Comment by dahart
3 years ago
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.
> Are there countless valid long terms studies demonstrating the existence of gravity? No, not really
Yes, there are. There’s actually periodic assesments of gravity at most places to get an idea of the trends and detect underground movements. An exemple of this: https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
Surveying gravity is one of the many measures that are done pretty frequently and very seriously around the globe.
On CICO, the issue is it’s a model that is true at a very low level view of the body mechanism. You are right that it’s very generic, and in theory it makes sense. The disconnect is between that extremely low level view, and what you do with it in practice.
There was this excelent discussion on type 1 disabetes (https://maori.geek.nz/the-unreasonable-math-of-type-1-diabet...). These people have their life on the line and actually monitor their blood levels, and it’s still tough to manage a good guess of the inputs and when/how much sugar will get in the blood. Reading the labels doesn’t give enough info on what will be actually processed, and the real solution becomes real time constant monitoring of the actual blood levels, without relying on a model of how it’s supposed to work.
When you advocate counting calories for a random person on the street, they won’t monitor their blood, they actually are in a worse position as what they care about is not sugar levels but their whole body intake, which there is no way to monitor. And you also won’t be hooking CO2 masks on them everyday to monitor their out, so it’s also a random guess. At this point CI has crazy large variations, and CO is basically unknown, especially as it will change as they change their CI. This is why applying a CICO thinking for someone who’ll change their diet for the rest of their life makes no sense.
An argument I’ve often seen is to just lower CI to the ground until seeing effects. Which basically means obliterating the subjects social and professional life and ask them to keep it that way or it will be their fault if they rebound. That’s not what I call a weight loss strategy.
On the linked study:
It’s a meta study based on three prior papers, one of them is “ Decrease in fat oxidation following a meal in weight-reduced individuals: a possible mechanism for weight recidivism. ” https://europepmc.org/article/MED/8596485
From the abstract: > Twenty older (age:mean +/- SE, 61 +/- 1 years; range, 56 to 70 y) obese (body mass index > 32 kg/m2) subjects (12 women, eight men) completed an 11-week dietary restriction program in which they lost 9 +/- l kg.
So the research is on 20 “obese” people. Aside from the low number of participants, there’s not even a “healthy” control group here. They’re “obese” by their BMI but they might as well be gym trainees, who knows ? It only lasted 11-weeks, there is no mention of the social conditions of the study ([EDIT: I didn’t realize at first look that all participants where elderly. Which brings in more questions IMO, but I don’t know where to stand on that). So this study is aimed at bringing a single piece of information, but we don’t have enough context to extrapolate that info’s validity in any other context it does it apply to any population at large? are the effects permanent ? do we even get the same effect after 1 month ? was it random fluke from the limited test subjects ? who knows). The title is about weight recidivism but there is 0 follow up on the subjects outside of that 5 hour post meal check.
And that’s just the first study. We could go on and on, my point is we don’t have the “science” on the subject, just a ton of questionnable data points and random intuitive theories, everyone with their beliefs and prejudices.
Athletes have the means to control a lot better what they do, including adjusting everything to their actual body without having to care for grand theories. And many people succeed in getting healthier in many different ways, including by going to different diets that actually increase calories as counted and little change in their daily life.
That’s why I feel it’s a disservice to preach a “one true theory” when it doesn’t help much really.
Hey I truly wish you good luck in your search for what works. I mean it. This seems like overthinking it to me. If CICO doesn’t help you, then don’t use it. I’d love to hear about what alternatives work for you.
Thanks. I didn’t care at all about this until close people started to do random diets they see on instagram. Every single one of those were rooted on pop science, garbage studies and very shaky foundations. That got me to look a lot more on a regular basis into what we actually know, and the answer was “very little”.
I think it’s fine for us to not know much about something. We don’t have all the answers in the universe, we’re just hairless monkeys after all. I just wish more people would be accepting of a “that’s complicated, nobody really knows and you’ll have to try a bunch of stuff to see what works for you specifically” approach.
To your question, I am slightly above the prescribed line in a lot of metrics and don’t really do anything special, I am lucky enough it doesn’t have any impact on my life in general.
1 reply →