A month or two ago, whilst dining in the Lion & Unicorn, a friend of mine, who happens to be a dietitian, asked me if I were losing weight and, if so, was I doing it accidentally or deliberately? I said yes, and assured her that it was quite deliberate; I was not, as far as I knew, suffering from a wasting disease, knock on wood. My diet, if it can be called that, commenced last September when I was in Krakow. It was hardly a punishing regimen. I would take a substantial cooked breakfast in the hotel in the morning, and then walk it off with extensive treks around the Vistula, punctuated by boarding a tethered vessel for a beer, out on deck in the sunlight. I had started at 76 kg, and it was my ambition to reach 70 kg (12 stone to 11 stone in old money), the weight I was when I was 21 years old. As I am about 6 feet tall, this represents a drop in Body Mass Index (BMI) from about 23.5 to 21.6. (My computer gives 22.7 and 20.9, but I think it’s including a factor for ethnicity.) The BMI is one’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of one’s height in metres. A BMI between 20 and 25 is regarded as normal. If above 25, you are overweight; above 30, obese; above 40, morbidly obese. It’s said the BMI is somewhat old hat; better simply to put a tape measure about one’s girth.
Anyway, this week I achieved target. I was rather helped by the fact that for the past week I have had a stinking cold. I lost my appetite, as well as my sense of smell, and taste. Covid, you ask? Well, I wondered too. But the SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test was negative. Appetite suppression is a well-known strategy for achieving weight loss, and many therapies, both medical and surgical, are based upon it. But I’m not sure whether Big Pharma has turned its baleful eye in the direction of the suppression of the sense of taste. For the avoidance of any doubt, I’m not advocating the adoption of such a strategy. What if the sense of taste never came back? Litigation would ensue.
Weight loss, or, for that matter, weight gain, is all about thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It is a conservation principle. Your weight will reflect the amount of energy you absorb, that is, your calorific intake, and the amount you burn, simply by living and breathing (the basal metabolic rate), and by exercise. If you eat more and exercise less, you will gain weight, and if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose it. No sophisticated dietary theory can gainsay that fact.
But I dare not be smug. I wouldn’t underestimate for a moment the severe challenges that people who are morbidly obese face, especially when they grapple with their problem. I’m not, I hope, “fat-ist”. The most crass and tasteless fat-ist remark ever passed must be, “There was never a fat person came out of Belsen!” The implication is that the ideal spa for the overweight would be a concentration camp. (They seem to be all the rage, these days.) We are much more inclined to accept that eating disorders resulting in BMIs well under 20 are deeply mysterious, and intractable. They certainly can’t be solved by telling a young lady (or a young gentleman for that matter) to pull herself together and go and eat a Big Mac. By the same token we should, at least, afford courtesy and compassion to the obese.
Still, I’m a little impatient with our political masters who are trumpeting weight reduction injections as The Next Big Thing. I’m told half the green benches are occupied by people who take them. They spend all day in the chamber, in committee rooms, or tearooms, glued to their smart phones and tablets, and they wonder why they are overweight.
The relationship between thermodynamics and the diet industry is somewhat akin to the relationship between thermodynamics and the dismal science of economics. In both spheres, we ignore the stark realties of thermodynamics at our peril. I am convinced that the great crashes in economics that have occurred over the years, the South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, and more recently the crash of 2008, have resulted from a wilful denial of the laws of thermodynamics. You imagine that you can create something out of nothing. Plain Vanilla operations are supplanted by “exotic derivatives”. You might imagine we would be chastened by the 2008 crash, but on the contrary our denial of the basic laws has moved on to a further level of sophistication. Now, it seems to me, we are in defiance of the Second Law. Let me explain.
For as long as natural philosophy and engineering have existed as sciences, cranks have been submitting designs to patent offices, of engines that self-propel indefinitely. Of course none of them work. Einstein thought that the Second Law – there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine – was the most basic law in all physics, and the one least likely to be overturned. In fact, to date, the Second Law has underpinned not only all the sciences, inorganic and organic, it has provided the foundation for all of our human communities and societies. The ancient professions are all founded on the Second Law. We have doctors and nurses because our bodies are falling to bits; we have criminal lawyers because we are corrupt; we have the clergy (at least, thus far) as our souls are mired in iniquity; we have educators because our minds are disordered, of not blank. Even, perhaps especially, the trades are founded on the second law. We have roofers and plumbers and joiners because, by the natural order of things, things fall apart.
But look what’s happened. Many of our institutions, banks, insurance companies, retail outlets, haver attempted to become fully automated. They are set up as perpetual motion machines. Every human conundrum can be reduced to a series of drop-down menus, and every human solution can be produced by an algorithm. The cranks who choose to defy the Second Law have even invaded medicine. The doctor in your pocket. Heaven help us. This is why we spend our lives on the telephone, pressing the key pad and working our way laboriously through the menus; or on hold, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon. Meanwhile the Fat (sic) Cats who have set up this Dystopia, are lying on the beach, like Alan Rickman’s character in Die Hard, earning 20%.
Life’s not like that. Every human conundrum is unique.
I’ve always been interested in the Laws of Thermodynamics. There are actually four of tem – 0, 1, 2, and 3. It was James Clerk Maxwell who realised, retrospectively, that the notion, largely taken as read, that if say, a thermometer recorded the same temperature in system A and system B, then systems A and B had the same temperature, was actually an a posteriori rather than an a priori proposition. It had to be proved. This became the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.
The Third Law states that a temperature of absolute zero (0 K or -273 degrees C) can never be achieved, as such a condition of absolute stasis would allow us precisely to measure a particle’s position and velocity, in defiance of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
I have this fanciful notion that when populist political leaders measure the world, and pin it down, call it as it is, apparently say what everybody is thinking, and do so through their own dogmatic lens, they defy Laws 0 and 3. Bit of a stretcher, I grant. Enough already. I’m going for a walk.
jamescalumcampbell 