I'm glad to see there is more research getting publicity for things like this.
There are a lot of people out there that have never dealt with trying to lose a lot of weight who think it's all just as simple as "calories in and calories out", "it's the first law of thermodynamics, man!"
It's like saying that running a marathon is easy, just keep running and don't stop!
It is so much more complex and there are a lot of factors and more variation between people than many realize. Obesity is a true epidemic and over simplifying the problem is not helping us solve it.
CICO is good enough almost all of the time. The complications and exceptions don’t really disprove it. Most people should start there.
As someone who has lost a lot of weight and gotten very strong, and coached a significant number people in their efforts: calorie tracking works… you need to be truthful in your effort.
The micro- level issues or margins of error in CICO are irrelevant to the macro- margins required by someone who has to reduce body fat by 50 lbs, or 100 lbs, or more. If you always record something wrong, and aren’t losing the weight, you’ll still need to make an adjustment to what you’re eating to accomplish the weight loss. There’s nothing magical about 2500 calories eaten or recorded, but there is something definite about losing 5 lbs over a period of time. That’s the baseline metric. The CICO is just an adjustable control.
As an example: most people aren’t willing to cook 90% of their meals for a couple of years. Restaurants generally won’t feed you reasonable portions (or proper vegetables), which is fatal to the cause when you need to lose a significant amount of weight. Routing around those baseline truths isn’t an accurate response to the challenges. Most fit people in the gym… the ones who are there at 6am, aren’t eating out — or calorically freely —all the time either.
The problem isn’t really the science of fat loss, but the world of crappy food products and restaurant meals. Restaurants do not follow a sustenance model.
Yes, tracking calories and measuring results does work, but I have found it to be an ever moving target. The more weight I lose, the more I have to restrict and/or the harder I have to work to burn the same amount of calories. And it certainly doesn't work over smaller ranges like 5 lbs. It's pretty easy to gain or lose 5 lbs simply by retaining or losing water which seems to fluctuate a lot based on more or fewer carbs/sugar. I have to see closer to 10 lbs loss to get a good direction.
As for the micro level issues, I agree they don't really matter in the scheme of tracking everything and losing weight, but where they do come into play is comparisons. If my body burns "just" 100 calories fewer per day than someone else, that person and I can follow the exact same diet and exercise and all else being equal, I will gain 12 lbs per year while they maintain their weight.
And I have heard so many people brush off these small variations among people as insignificant. But 50 or 100 calories a day is actually very significant.
> Obesity is a true epidemic and over simplifying the problem is not helping us solve it.
A "Lapalissade". Saying an issue is more complex than its synthesis doesn't make the issue more understandable.
You won't deny we never seen any person in a labor camp or lost on a desert island coming back obese, no matter their genetics.
So yes, everyone is different and for some it is less easy than for others. But obese people should stop trying to make it sound like their body is going against the laws of thermodynamics...
While I agree, is it possible that we don't see people come back overweight because those who struggle to meaningfully metabolise their fat reserves just die first?
No obese person is claiming they are breaking the laws of thermodynamics. What they are claiming, either accurately or not, is that the rules of thumb and assumptions used to estimate their calories in and out are not giving them very accurate estimates.
Obese people just need to refrain their argument. Instead of saying “it’s a disease, genetics, etc that prevent me from losing weight even when I drastically reduce my validly count” (this is simply a losing argument) and instead argue “genetics makes it very very difficult to stop my mind from Cindy sky thinking about food and thereby reducing my caloric intake. I’m simply unable to stop eating. Genetics makes it impossible to stop.”
If they did that we could stop arguing about CICO and all this thermodynamics crap. Going against those is a losing battle. Just focus on your inability to stop eating and you’ll get way more supporters.
No, I think you need to realize that someone who is overweight could literally be eating the same or less than you and working out the same or more than you and still become overweight. That's all I'm trying to get across. You simply need to realize that biological variation is enough that some people with much stronger willpower than yourself may in fact become obese while you remain a healthy weight.
It might not be easy but it absolutely is as simple as calories in and calories out. All the other factors combined can still not override the first law of thermodynamics.
In a very basic sense it’s true. The first law of thermodynamics must be followed. But it’s a meaningless statement without explaining what people actually mean by calories in and calories out.
When people say calories in and calories out, calories in is meant to represent calories consumed as food, and calories out is meant to represent calories lost through physical efforts (exercise, and basic daily activity).
The problem, however, is that both sides of it are incomplete. There are parts of calories in that will never get absorbed by the body. If the same person consume the same amount of calories in donuts, or alternatively in lettuce, they will almost certainly gain more weight eating donuts than lettuce even if their “calories out” is the same, because a lot of the calories in the lettuce will never be absorbed by their body and will simply exit as fiber in the first place.
Then even looking at the calories out side, a lot of digestion isn’t even done by our bodies. It’s done by stuff like gut bacteria. Someone who has a healthier gut biome will likely not gain as much weight eating exactly the same foods and exercising exactly the same amount as someone who doesn’t have as healthy a gut biome.
Then there are dieting patterns. Most extreme diets, for example, drive the body to enter starvation mode and lower its BMR, so even two people doing the same amount of exercise and eating the same foods, if one of them does it in a way that makes their body think they’re starving and the other does it in a way that does not, the latter will lose more weight since their BMR will be higher.
Calories in and calories out is supposed to convey the idea that all that matters are the calories you’re eating, and the exercise you’re doing. But this is
wrong because the nutritional value of the calories you’re consuming, the timing and frequency with which you’re eating, your gut health, your BMR etc are all also extremely, arguably more, important factors in weight loss.
And all of that is without even considering the impacts of certain types of foods and exercise on your mental health and satiety.
Calories in vs calories out is only accurate in the most basic and meaningless physics sense in the context of weight loss. And yet most people telling others to lose weight offer it as prescriptive advice.
There is only calories in and calories out. Did you go a week without losing any weight? You consumed too many calories. Whether you chalk that up to "muh metabolism" or some kind of magical universe defying intervention, the end result is that you consumed to many calories to lose weight. Dial things back by 500 and see what the scale says next week.
No amount of mocking "the first law of thermodynamics, man" makes it not true. For everyone complaining about the complexity of losing weight, the gym bros just keep weighing out their chicken and broccoli to great result.
See, you are a perfect example of what I was talking about. You seem to know just enough to be very confident in what you are saying, but you are very, very wrong. Another user in an above thread lays out some of the minutia that comes into play.
Calories in: What kind of calories? When you eat them, how fast you cut them, how your body reacts to the restriction, how your gut biome reacts, how your brain and willpower reacts, how your family and friends react....
Calories out: what is your actual resting burn, how does that change as you adjust calories in, how does it change as you adjust the type of calories in, how does your resting burn react long term to weight loss....
It's as simple as calories in, calories out, just like the theory of relativity is as simple as e=mc2.
Not all calories are equal.
Calories from carb rich food are metabolized different than calories from “healthy“ fat rich food.
Metabolism of former also raises insulin + glucose in blood stream, which influences obesity more than later.
But the body is supposed to regulate calories in and calories out automatically. You aren't supposed to know how many calories you are inputting or outputting.
So pointing at this just means there is something wrong with the control loop built into the human body.
It's kindof ironic that despite it being quite simple, and there being around 100 years of freely available science explaining why it's not true, some people just can't stop saying "calories in - calories out"
I started reading and listening to Jason Fung’s explanation of body internal system [1].
What actually influences weight is hormonal cycles. I am experiencing positive results so far, working on this explanation.
Take steps to reduce not only amount of insulin presence in blood stream, but reduce its sustained presence. Reduce visceral fat.
The problem is solved by mix of correct nutrition, moderate physical lifestyle and intermittent fasting. Never by “dieting” or sustained calorific deficit.
Fasting should not be primarily thought of as reducing calories. Rather as creating longer gap inside body without insulin running though blood stream and toggling body to use fat as metabolism source.
Weight loss (from fat reduction, not muscle) is secondary benefit.
The only way those interventions work though is because their net result is less calories consumed versus expended. It's cool if that works for you, but if you've lost weight you very much have sustained a caloric deficit.
I think it has more to do with how fast you lose it than how few calories you eat. The Biggest Loser contestants ate 1200-1500 calorie diets and still had abnormally low BMR even 5-10 years out.
You've mentioned the biggest loser study a few times, but my understanding is the metabolic adaptation of BMR is thought to be due to their dramatic increase in physical activity, not just the caloric restriction
For weight loss, through a decade of research and trial and error, here's what I have found.
- eat more than your BMR (basal metabolic rate) but less than your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) in order to maintain your BMR as you lose weight
- the gap between BMR and TDEE can be increased with exercise
- cardio burns calories but weight/resistance training helps build/maintain muscle mass as one's body drops weight, hopefully more from fats
- every week or so, resetting one's system by eating a very high calorie or carb heavy meal helps jolt the system as well as one's mindset. I personally find it easy to stick to good eating habits if I eat like shit once a week (on purpose, rather than accident).
This was one of my hopes for the new "weight loss drugs" like smeglitude, etc. But in reading about them they don't seem to act on metabolic rate, but just really cut the desire to eat food. So they work by calorie restriction at the end of the day vs actually changing metabolism?
Am I wrong here?
After reading the reviews of the drug, I decided to just do calorie counting of everything entering my mouth. Down 20 pounds so far in a month or so...
Things that change your actual metabolic rate are scarier. Like DNP. Ultimately the increased calorie expenditure needs to be spent somewhere and if it isn't just heat then it would have be be a large increase in NEEE (i.e. you get jittery) or I dunno, maybe you just get the compulsion to go on runs or do chores or just perfuntory tasks (like meth heads)
Yes, but how much will it go down? Will it go down proportionally? What more and more studies are finding is that it goes down very significantly and can stay very low for many years, making it near impossible to keep weight off.
The "Biggest Loser" study found that many of the people who lost weight on the show had a BMR much lower than other people of similar characteristics, but who had always been that size.
In other words, many times, the smug skinny person saying it's as simple as "calories in / calories out" doesn't realize that the people they are preaching to have to eat fewer calories and/or workout more than the lifelong skinny person has ever had to just to maintain a similar weight. Simply because at some point in their life, even 5-10 years prior, they were once overweight.
In my personal experience, yes it does go down quite a bit. But I also wonder if having a lower than average BMR to begin with predisposes to becoming overweight.
To make matters worse, how much you burn during exercise goes down substantially as well.
But in the end, the only thing I found for myself to work is to always track my weight and what I eat. So I’m always in control basically, no matter if my BMR is average or lower (or higher). And that’s all that counts at the end of the day.
Readit News
There are a lot of people out there that have never dealt with trying to lose a lot of weight who think it's all just as simple as "calories in and calories out", "it's the first law of thermodynamics, man!"
It's like saying that running a marathon is easy, just keep running and don't stop!
It is so much more complex and there are a lot of factors and more variation between people than many realize. Obesity is a true epidemic and over simplifying the problem is not helping us solve it.
As someone who has lost a lot of weight and gotten very strong, and coached a significant number people in their efforts: calorie tracking works… you need to be truthful in your effort.
The micro- level issues or margins of error in CICO are irrelevant to the macro- margins required by someone who has to reduce body fat by 50 lbs, or 100 lbs, or more. If you always record something wrong, and aren’t losing the weight, you’ll still need to make an adjustment to what you’re eating to accomplish the weight loss. There’s nothing magical about 2500 calories eaten or recorded, but there is something definite about losing 5 lbs over a period of time. That’s the baseline metric. The CICO is just an adjustable control.
As an example: most people aren’t willing to cook 90% of their meals for a couple of years. Restaurants generally won’t feed you reasonable portions (or proper vegetables), which is fatal to the cause when you need to lose a significant amount of weight. Routing around those baseline truths isn’t an accurate response to the challenges. Most fit people in the gym… the ones who are there at 6am, aren’t eating out — or calorically freely —all the time either.
The problem isn’t really the science of fat loss, but the world of crappy food products and restaurant meals. Restaurants do not follow a sustenance model.
As for the micro level issues, I agree they don't really matter in the scheme of tracking everything and losing weight, but where they do come into play is comparisons. If my body burns "just" 100 calories fewer per day than someone else, that person and I can follow the exact same diet and exercise and all else being equal, I will gain 12 lbs per year while they maintain their weight.
And I have heard so many people brush off these small variations among people as insignificant. But 50 or 100 calories a day is actually very significant.
A "Lapalissade". Saying an issue is more complex than its synthesis doesn't make the issue more understandable.
You won't deny we never seen any person in a labor camp or lost on a desert island coming back obese, no matter their genetics.
So yes, everyone is different and for some it is less easy than for others. But obese people should stop trying to make it sound like their body is going against the laws of thermodynamics...
If they did that we could stop arguing about CICO and all this thermodynamics crap. Going against those is a losing battle. Just focus on your inability to stop eating and you’ll get way more supporters.
When people say calories in and calories out, calories in is meant to represent calories consumed as food, and calories out is meant to represent calories lost through physical efforts (exercise, and basic daily activity).
The problem, however, is that both sides of it are incomplete. There are parts of calories in that will never get absorbed by the body. If the same person consume the same amount of calories in donuts, or alternatively in lettuce, they will almost certainly gain more weight eating donuts than lettuce even if their “calories out” is the same, because a lot of the calories in the lettuce will never be absorbed by their body and will simply exit as fiber in the first place.
Then even looking at the calories out side, a lot of digestion isn’t even done by our bodies. It’s done by stuff like gut bacteria. Someone who has a healthier gut biome will likely not gain as much weight eating exactly the same foods and exercising exactly the same amount as someone who doesn’t have as healthy a gut biome.
Then there are dieting patterns. Most extreme diets, for example, drive the body to enter starvation mode and lower its BMR, so even two people doing the same amount of exercise and eating the same foods, if one of them does it in a way that makes their body think they’re starving and the other does it in a way that does not, the latter will lose more weight since their BMR will be higher.
Calories in and calories out is supposed to convey the idea that all that matters are the calories you’re eating, and the exercise you’re doing. But this is wrong because the nutritional value of the calories you’re consuming, the timing and frequency with which you’re eating, your gut health, your BMR etc are all also extremely, arguably more, important factors in weight loss.
And all of that is without even considering the impacts of certain types of foods and exercise on your mental health and satiety.
Calories in vs calories out is only accurate in the most basic and meaningless physics sense in the context of weight loss. And yet most people telling others to lose weight offer it as prescriptive advice.
No amount of mocking "the first law of thermodynamics, man" makes it not true. For everyone complaining about the complexity of losing weight, the gym bros just keep weighing out their chicken and broccoli to great result.
Calories in: What kind of calories? When you eat them, how fast you cut them, how your body reacts to the restriction, how your gut biome reacts, how your brain and willpower reacts, how your family and friends react....
Calories out: what is your actual resting burn, how does that change as you adjust calories in, how does it change as you adjust the type of calories in, how does your resting burn react long term to weight loss....
It's as simple as calories in, calories out, just like the theory of relativity is as simple as e=mc2.
Take steps to reduce not only amount of insulin presence in blood stream, but reduce its sustained presence. Reduce visceral fat.
The problem is solved by mix of correct nutrition, moderate physical lifestyle and intermittent fasting. Never by “dieting” or sustained calorific deficit.
Fasting should not be primarily thought of as reducing calories. Rather as creating longer gap inside body without insulin running though blood stream and toggling body to use fat as metabolism source. Weight loss (from fat reduction, not muscle) is secondary benefit.
[1] https://youtu.be/RL8x7FTSo-Y
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/oby.23308
- eat more than your BMR (basal metabolic rate) but less than your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) in order to maintain your BMR as you lose weight
- the gap between BMR and TDEE can be increased with exercise
- cardio burns calories but weight/resistance training helps build/maintain muscle mass as one's body drops weight, hopefully more from fats
- every week or so, resetting one's system by eating a very high calorie or carb heavy meal helps jolt the system as well as one's mindset. I personally find it easy to stick to good eating habits if I eat like shit once a week (on purpose, rather than accident).
Am I wrong here?
After reading the reviews of the drug, I decided to just do calorie counting of everything entering my mouth. Down 20 pounds so far in a month or so...
Surrounding daily life with sugar, carbs is the root.
[1] https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
The "Biggest Loser" study found that many of the people who lost weight on the show had a BMR much lower than other people of similar characteristics, but who had always been that size.
In other words, many times, the smug skinny person saying it's as simple as "calories in / calories out" doesn't realize that the people they are preaching to have to eat fewer calories and/or workout more than the lifelong skinny person has ever had to just to maintain a similar weight. Simply because at some point in their life, even 5-10 years prior, they were once overweight.
To make matters worse, how much you burn during exercise goes down substantially as well.
But in the end, the only thing I found for myself to work is to always track my weight and what I eat. So I’m always in control basically, no matter if my BMR is average or lower (or higher). And that’s all that counts at the end of the day.