Comment by makeitdouble
3 years ago
Science work by repeating experiments: I give you a protocol, you repeat it controlling for the same conditions, and validate my results.
As you say ignoring the inner workings would be fine if we had consistent, culture independent widely reproduced results. Thing is, we don’t.
For anything beyond a clinical trials on specific subjects that stay there for days/weeks to be fully studied, we might not even have valid control groups.
This is why I see comments on us having a vast body of studies to look to be more or less a “look a my library, there’s a lot of books” kind of statement that doesn’t really point at us having actual vast knowledge about the subject.
> It works as a tool for weight loss.
Does it ? to get back to the above point, do you see any consistently reproduced studies on large cohorts of people pointing at it working in the long term?
Still not sure what you’re trying to say. Are you skeptical that reducing caloric intake works? Or skeptical that counting calories helps to reduce caloric intake? Are you skeptical about whether calories are a metric? What exactly do you think doesn’t work, and why? Why are you claiming that we don’t have culturally independent results? I don’t believe that’s true.
If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part; it’s physics. If you are maintaining weight and then stop eating you will die. If you are maintaining weight and then cut your diet in half you will lose weight. I posted a link to one survey on this somewhere in this thread that should be easy to find that demonstrates the rate of metabolic adaptation to caloric restriction (it’s about 15%). But you can Google this and find out for yourself, there are many many papers in many many languages, and you looking for your own sources will be better than being skeptical of anything I suggest. The health agencies of every developed country in the world publish caloric recommendations and have resources and research information available.
Literally millions and millions of people globally have successfully used CICO to manage weight, and the primary complaint is not that it doesn’t work, the primary complaint is that it’s difficult to implement and make habitual, it requires too much work and/or control. When most people say “it doesn’t work”, what they mean is “it doesn’t work for me because I couldn’t establish a working routine, the habit doesn’t stick easily.” There are no studies showing normal people reducing their caloric intake significantly and failing to lose weight.
> If you’re asking whether calorie counting has been studied and controlled enough to know if it works as a weight loss tool in practice, the answer is yes. You don’t need a study for this part
This is the shortcut I am pointing at.
You're bringing in a pure assumption. I need an actual, well designed study that shows that your inntuition is in fact correct (to reiterate we're talking weight loss, and in particular stable loss, not some blimp in a three weeks trial)
Can you point to a rock solid study on it? There are countless studies on the most obvious things. Take any of what you call "physics" and you'll have large studies from reputable research labs analysing the long term impact on stricly controlled groups. CICO is not some hippy unknown strategy, the press turns around "obesity crisis" headlines year long, there is no shortage of funding for research."It's obvious so nobody tested it" isn't a valid argument.
Hey listen FWIW, I’ve been overweight (and am now TBH, gained quite a few pounds over the pandemic). I don’t think the obesity crisis is a failure of CICO, I think it’s a failure of big business interests and social engineering and advertising and economics. I don’t think using CICO is easy, I know for a fact, first hand that it’s hard. I don’t think overweight people lack self control, I think that humans evolved to be afraid of hunger for a good reason and that our standards for beauty are completely distorted by mass media.
I’m trying to understand, but I don’t yet understand your objection to the physics. Do you disagree that failing to eat enough will cause death? That’s not an assumption, right?
Here’s the study I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I have no idea if this meets your bar for size or quality. It feels like you’re trying to set the burden of proof as to be so high that you are ensuring it can’t be met.
https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/16/2/196/480196?logi...
This argument feels to me like demanding rock solid study of a large cohort of multicultural evidence for gravity. Are there countless valid long terms studies demonstrating the existence of gravity? No, not really, because nobody anywhere denies that gravity exists.
CICO isn’t a specific methodology, nor is it a belief or a surprising theory. Calories-in, calories-out is a completely generic statement about the causes of mass gain and mass loss in the human body. It doesn’t make any claims about the amount of gain or loss. It doesn’t claim that eating a pound makes you gain a pound, it’s simply an observation that eating is the sole mass input of the human body, and energy expenditure is the only controllable output, the only way mass is lost. There are no other alternatives, right? Calories are an approximate measure of what you eat & burn. This is tautological, there is practically nothing to argue there, and there is nothing to debate. A study isn’t necessary because this is an already proven fundamental truth about the human body (and incidentally all life): there are no other sources of weight gain or loss. CICO doesn’t prescribe specific actions either. The way you use this information is up to you. The scientific among us might reasonably start measuring calories first to calibrate their steady state, and then slowly make changes to their inputs and outputs to see what happens.
Anyway, I also don’t need a study personally because it worked for me and it suddenly became clear what everyone who knows this was talking about. I had resisted trying it for a looong time, perhaps on the same grounds you’re resisting the idea. Better than papers might be to experiment on yourself, if you really want to know. First hand knowledge will certainly be more valuable to you than assurances from academics.
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