Taubes says calories-in/calories-out is a damaging theory.
It reinforces what appears to be obvious, which is:

“Obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth”

He says it is Harmful because…
It is partly responsible for the growing number of obese;
It directs attention away from the real reasons we get fa;,
It reinforces the perception that fat people have no one to blame but themselves.

Instead of making us question our assumptions
about calories-in/calories-out..... .

...The fact that eating less FAILS as a CURE for obesity
is taken as evidence that fat people
are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation
and they are blamed for it.

Taubes says

“There has to be a reason…
why anyone would eat more calories than he or she expends,
particularly since the penalty for doing so is
to suffer the physical and emotional cruelties of obesity.
There must be a defect involved somewhere;
the question is where.”

“The logic of calories-in/calories-out
allows only one acceptable answer to this question.
The defect cannot lie in the body—in the enzymes and hormones
that control how our bodies turn what is eaten into fat—
--because this would imply that something other than overeating
was fundamentally responsible for making us fat.
And that’s not allowed.

So the problem must lie in the brain.
And more precisely, in behavior,
which makes it an issue of character.

So, both eating too much and exercising too little are Behaviors,
not Physiological states,
a fact made even more obvious by the use of the…terms -- gluttony and sloth.”

Suggesting as an answer that fat people
respond to food restriction just as animals do
--that they reduce their energy expenditure
while experiencing increased hunger—
opens up the possibility that
the same physiologic mechanism that drives fat people
to hold onto their fat—even when semi-starved—
--might be the cause of their obesity in the first place.

This thinking is not allowed under the calories-in/calories-out theory.
So instead it is said the diet didn’t work
because the fat persons failed to stay on it.
They are blamed lack of willpower,
a lack of strength of character
to eat in moderation the way lean people do.

Once the fundamental cause of obesity
is established as overeating, 
blaming behavior—a lack of character and willpower—
is the only acceptable explanation.
The fat have a “perverted appetite”.

Taubes talks about the History of how this “insidious logic”
invaded the American science community in the 1920s,
and continued through the second world war.

He says the only thing different now
is that experts word it in less demeaning terms.
Like referring to obesity as an Eating Disorder,
which has become common since the 1960s. 
 He says by the 1970s “Behavioral Medicine” emerged to treat fat people with
“behavioral therapies” which are ways to make the fat eat like the lean.
When speaking of these behavioral treatments, Taubes says

“None of these therapies has ever been shown to work..
even so..many are still with us today.”

Taubes says that today most of the leading authorities on obesity
are psychologists and psychiatrists…
people whose expertise is in the ways of the mind,
not of the body.

He points out

“Imagine how many more dead diabetics we’d have
if victims of that disease
were treated by psychologists instead of physicians.

And yet diabetes and obesity are so closely linked…
...that some authorities have taken to calling the two disorders “diabesity”,
as though they’re two sides of the same pathological coin,
which they assuredly are.”

Taubes concludes with

“So long as we believe that people get fat because they overeat,
because they take in more calories than they expend,
we’re putting the ultimate blame on a mental state, a weakness of character,
and we’re leaving human biology out of the equation entirely.”

He says it’s a mistake to think this way,
and he will give us a better way to think about it in the rest of the book.

This chapter very much rings true for me.

I have a life-time of personal experience
in being blamed for failing to eat in moderation,
despite extensive and almost continual efforts to do so.

For me, this started at puberty and continued until
this present time when I began weighing in the normal range.

 I’ve experienced this issue with regards to
parents, siblings, boyfriends, husband, children, and other relatives;
friends, acquaintances, and strangers, teachers, potential employers,
Doctors, Psychologists, “Eating Disorder” specialists, Diet Counselors,
but most of all with my own accountability.

Details of my History are in the "About Me" section.
Personally, I’d very much like to have a better way to think about it.

Taubes says,

“the energy we consume
and the energy we expend
are dependent on each other….

These are dependent variables, not independent variables.
Change one, and the other changes to compensate.

To a great extent…the energy we expend from day-to-day
and week-to-week will determine how much we consume,
....while the energy we consume and make available to our cells…
will determine how much we expend.

The two are that intimately linked.
Anyone who argues differently is treating an extraordinarily complex
living organism as though it were a simple mechanical device.”

A 2007 article by the dean of Harvard Medical school and his wife,
who specialized in obesity research said

“An animal whose food is suddenly restricted
tends to reduce its energy expenditure
both by being less active
and by slowing energy use in cells, thereby limiting weight loss.

It also experiences increased hunger
so that once the restriction ends,
it will eat more than its prior norm until the earlier weight is attained.”

Taubes says  that the diet advice
given by our Health Authorities is wrong;

“eating less and/or exercising more
is not a viable treatment for obesity or overweight
and shouldn’t be considered as such.

It might have short-term effects…
Eventually, our bodies compensate.”

I believe Taubes is correct in his statements here,
and I know that, in my own body,
my food-intake and physical activity are connected.

After a day, or days, of little food-intake
I feel more tired and sleepy,
and I don’t feel energetic enough to accomplish my normal tasks,
let alone add in extra physical activities
I find that I can “push through these physical feelings” for awhile,
but exhaustion always seems to catch up with me.

After days of a great deal of physical activity,
I find myself ravenously hungry.
I can choose not to eat extra food….although it is difficult,
but eventually if I don’t eat more food
I wind up taking a very long nap….
which, of course, reduces the physical energy I’m using.

I’ve now had 5 full years of maintaining a large weight-loss
by eating less and exercising more.
I can report that this appears to work better in the short-term
than in the long-term for my own body,

During the past 3 years, each year it has become more
difficult to eat only the amount of food it takes to maintain my current weight,
AND, each year, I have found myself with less and less energy
for physical activities.

I am looking for Alternatives,
which is one reason that I am interested in the theories in this book.

Taubes starts out

“The very notion that we get fat because we consume more calories
than we expend would not exist without the misapplied belief
that the laws of thermodynamics make it true.
…
Obesity is not a disorder of energy balance,
or calories-in/calories-out or overeating,
and thermodynamics has nothing to do with this.”

There are three laws of thermodynamics.

“The first one…is known as the law of energy conservation:
all it says is that energy is neither created nor destroyed
but can only change from one form to another.”

He goes on

“All the first law says is that if something gets more or less massive,
then more energy or less energy has to enter it than leave it.
It says nothing about why this happens.
It says nothing about cause and effect.

It doesn’t tell us why anything happens;
it only tells us what has to happen
if that thing happens.
A logician would say that it contains no causal information.”

As an example,
Taubes suggests that instead of talking about why we get fat,
we could talk about why a room gets crowded.
In this example the energy we’re discussing is energy in entire people,
rather than just their fat.

So, we want to know why this room is crowded and so overstuffed with energy (people).

If I said, “the room is crowded because more people entered than left,”

You’d say…”Of course…But Why?”

If I then said, “rooms that have more people enter than leave
will become more crowded. There’s no getting around
the laws of thermodynamics”.

You’d say…”So what.?”…because I still haven’t given you any reason why.
I’m just repeating the obvious.

Taubes says

“This is what happens when thermodynamics is used to conclude
that overeating makes us fat.
Thermodynamics tells us that if we get fatter and heavier,
more energy enters our body than leaves it.
Overeating means we’re consuming more energy than we’re expending.
It says the same thing in a different way.

Neither happens to answer the question why.
Why do we take in more energy than we expend?
Why do we overeat?
Why do we get fatter?”

He goes on:

"The vast majority of experts who say that we get fat
because we overeat
or we get fat as a result of overeating
…are making the kind of mistake
that…should earn a failing grade in a high-school science class.”

Taubes says maybe we should start with the 1998 National Institutes of Health report
that said:

“Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from
an interaction of genotype and the environment.

Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete,
but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological,
metabolic and genetic factors.”

I’ve read many books and online discussions about
the First Law of Thermodynamics.
So, despite my lack of knowledge about such Scientific issues,
I am familiar with what that First Law says.

Usually in these discussions, people wind up arguing about things like
the differences between energy burned inside an open container
and energy burned inside a closed container.

Frankly, this tends to make my eyes glaze over,
and I want them to talk about something more interesting to me,
or at least, something I could better understand.

I like the fact that Taubes gives a simple explanation 
of the First Law of Thermodynamics
and how, while that Law is always True,
it doesn’t explain what causes of obesity.

Also I definitely agree that obesity is a very complicated disease
and that no one completely understands how and why it happens.

Taubes says

“Where on our bodies we get fat,
and even when it happens,
are important questions”

He says we’ve known since the 1930s
that there is a large genetic component in obesity,
That body types run in families.
similarities in body types between parents, children, and siblings
are "as striking as facial resemblance".

Taubes gives examples to show that genes that determine relative adiposity
don’t have to do with appetite or physical activity,
but rather, what the body does with its calories.
He points out how men and women fatten differently.

“when boys become men, they become taller, more muscular, and leaner
…when a girl enters puberty as slender as a boy, and leaves it with the
shapely figure of a woman, it’s not because of overeating or inactivity,
even though it’s mostly the fat she’s acquired that gives her that womanly
shape and she had to eat more calories than she expended to accommodate that fat.”

Taubes talks about how animals are bred for different fat content.
He talks about a disorder known as Lipodystrophy, where a person’s fat distribution
moves over time. Like thin on top half and obese on bottom half.
He says they didn’t lose fat on their upper bodies because they underate,
or gain fat on their lower half because they underate,
and asks:

“But why is it that when fat loss and fat gain are localized like this—
--when the obesity or extreme leanness covers only half the body,
or only a part and not all—they clearly have nothing to do with how much
the person ate or exercised; yet when the whole body becomes obese or lean,
the difference between calories consumed and expended supposedly explains it? “

Taubes talks about how HIV drugs cause a loss of fat in some body areas
and a gain of fat in other body areas, and says

“If we can’t blame..(this)…on calories-in/calories-out,
maybe we shouldn’t blame ours, either.”

 I think most everyone knows Genetics is involved in obesity, and
body types running in families is something I’ve observed all my life.

I hadn’t really tried to connect the puberty issue with the obesity issue, although .
of course I realized sex hormones are responsible for the different fat distributions
that occur then.

The extremely thin on top and extremely fat on bottom, and the HIV drug
changing fat distribution was interesting,
and I think that it is Obvious that no one could really blame
calories-in/calories-out for the specific examples Taubes uses in his chapter.

Comparing those examples with ordinary obesity is interesting,
and is a different way to think about those issues.

I am content with the way my fat is distributed on my own body,
I would just like to have less of it.
That is also how I felt when I was fat
I like my personal body shape, I like my small waist and larger hips.
I never wanted to be tall and willowy, or have big breasts and small hips.
I just wanted to keep my same basic hourglass shape….without the fat,
and preferably get my bottom half to be able to wear the same size as my top half…
This is something, by the way…that I have achieved
...and that I work to maintain.

Taubes’ point seems to be that genetics plays a large part
in how much Fat we have, and the places where our Fat is distributed.
Also that hormones play a large part in where and when Fat is
distributed on males and females at puberty.

This IS the norm for everyone.

Taubes also discusses the fact that there are diseases and treatments of diseases
that also influence how much fat one has and where it is distributed on one’s body.

Pretty much all morbidly obese people ---like on the Biggest Loser --
look similar, when they are that fat.
But what I’ve observed is that fat people do carry their weight in different places,
for example some fat women have almost skinny legs and arms
with barrel chests and shoulders; some have enormous round bellies
with smaller chests and hips,
and some have large breasts and small hips, and others have large hips and small breasts,
Others have a giant hourglass shape, some top heavy, and some bottom heavy.

All of these body types can be very fat,
but with fat distributed differently on their bodies.
The way this fat is distributed is due to their genetics.

I think here Taubes is trying to get us to think about the fact that fat accumulation
is influenced by more factors than just what we eat and how much we exercise.

Taubes begins with the Theory that 1 lb of fat = 3500 calories.
Based on this, one only needs to overeat an average of 20 calories a day
to gain 2 lbs a year, and get from a lean 25 year old to an obese 50 year old.

20 calories is less than a bite of a hamburger,
3 potato chips, or 3 small bites of an apple.
He says that under this Theory..

"One or two bites or swallows to many (out of the hundred or two
we might take to consume a day’s worth of sustenance) and we’re doomed.

If the difference between eating not too much and eating too much
is less than a hundredth of the total amount of calories we consume,
and that in turn has to be matched with our energy expenditure,
to which we are, for the most part, completely in the dark,
how can anyone possibly eat with such accuracy?

To put it simply, the question we should be asking
is not why some of we get fat,
but how any of us avoids this fate.”

Taubes quotes a leading 1936 US authority on nutrition and metabolism,
who said

"We do not yet know why certain individuals grow fat.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we do not know
why all the individuals in this over-nourished community do not grow fat.
…..there is no stranger phenomena that the maintenance of a constant body weight
under marked variation in bodily activity and food consumption.”

Taubes surmises--perhaps we maintain our energy balance by watching the scale
or how our clothing fits,
but he points out that animals don’t do that.

He asks

“if eating in moderation means we consciously err on the side of too little food,
why don’t we all end up so lean that we appear emaciated.?
The arithmetic of calories-in/calories-out doesn’t differentiate
between losing and gaining weight;
it says only that we must match calories consumed to calories expended.”

Taubes ends the chapter with

"Surely something else is determining whether we gain fair or lose it,
not just the conscious or unconscious balancing act
of matching calories consumed and expended.”

 I’ve discussed my own experience with this in posts above,
Taubes’ brings up interesting points, and I cannot help but agree with them,
although I don’t feel at all certain that I’m going to totally agree with his end result.