Comment by wyldfire
3 years ago
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.