Comment by arcticbull

We should probably stop treating debates among "dummies on the internet" as anything other than noise that muddies up the conversation.

Edit: to be clear, this also applies to comment sections on HN :-)

Internet dummies, and you occasionally get crank doctors espousing these points of view too. Most doctors are smart, but, you know, there are a lot of doctors.

who do you mean by "anyone". it sounds that you mean "nutritionists". There are plenty of laypeople who have supernatural beliefs about calories.

Ah, gotcha.

For what it's worth CICO sucks because (1) nobody can stick to it, ever (2) humans are awful at estimating their calories in, studies show only 1/5 of people can properly estimate the calorie content of their food [1] and (3) your metabolism slows down in response to, specifically, caloric restriction diets and your hunger rises which makes it difficult to estimate your calories out without indirect calorimetry.

Yes, CICO works in a lab, and for some weird people. It's a matter of thermodynamics. However you are a far more complex system than a coal powered furnace. And yes certain types of food will be more or less satiating and may influence the amount of total calories you consume. It's really really hard to overeat if you just eat lean protein, for instance.

CICO is, in practice, a tool that is roughly impossible for most people to leverage to lose a meaningful amount of weight and keep it off.

Which brings us back to the difference between maintaining a persistent caloric deficit -- and instructing people to do so.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719184/

I'm still sympathetic to those arguments. Humans have, for at least the last several million years, been taught in the evolutionary sense to never let a calorie go uneaten. Too many famines. "Just don't do that thing that every gene in your body screams at you to do, and feel miserable for it" isn't really good advice, and isn't all that insightful. One can't even necessarily make judgements about how many calories they themselves can eat based on what they see other people around them eating. "That other person stays skinny, and I'm eating about the same amount as them" is not an on-the-surface unreasonable assumption... but it doesn't work, even if you could eliminate human misperceptions.

>At one point, I had a podcast-obsessed coworker who tried to tell us all that even when he ate 1000 calories per day he couldn't lose weight. He had a long list of influencers and podcasters who supported this claim.

The week after Thanksgiving, I had a heart attack (age 50). I was in the CICU for nearly a week before they let me go home. On the day I was released, they sent a nutritionist in to tell me that I shouldn't try to eat one meal a day, that I really needed to be eating 3 meals a day, and to eat bread at least for two of those (or other carbs). Don't eat butter, eat margarine though. Yadda yadda. This was what, 8 weeks ago? Not 1962 in any event.

Do you know what 1000 calories looks like spread across 3 meals? Or how long you have to run on a treadmill to make up 300 calories if you bump that up to 1300? Or that, even sitting in an office chair every day, I can't lose weight (of any significance) at caloric intake much above that? I'm willing to concede that any problems I'm having here are in my own head, that I can't change my behavior or habits or whatever (to literally save my own life), but this isn't the sort of problem that can be handled by any but the most godlike of willpowers (which I do not have, if that doesn't go without saying). Right now, I probably need to be eating just one meal every other day, as I'm not really gaining any weight back but I'm not losing much either. My meal, such as it is, is a salad that fits in a small bowl (less than 2 cups of lettuce and uncooked vegetables). None of this is helped by knowing that people who are so-called medical professionals are giving me is absolute horseshit.

The truth of the matter is that we are adapted to eat only once every few days, and for even that meal to be meager and less than appetizing. But we live in a world that has mastered abundance and flavor, and uses marketing science to constantly try to get us to to buy all that. When you tell people "just eat less", really you're just doing the r/fatpeoplehate but in a covert way where you don't have to feel like an asshole. We (all of us, sympathizers, haters, acceptance activists) turn this into a morality tale, and can't think about this rationally. For anyone that cares, I wear 33" jeans, but I probably need to drop another 20-25lbs realistically.

PS Just giggled thinking about what it would mean to the US economy if suddenly every adult over the age of 28 started eating one small meal every 2-3 days... even our stock market is arrayed against us.

Some people have such bad metabolism that they have to east tiny amounts of food to not gain weight ,way lower than predicted by calculators and controlling for weight. Ozempic makes this easier. Yeah, you're right that overeating is the problem, but this threshold is low for those with crap genetics.