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Published online 25 March 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.688
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Counting calories: not so easy
The number of calories you need to burn per pound is not a constant.
For half a century, dieters have adhered to a simple doctrine: to lose a pound of weight, you must burn 3,500 more calories than you take in. The 3,500-calorie rule has become a universal constant in the complex calculus of weight loss, but the truth may not be so simple: a new mathematical model predicts that the energy deficit required to lose a pound depends on how much fat a person has to start with.
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shouldn't that be 3500 kilocalories?