In this chapter, Taubes’ focus is on “the elusive benefits of undereating”.
and says:

“Of all the reasons to question the idea that overeating causes obesity,
the most obvious has always been the fact that undereating doesn’t cure it.”

The chapter begins with a research project started in the early 1990s.
Twenty thousand women were told to eat a low-fat diet,
with lots of fruits, veggies and fiber, and received regular counseling
to help them stay on the diet.

They weren’t told to eat less, but they ate 360 less calories a day
which was about 20% less than the charts gave
as their daily weight-maintenance requirement.
But, after 8 years of this, the women lost only an average of 2 pounds each,
and their waist measurements increased,
suggesting that they lost muscle, not fat.

Taubes quotes some Experts who in 1959 studied all the medical literature
for research results on dieting and found those results were

“remarkably similar and remarkably poor”.

A 2007 review analyzed all the diet trials since 1980 and found the same thing.
Taubes says that the reality of this doesn’t keep Authorities
from recommending that people undereat to lose weight.
He quotes from medical textbooks that say..

”Dietary therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment,
and the reduction of energy intake continues to be
the basis of successful weight reduction programs”

But then later the same textbooks go on to say that the results

“are known to be poor and not long-lasting”.

He points out that if a you are stranded on a desert island and starved for months on end,
you will waste away, whether you were fat or thin to begin with.
But

“Try the same prescription in the real world, though,
and try to keep it up indefinitely—try to maintain the weight loss
—and it works very rarely indeed, if at all.”

Taubes says this isn’t surprising.

“most of us who are fat spend much of our lives trying to eat less.
If it doesn’t work when the motivation is …decades of
the negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity---.
social ostracism, physical impairment, increased rate of disease—
can we really expect it to work
just because an authority figure in a white coat insists we give it a try?.”

“the fat person who has never tried to undereat is a rare bird.
If you’re still fat…that’s a good reason to assume that
undereating failed to cure you of this particular affliction,
even if it has some short-term success
at treating the most conspicuous symptom—excess adiposity.”

Taubes notes that until the 1970s,
the medical term used for low-calorie diets was “semi-starvation” diets;
and the medical term for very low-calorie diets was “fasts”.
He says that experts say a diet has to be something we can follow for life
– a lifestyle program, but asks

“how is it possible to semi-starve ourselves or fast for more than a short time?"

Taubes ends the chapter by saying

“undereating isn’t a treatment or cure for obesity;
it’s a way of temporarily reducing the most obvious symptom.
And if undereating isn’t a treatment or a cure,
this certainly suggests that overeating is not a cause.”

Personally, I have to agree with Taubes here.
I’ve spent my entire life losing and re-gaining weight,
a few times involving 100 lbs, several times 50 lbs, and many times 10 to 20 lbs.
Until the present time I always regained all my lost weight and more.

For the past 5 years I’ve been able to maintain my current weight by “semi-starvation”,
which, as I’ve shared before, takes a lot of Effort, Focus and Acceptance.
I’ve learned that I cannot trust my body to tell me what or how much to eat.
Without conscious monitoring, the default choice of my body is always to “overeat”..
meaning …take in more energy than my body can use…and store it as fat.

It is true that “undereating” hasn’t “cured” my obesity,
it has only relieved me of the symptom of being fat.
Every day, my reduced obese body still wants me to eat far more than it can use up.

It’s a problem that I deal with every day.
Is low-carb a solution?
I don’t know.
However…..I do know a great many Ways-of-Eating that are NOT solutions.

In Chapter 2, Taubes uses the pre-1970s medical term
---“semi-starvation” when he refers to “undereating” or dieting.

I've been thinking more about this question as applied to me personally.
I think there can be little doubt
that my current, maintenance, eating-lifestyle is one of "semi-starvation".

My body wants me to eat far more than it can use,
which, of course, would result in weight-gain.
Since previously in my lifetime, I've regained more than 100 lbs more than once,
and 20 to 50 lbs more times that I can count,
I know this to be a True Personal Fact,
and according to the applicable Research
it is true for the majority of those who are "Reduced Obese".

In fact, I strongly identify with the subjects of that famous Keyes’ Starvation experiment.
The last part of that Study showed that when the semi-starved men were allowed
to again eat as they wished, they had insatiable appetites, yet never felt full.
Even five months later, some continued to have dysfunctional eating,
although many, after regaining their lost weight,
also regained some normalization of their eating.
So....how have I lived with this "semi-starvation" long-term -
- for more than the past six consecutive years,
and how do I plan to continue to live with it for the rest of my life?
I’ve found it necessary to Accept my own eating Realities,
and to be personally Accountable to myself for what I eat.
I’ve chosen to treat “Dieting”, and the issues surrounding it as a Hobby,
finding enjoyment and personal fulfillment in dealing with the issues…
learning more about them, reading the latest diet books,
sharing experiences and ideas with others.

Throughout my lifetime I have always had Hobbies.
Some of these are ....building stained glass windows,
building and collecting miniatures, gardening, cooking, sewing,
Play station RPG games, and many others.
Dieting is another one of these Hobbies.

 Now that I’ve retired from my law practice,
I have much more free time to spend on my Hobbies,
and so I’m currently doing that.
I will be talking more about Dieting as a Hobby
here on my personal thread,

Reading about new Concepts and trying them out,
is part of my ongoing Hobby.
It is part of my Lifestyle,
and it helps me live with “semi-starvation” long-term.
Of course….. if there is a way to maintain my current normal weight,
without the hunger and cravings of semi-starvation,
I want to know about it, and I want to make it part of my life.

This Chapter is filled with Examples that refute the Theory
that it is our "improved prosperity" or "toxic environment"
that has created the obesity epidemic.

Taubes says facts show that being fat
is often associated with poverty rather than merely with prosperity.
Examples of connections to poverty, obesity, and high carbohydrates are:

Pima Indians in Arizona
Sioux Indians, in South Dakota
1951 Naples, Italy
1959 Charleston, So Carolina
1960 Durban, So Africa
1961 Naura, the South Pacific
1961-63 Trinidad, West Indies
1963 Chili
1964-65 Johannesburg, So Africa
1965 Cherokee Indians in No Carolina
1969 Ghana, West Africa
1970 Lagos, Nigera
1971 Rarotonga, the South Pacific
1974 Kingston, Jamica
1974 Chili (again)
1978 Native American Tribes in Oklahoma
1981-83 Mexican Americans in Starr County, Texas

In all of these studies, a large percentage of these populations
were poor, many were physically active doing manual labor,
but were also fat.

2005 New England Journal of Medicine article
by Benjamin Caballero, at Johns Hopkins University
tells of his experience in Brazil,
of seeing starving children together with their fat mothers.

Taubes points out that this poses a challenge to the current "conventional wisdom

"If we believe the mothers were fat
because they ate too much,
and we know their children are thin and stunted
because they're not getting enough food,

we're assuming that the mothers' were willing
to starve their children so they could overeat.

This goes against everything we know about maternal behavior."

Chapter 1 is filled with examples of times and places where a large percentage
of the population were Obese, even though they were very poor
and had no access to our present “Toxic Environment.”

A great many of those Obese people were physically very active
doing hard manual labor. It was noted that there were instances in those populations,
like in Brazil, where while the majority of poor children were thin and malnourished,
as poor adults…and still malnourished…they became obese.

Taubes asks about the people he used as Examples….

”Why were they fat?”

They were physically very active,
and there was little food available to them.

The facts in those cases show that a simple explanation of….
“calories-in/calories-out”….doesn’t answer this question about those people.

Taubes noted that all of these Obese populations had something in common,
in that the majority of their nutrition came from carbohydrates.

Taubes says that Conventional Wisdom is handicapped with a
"flawed belief system" which insists that

"We get fat because we eat too much
and/or move too little,
and so the cure is to do the opposite."

This is the "energy balance" paradigm
which is also known as "calories-in/calories-out.

 I agree with Taubes when he says:

"this way of thinking about our weight is so compelling and pervasive
that it is virtually impossible nowadays NOT to believe it."

"Imagine a murder trial in which one credible witness after another
takes the stand and testifies that the subject was elsewhere
at the time of the killing and so had an airtight alibi,
and yet the jurors keep insisting that the defendant is guilty
because that's what they believed when the trial began."

Taubes says that this "flawed belief" is the "original sin", and says

"we're never going to solve our own weight problems,
let alone the societal problem of obesity and diabetes
and the diseases that accompany them
until we understand this and correct it."

He goes on to say

“the science tells us that obesity is ultimately
the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one --

specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion
caused by eating easily digestible carbohydrate-rich foods;
refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains,
starchy vegetables such as potatoes,
and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup.

These carbohydrates literally make us fat,
and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier
and they make us sedentary."

 Taubes says that until the mid 1960s, the conventional wisdom was

"Carbohydrate-rich foods
-- bread, pasta, potatoes, sweets, beer --
were seen to be uniquely fattening,
and if you wanted to avoid being fat,
you didn't eat them."

Taubes divides this book into two parts.
The first part presents the evidence against the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis.
It discusses many of the observations and facts of life, that this concept fails to explain. I
t discusses why we came to believe it anyway, and talks about the resulting mistakes.

The second part presents what the European medical researchers accepted before WWII.
Those medical researches started from the idea that obesity is fundamentally a disorder of
excess fat accumulation. However, due to that war, those researchers weren’t around in the
late 1950s and early 1960s when the question of what regulates fat accumulation was answered.

Taubes advises

“if your goal in reading this book is simply to be told the answer to the question
“What do I do to remain lean or lose the excess fat that I have” then this is it:
stay away from carbohydrate-rich foods, and the sweeter the food or the easier
it is to consume and diguest…the more likely it is to make you fat and the
more you should avoid it.”

Taubes says the social and moral implications of dependance on animal products
are important questions, but those issues don’t have a place in this scientifc
and medical discussion of why we get fat.

“In the more than six decades since the end of the Second World War,
when this question of what causes us to fatten---calories or carbohyrdates--
has been argued, it has often seemed like a religious issue rather than a scientific one.
So many different belief systems enter into the question of what constitutes a healthy diet
that the scientific question--why do we get fat?--has gotten lost along the way.

It's been overshadowed by ethical, moral, and socological considerations
that are valid in themselves and certainly worth discussing
but have nothing to do with the science itself
and arguably no place in a scientific inquiry.”
 

Good Calories Bad Calories was a lengthy book.
Dense with science, historical content and annotations.
Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It is shorter,
a book that doesn't require such an investment of time and effort.

Taubes says:

"I offer here the arguments against the conventional wisdom
distilled down to their essence."

He goes on:

“My one request is that you think critically while you’re reading.
I want you to keep asking yourself as you read whether what I’m saying really makes sense. To steal a phrase from Michael Pollan, this book is intended to be a thinker’s manifesto.
Its goal is to refute some of the misconceptions that pass for public-health
and medical advice in this country and around the world, and to arm you with the necessary information and logic to take your health and well-being into your own hands.”

So, I’m beginning with a comment about reading the book.

People are full of opinions which have been formed
by their exposure to information and personal experience.
Everyone who starts a new book brings those opinions with them,

To be open-minded, doesn’t mean we have no opinions.
People who are open to learn new things are faced with the task
of recognizing their own biases
and then mentally working to put those opinions aside,
while they read and assimilate new information.

For most of our lives, we have been exposed to the “calories-in/calories-out” theory.
The medical profession, the government and the media have presented it to us as a True Fact.
Therefore, almost everyone who reads “Why We Get Fat and What to Do About it”
when they first start reading the book.
will have the belief that “calories-in/calories-out” is true
and that Obesity is CAUSED by Gluttony and Sloth.

When presented with a new idea, some people literally “close their minds”,
and refuse to allow the idea inside, refuse to mull it over, and refuse to wonder about it.
They “know what they know” and that’s it.
Other people, work to “open their minds” to the idea, think about it,
and try to fit the idea together with their current knowledge and experience.
“Maybe it’s correct…maybe not…let’s see why the author believes this.”

While I agree with the idea of discussing this book Chapter by Chapter,
I think a careful reading of the entire book…and maybe more than once…
is necessary before one can firmly grasp the concepts it presents.

the idea of reading the book is to take into the mind and thoroughly comprehend new information.
While the mind absorbs that new information it works to piece the information
together with past information, and….perhaps…the result can be the formation of a New Opinion. However, it is quite a task to force one’s mind to assimilate ALL the new information,  
rather than to receive it selectively. Our minds tend to naturally accept information that supports our current opinions, and instantly reject…by skimming quickly past…any information that seems to oppose those current beliefs. This is something each of us has to struggle with in order to be open-minded enough to learn new information that will lead to a new way of thinking about familiar concepts.

This task is no easier for me than it is for others.
My reason for reading this book,
and for being willing to consider the concepts that Taubes presents,
is because the way I’ve been eating and exercising aren’t working as well as I’d like.

I’ve lost a great deal of weight,
and I’ve been maintaining my weight in a normal range for the past 5 years,
however, it is a constant struggle that requires extreme vigilance.

While I find the various methods and tools that I use to be helpful,
I am often hungry, and I constantly crave sweets and starches. 
If there is a better way to maintain my small size,
while avoiding the hunger and cravings,
I want to find it.