START HERE --> The Farmer vs. The Banker

A Righteous Assault on the Absolute Worst Idea in the History of Science: And a New Framework to Save Us All

The world is getting fatter. Fast. Seventy-five percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Type II diabetes—once called "adult-onset diabetes"—is now afflicting children. Everyone seems to have a different theory on why this is happening. Is it ultra-processed food? Carbs? Seed oils? Meat? Microplastics? Too much screen time?

The most dominant explanation, however, is something we’ve all been taught since childhood: calories in, calories out (CICO). According to this model—let’s call it The Banker Model—the body is a simple accounting system. Calories are like money. If you eat more than you spend, the excess gets stored as fat. Want to lose weight? Just eat less and move more.

This idea is everywhere. It’s taught in medical schools, repeated by health authorities, and embedded in public policy. It’s also wrong.

Not just slightly wrong. Catastrophically, irredeemably wrong.

The Banker Model has dominated obesity science for decades. And yet, in that time, obesity rates have skyrocketed. If CICO were correct, why has the obesity epidemic exploded while we've been laser-focused on calorie control? Why do millions of people swear they are counting calories and exercising—yet see no results? Why do some people get fat even when they barely eat? Why do some stay rail-thin while living on junk food?

These contradictions aren’t minor footnotes. They are flashing red warning lights, telling us that we’ve misunderstood the problem at a fundamental level.

Why CICO Fails

The CICO model assumes that body fat is governed solely by how much energy enters and exits the system. But here’s the problem: the body isn’t an accounting ledger. It’s a living, self-regulating system.

Imagine a famine-stricken country where a mother and her child are both struggling to survive on too little food. The child is frail and underweight, as you’d expect. But the mother—despite being just as malnourished—is obese. If obesity is purely about overeating, how can someone with so little food still store excess fat? This unsettling paradox, seen in impoverished communities worldwide, reveals the deep flaws in CICO.

Or consider Progressive Lipodystrophy, a disorder where people become emaciated in their upper bodies but gain enormous fat deposits in their lower bodies. Again, the CICO model falls apart. If obesity is just a matter of excess calories, how could fat accumulate in some areas while vanishing in others?

The answer is obvious when you think about it: fat storage is controlled by biology, not arithmetic. Every tissue in the body—whether it’s muscle, bone, or a growing fetus—responds to hormones, enzymes, and cellular signals. Fat is no different.

CICO is based on physics, specifically the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. But the mistake is applying a physics law to a biological process. That’s like explaining why a tree grows by citing Newton’s Laws of Motion. The physics may be true, but it tells you nothing about how the system actually works.

Introducing the Farmer Model

If fat storage is controlled biologically, then we need a model that reflects this reality. Let’s think of the body not as a bank, but as a field.

Imagine you are a farmer. Your land has hills, valleys, irrigation channels, and places where water collects. Rain (food) falls onto your land, but whether it nourishes your crops or floods into stagnant pools depends on the landscape.

A healthy landscape absorbs and uses water efficiently. A broken landscape collects water in the wrong places, leading to floods and droughts.

This is how body fat works. It’s not just about how much food (rain) enters the system—it’s about the terrain of your metabolism. Some people have bodies that store fat easily, like a landscape full of deep pits. Others burn energy quickly, like a dry, sandy desert. The problem of obesity isn’t about eating too much—it’s about why the body decides to store energy instead of using it.

The Power of Topography

The crucial insight here is topography. The shape of the metabolic landscape—determined by hormones, genetics, and environment—controls how the body handles energy.

This explains why:

• Some people store fat even when they eat very little (because their “landscape” holds onto water).

• Some stay thin no matter how much they eat (because their “landscape” drains excess energy away).

• Some gain fat in only specific places (because different areas of the body have different “drainage” systems).

• The same diet can make obese people lose weight while making anorexics gain it (because it restores the land’s ability to regulate water properly).

Instead of obsessing over calorie math, we should be asking: What is the state of the land? How do we fix it?

Why This Changes Everything

This perspective reveals that the key to overcoming obesity isn’t cutting calories. It’s about fixing the terrain—repairing the body’s natural ability to regulate fat storage.

This shift in framing also eliminates the moralistic nonsense embedded in CICO. For decades, people struggling with weight have been told they’re lazy, undisciplined, or gluttonous. But this is as absurd as blaming a farmer for his land’s natural topography. You wouldn’t yell at a swamp to stop holding water. You wouldn’t tell a desert to just “absorb more rain.”

So why do we tell obese people to simply “eat less and move more”?

The Farmer Model shows that obesity isn’t a personal failing. It’s a dysfunction of the body’s energy-regulating systems. And that means the solution isn’t starvation or self-punishment—it’s restoring balance.

What Comes Next

If we adopt this model, everything changes. Instead of:

• Blaming people for their weight, we focus on fixing metabolic dysfunction.

• Counting calories, we focus on how the body processes and stores energy.

• Assuming all food is the same, we recognize that some foods alter the landscape more than others.

• Treating obesity as a willpower issue, we treat it like any other biological disorder—by understanding and correcting its root causes.

This isn’t just a tweak to an existing framework. It’s a revolution. The way we’ve been thinking about weight and metabolism is broken at the foundation. It’s time to tear it down and build something better.

The world is getting fatter and sicker. The old solutions have failed.

It’s time for something new.

Farmers of the world: unite!