For instance. Say you take your pill with its 2000 calorie/day dose. But you use your extra time not spent shopping/cooking to train for a marathon, sending yourself into calorie deficit pretty quickly. Apparently you can offset that deficit with food (because you can still eat), although there is no mechanism for alerting you to the calorie deficit, because the pill has abolished hunger. You could exercise yourself to death, conceivably. Unless the user can feel weakness from lack of caloric energy. Or loses so much weight that it’s apparent that food is required to offset the deficit. The fixed-calorie clause thus means either a post-pill cessation of ALL non-metabolic activity or an automatic descent into calorie deficit that must be offset with food in order to maintain health, which means you’ve still got to eat but it’s no longer fun (as scott commented, “it’s a trap!”).

Similarly, it’s apparently not quite right to say that “your weight would depend entirely on your activity level.” That’s focused on dieters. It seems from the premise that you could engage in only normal daily activities and gain no weight, or you could conceivably have an eating disorder that causes you to binge without hunger or physical satisfaction, even post-pill, which would result in weight gain. In fact, any eating — even your six months — would result in weight gain, since you’re going above the ideal metabolic calorie dose the pill delivers.

I think the thought exercise allows a cleaner decision if you tweak your answer to commenter brittney to say “It produces the optimal quality of calories for your height / sex / body type, and adjusts to your changing activity levels and metabolic needs.” And remove the part about weight being dependent on activity level. Such a change may also accidentally remove the ability of the user to gain weight through eating, but I think that too makes more sense if the question is strictly “would you eat if you didn’t have to.”

PS I hate you for hijacking my brain.

Firstly, we were given five senses with which to experience the world around – sensations that can be both agreeable and disagreeable. Just five, precious few when you think about it. It seems a little ungrateful and churlish to neuter one of these senses in the name of mere convenience. A bit like ripping up a time-consuming garden in order to lay an ugly grey concrete patio which needs no tending.

Secondly, so many technological devices are invented to save us the labour of everyday tasks. But hidden inside these very tasks is the rich texture of life itself and if we keep on eliminating them we will end up like the humanoids in the movie Wall-E. Eating is certainly a hassle, as is walking, having children and getting to know people. Not surprisingly Kurt Vonnegut puts it so much better than I ever could:

http://www.designfax.net/archives/0899/899trl_3.asp

Everyone who said “no,” please change your answer to “yes, I would be forced to.”

FORTUNATELY for our freedom to speculate, this pill has already been developed, and the guy who invented it is in a padded cell next to the guy who invented the car that runs on seawater.

Years ago a researcher found that by sleeping 15 minutes every 2 hours, he could satisfy all his need for sleep while cutting his total amount of sleep time in half. Supposedly this technique was pioneered by some Leonardo Da Vinci type. He found that he was totally bored with all the extra time he had. He was no Leonardo Da Vinci! So he gave it up, preferring to live a more “natural” lifestyle. I’m sure many of you (particularly the parents) really would benefit from all the “extra time” in your life. But most of us would fill it up with reading blogs, or doing something else ultimately less fulfilling than preparing and eating a good meal.

PS: Eric Berlin, I’m sorry you had so much trouble when you were younger, i realized early on that by organizing & leading the socializing I could steer others away from the bar scene.