight gain) or whether it gets exhausted (that would be
the output that he ignores). He says those other methods are all crap,
basically -- yet his model doesn't even start to describe the mechanisms
that are responsible for transforming incoming matter into stored matter or
into energy or leave it going out.

His method doesn't include modifications to the metabolism or to the
digestion at all. This possibly can be explained with a relative lack of
familiarity with the involved processes, as opposed to a higher familiarity
with simple systems engineering. Yet it is quite possible that a method
that results in a modified metabolism or digestion could have equally good
effects, or maybe better ones, and he simply ignores that. 

Again, I'm looking at it from a system engineering point of view. The model
is never perfect, but I need to know what the model can do and what it
can't do -- and use it properly. Using it for what it can't do is bad
system engineering. I can still get to results that work; the fact that it
works doesn't make it necessarily good system engineering.

I think for further discussion we would have to take his text and get into
the details. Not sure this is the right place here (even though the
approach would be a system engineering approach that is useful for many
engineering tasks).

Gerhard


M. Adam Davis wrote:

> Interesting.  [...]

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