Why Governments Like the Thermodynamic Theory of Weight Management

The thermodynamic theory of weight management is the one behind "eat less, exercise more". It is the preferred theory of weight management of governments everywhere, which alone ought to make you suspicious. Why do governments like it?

Let’s suppose that the human body responds continuously to changes in exercise and diet. Eat a little less, you’ll lose a couple of grams; walk a little further, you’ll lose another couple of grams. And all four of those grams will stay off. Eat less, exercise more, however little, and you will lose weight slowly and surely. What are the implications for public policy? You don’t need trainers, gyms, sports parks or special advice. Drink low-fat milk and get off at the stop before your regular stop. Keep that up for ten years and you will lose a stone. Of course, that 3,000 calorie Christmas dinner will blow months of gradual weight loss out of the window. You must be ever vigilant. You can’t weaken once. Failure is clearly down to your lack of self-discipline, but don’t fret, you can always start all over again. How useful: a government policy that costs nothing and blames the citizen when it fails. That doesn’t happen often.

Now let’s suppose the body does not react continuously to changes in exercise and calorie intake. It’s a local equilibrium machine, which means that if you eat a little more, it will speed up to burn it off; if you eat a little less it will slow down to conserve; if you exercise it will prompt you to eat a little more; and if you don’t exercise, it will ease back on the promptings. In this case, not eating that croissant and walking the extra quarter-mile will make no difference at all. You need to shake your body off its equilibrium and take it to another one at a lower weight and body fat ratio. That is going to mean a discontinuous change in diet and exercise routine. This is not easy for anyone, as adult lives are generally only manageable by routine, and can cause all sorts of insecurities and upsets with partners. Plus you know nothing about diet and serious exercise, so you need a trainer for a while – and now we have a public policy problem. Good trainers cost money and don’t work for the NHS (though it might be cheaper if they did and the NHS stopped spending hundreds of millions on drugs with names ending in ..statin and ..formin).

So that’s why governments believe what they do about diet and exercise. Not because it’s true, but because it gets them off the hook of having to know something and provide facilities and training, instead of spending the money on something useful like a huge computer project that fails but gets the senior Civil Servant a partnership with a top five consultancy. Because they can blame you for lack of self-discipline and moral fibre, instead of themselves for failing to provide useful advice, facilities and for creating an economy that consists more or less entirely of low-calorie-burning jobs.