Okay. I said I was through with Anthony Colpo, but now I’m going to quote from him once again. What gives? What gives is that I’m stuck in the airport in Seattle – my flight to Chicago is delayed for almost four hours because of bad weather in the Windy City. I figured I would use this time to stick up a quick post about thermodynamics and provide a long quote from Robert McLeod, who writes Entropy Production , a physics (sort of) blog. As you can see below, he pretty much trashes Bray and other nutritional researchers who blithely use the 1st Law of Thermodynamics to prove the old a-calorie-is-a-calorie notion. To show the way the average nutritional writer looks at this law, I needed to find a quote. As it works out, the only thing I have with me is Anthony’s book The Fat Loss Bible , which just happens to have the perfect quote. So, sorry AC, I’m not really trying to pick on you. And you certainly aren’t the only nutritional writer who thinks this way – you’re just the only one who has a quote handy I can use. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. In other words, energy just doesn’t just magically disappear; it must be converted to something else. In the case of any excess calories you ingest, they will be stored as fat, used to accommodate an increase in lean tissue mass, or dissipated as heat through thermogenesis. Manipulating the proportion of protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat each day will not excuse you from the Law of Thermodynamics. This is the way just about all nutritional scientists and writers look at the First Law.

Original Source of More on the thermodynamics of weight loss