&gt;&#x27;After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce.&#x27;<p>&gt;So the &#x27;not much science involved&#x27; calorie balance really REALLY should have resulted in a loss at this rate, yet it didn&#x27;t - how do you explain that? I mean that literally entirely contradicts your claim.<p>Explanation is simple: The author either lied to herself or she lied to us.  Her diet and workout plan did not violate the laws of physics, so she&#x27;s wrong.