Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Someone's doctor told them, and that person told my wife, and my wife told me, that too much fiber cereal is bad in a day--it seems like it would be a fine snack, but if you've already had enough fiber and add more it messes with the body's ability to process food and leads to weight gain. I thought I'd pass that on to the world, as it's one of my goals here to write down what I learn about food. But I wanted to confirm it. And googling yields very little of note. I did find this:

The effects of overindulging on fiber vary from person from person, but the one specific illness that is frequent is of course unwanted weight gain...

Written by a 19-year-old from England, not a doctor, which goes on about carbohydrates, etc.

Any Google search for a food-or-diet related subject is utterly corrupted. Other sources that appear in the search results: the desultory and non-committal article from WebMD; a typically incompetent and rambling set of Yahoo! Answers posts that devolves into fartchat; and scholarly articles ("Association of fiber intake and fruit/vegetable consumption with weight gain in a Mediterranean population," Nutrition). Of course there's Wikipedia, which provides the overview of fiber, starting with disambiguation, and tells me:

Because soluble fiber is changed during fermentation, it could provide energy (Calories/kilojoules) to the body. As of 2009 nutritionists have not reached a consensus on how much energy is actually absorbed, but some approximate around 2 Calories (8.5 kilojoules) per gram of soluble fiber.

Great. I wish $100 million of the many trillions we'll blow on health care as the current boondoggle comes to pass would go into web resources--imagine, say, the value of an Ask Metafilter where the questions were vetted by doctors. And create a sort of Library of Congress for calories--don't regulate or tax foods, but put all the labeling information in a national database that's easy to search. There are, of course, interactive tools on various govt. sites, but nothing that makes me want to get too far beyond registration.

Weigh-in was first thing in the morning, before anything else. Up 1/4 lb. from yesterday. I was prepared for this--one of my sources is The Hacker's Diet, written by Autodesk founder, hypertext-funder, and Ayn Rand fan John Walker, who shows us the up/down in his weight-losing nerd's chart, talks about moving averages, and generally maths it all up.

Yet despite the ups and downs of the scale and the emotional battering they administered to Dexter, his diet worked perfectly, achieving precisely the result he intended in the anticipated time. Dexter was deceived by his scale. It didn't measure what he cared about: pounds of fat. Instead, the changes in daily weight reflected primarily what happened to be in the rubber bag at the instant it was weighed.

The detailed picture of what goes in and out of the rubber bag on page [Ref] explains why daily weight measurements have so little to do with how fat you really are. Dexter went on a two month diet to lose 10 pounds. And yet every single day, on average, a total of 13.5 pounds of food, air, and water went into Dexter's rubber bag, and a comparable amount went out. His daily weight loss during the diet was less than one fifth of a pound per day, yet each and every day almost 80 times that weight passed through his body!

If the body consumed and disposed of these substances on a rigid schedule, maintaining a precise balance at all times, weight would be consistent from day to day. But that is not the way of biological systems. A few salty potato chips are enough to cause the body to crave, drink, and retain a much larger amount of water to dilute the extra salt. The body's internal water balance varies widely over the day and from day to day. Since water accounts for three quarters of everything that goes into and out of the rubber bag, it dominates all other components of weight on the scale.

Weight: 340.25 lbs