Comment by makeitdouble
3 years ago
> losing weight happens by eating less
To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.
Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
3 years ago
> losing weight happens by eating less
To note, when they refer to "diet" it's probably not about "eating less" or popular "on a diet" interpretation.
Good and bad diets also aren't as simple as the "CICO" myth
It seems to me that CICO is less of a myth and more of an "incomplete model." Having a model is an improvement over no model at all, even if it's oversimplified IMO. For very overweight people it probably doesn't matter quite as much.
If you had an accurate & sophisticated model for how the foods one eats contribute to their fitness / health / appearance, it probably would be too unwieldy to apply. A daily sum of calories, however, is simple enough to keep in your head or paper or an app.
To me the sad part is that it's way too easy to accept as a solid model. It's so simple, feels so elegant and powerful, a lot of people have a hard time seeing what could go wrong with such a beautiful model. They then take decades to realize it didn't mean anything really.
Basically, it's way harder to make people accept it's complex and highly variable when they've already internalized a shiny theory of everything.
Just been reading Why We Eat (Too Much) by Andrew Jenkinson and he is basically saying this - that CICO is true but there is also this feedback system with the 'Calories Out' part so that our body adjusts to physical activity levels (as described in the article) and also to what the 'Calories In' part it is. So while restricting calories in works short-term your body adjusts and also decreases the 'Calories Out'. His argument is that the problem for most people overweight is leptin resistance interfering with the body's feedback mechanisms and basically you need to fix that rather than try and changes either the 'Calories In' or 'Calories Out' directly.
CICO is almost as pernicious and ubiquitous. It really grinds my gears when people try to use “intuition” to understand something super complex with no data at all. People talk about “metabolism” the same way.
Say the word “toxins” around me and I will fight you in the streets.
Except we have literal truckloads of data on calories and metabolism. Like a lot of human physiology, these things come with Normal (Gaussian) distributions in the human population. There are averages and deviations we can talk about, without having to understanding anything about the inner workings of the human body, right?
I couldn’t agree more that CICO is a super blunt instrument, but it actually does work, because the alternative we’re comparing to is not tracking input & output at all. You can be a lot wrong, and it’s still better than completely wrong, right? :P Like the amount of noise in my calories estimates is probably at a minimum 10%-15% wrong at all times, same goes for expenditure (maybe even worse) but it seems like the important part isn’t actually the number, it’s the act of establishing and sticking to a budget. For me, mentally, it was the realization that my feelings on hunger and satiety were actually mis-calibrated. This helped me get over the idea of being hungry, and helped me realize the goal wasn’t to overcome hunger, it was to get used to something closer to the correct amount of food.
> truckloads of data on calories and metabolism
We have, but most of it seriously flawed because of many issues.
For instance this pretty serious study on diets (http://www.dishlab.org/pubs/MannTomiyamaAmPsy2007.pdf) had to rely on BMI for segmenting the subjects because the whole field had standardized on BMI. Yet we know for decades that BMI based segmentation is meaningless, BMI itself being a clunky relic of the past. Then you can come down on the subject of the studies, repeatability, no possible control group most of the time etc.
We can say that's the best we can do, but we should also accept it's far from being reliable info most of the time.
> it actually does work
well, it doesn't work or not, it's just a concept, an observation like a law of physics. It's like saying gravity works, that's not the info you'd give people having difficulties to build a self balancing robot.
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CICO mostly doesn’t work if you count the calories wrong. But if you don’t eat 1000kcal under your actual TDEE, there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).
If you metabolize less or more doesn’t really matter as it gives you a hard maximum of what you could potentially ingest (both in the TDEE calculation and the restricted diet)
> there is little chance you will not lose weight (barring severe health problems).
And you will probably either have severe health problems, either have a reduced metabolism to the point you can’t properly function on a day to day basis.
You’ll either give up, the pendulum will swing the other way and rebound your weight, and people will blame you for being too weak.
Or you’ll push through, lose your job and/or continue develop eating disorders, hopefully you’ll realize you can’t go on and give up, or you’ll get medicated, with side effects affecting your appetite and weight ingestion, might still end up rebouncing and get blamed for it.
You’ve got a snow ball’s chance in hell that you can keep your intake very low and be fine with it for the rest of your life, but then you’re probably already healthy and pretty normal weighted, because I don’t think anyone who can just stop eating extra would stay overweight for long with the pressure we apply on obese people as a society.
All of the above is really just par for the course for people who get told “just do CICO”. People for which it actually kinda works don’t usually need to be told anything in the first place.