>>absorbing more calories that the food contains (impossible.)<<
It’s not a matter of absorbing more calories.
It’s a matter of HOW many calories a body can metabolize, how much is stored and how many each body needs.
To use a simple “calorie in/calorie out” method to determine how much weight a person gains or loses is silly. I worked with Anorexic and Bulimic patients. The amount of calories these people needed to maintain body weight would startle you. And we are talking forever, not this week, not six months.
Along with that, the horrendous junk science that has been accepted as fact (just like global warming) has taken a society of less active people and thrown them into metabolic syndrome like never before. AND add in the corn sugars to so many of the foods that one would not even suspect and we have been snowed.
Very few people can just reduce their food intake and lose a large amount of weight. (10 pounds, 20 pounds maybe) Their bodies will go into starvation mode and store energy or feed off their own muscle. Most must eat more, eat smarter and exercise it off. Exercise builds brown fat that burns calories more efficiently and longer.
I wonder if an analysis of the calorie content of fecal matter would give us a better idea of metabolic efficiencies. Of the 2000 calories the average adult needs to consume in order to maintain their weight, how much are they actually absorbing vs. how much is lost due to inefficiencies within the digestive process? That might explain why some people are able to live on what another would starve to death on. They aren’t extracting more calories than what’s there, it’s that the average person is extracting fewer calories than what’s there.
You missed the point.