Comment by Aurornis

Comment by Aurornis 16 hours ago

16 replies

View on Hacker News

> The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight"

If you missed the whole "calories in, calories out" debate, consider yourself lucky. The comment above isn't helpful, but there really was a period of time where the topic du jour among health influencers was debating that calories didn't explain weight gain or loss. It played into the popular idea that blame for the obesity epidemic rested squarely on the food industry and "chemicals" in our food.

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 CICO debate was especially popular among influencers pushing their own diet. Debating CICO was a convenient gateway to selling people your special diet that supposedly avoids the "bad" calories and replaces them with "good" calories, making you lose weight.

arcticbull 16 hours ago

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/

Reply View 12 replies
  • JoshTriplett 15 hours ago

    > 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.

    This is the critical one that leads people to correctly argue CICO is largely useless for attempting to lose weight: the "CO" part of that is highly variable and is not merely a matter of being active. The body has all sorts of mechanisms that it can adjust to achieve the amount of storage vs burning that it wants to do, regardless of the amount of food consumed or the activity level.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • phil21 15 hours ago

      The metabolism slowing down thing is greatly over exaggerated. Everything I’ve read that is evidence based puts it at a nominal difference.

      Put simply: starvation mode is a myth for everything but outliers that are uninteresting to discuss.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • paulpauper 11 hours ago

      yes, this. the body decides to become super-duper efficient like a Prius. this is shown by studies in which acts like walking burn less energy . There is a lower threshold in which weight loss must occur, but this can be way lower than predicted by calculators or naive CICO estimates.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • nemomarx 15 hours ago

    Why are people trying to estimate calories blindly? You have to look them up in some sort of system and log it in a food journal for the tracking to be any good at all.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • [removed] 15 hours ago
      [deleted]
      Reply View 0 replies
  • s1artibartfast 13 hours ago

    FYI, GLP1 drugs are CICO - they work because they reduce calories in.

    It CICO is physics, not a complete instruction set for life. I dont understand why it makes people so angry.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • paulpauper 11 hours ago

      "you're doing CICO wrong. you can only lose weight in the way I approve of"

      Reply View 1 reply
  • paulpauper 11 hours ago

    CICO works if you have the patience and discipline to make it work, which few do. At some point it becomes too unpleasant to keep reducing calories or to measure and track everything. Life gets in the way.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • bena 15 hours ago

    It works for everyone.

    Full stop.

    Even if your metabolism slows down in response to caloric restriction, it does not move the needle to any appreciable degree.

    Because it takes energy to do. It just does, you cannot fool physics.

    However, measuring calories is incredibly difficult. Both in and out. Also, if you put 5000 calories worth of food inside of you, but then immediately vomit out 4500 of those calories, you've only really consumed 500 calories. You can overwhelm the system.

    If you can restrict yourself to consuming at a caloric deficit, you will lose weight.

    That's difficult however. Because if you pick a target calorie amount, you will see less progress as you lose weight. Because of math. 1500 is half of 3000, but only a quarter of 2000. People get fixated on 2000, as if we operate based on 2000 calories a day. But if you were previously consuming 3000 calories a day, your weight requires 3000 calories a day. So when you drop to 1500, you are going to lose about a pound every two days for a while. When you get to about 2500 maintenance calories/day, you're going to slow down to a about pound every three days. This is not your metabolism "adjusting". You weigh less, it takes fewer calories to maintain that weight.

    And you will be hungry. It will suck. And you have to be meticulous in your record keeping. There are no "free" calories.

    And we're not even getting into the mental component of all of this. What's been termed as "food noise". And it's one of the things that people on Ozempic and the like notice the most, they stop thinking about food. And food addiction is one of the absolute worst addictions to have. Hands down. With just about every other addiction, abstinence is an option. Alcohol, gambling, heroin, cocaine, meth, etc, none of that is necessary to live. We need food. We need to eat. You cannot avoid food. You have to actually develop discipline. Teetotalers do not have discipline. They avoid the issue altogether.

    So CICO works, but it's incredibly difficult to do for lots of reasons that are not related to the biology or physics of it.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • paulpauper 11 hours ago

      Yup, and where this stall vs. weight occurs is mediated by genes to a large extent. Someone who stalls out at 1.8-2.2 kcal/day while still being obese will need extra help, when cutting more calories is too unpleasant (many such cases). This drug makes that easier. And there is no evidence to suggest it gets easier with time or the body at some point stops trying to put the weight back on. Dieting is 24-7 war on food.

      Reply View 0 replies
NoMoreNicksLeft 15 hours ago

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.

Reply View 2 replies
  • Noumenon72 3 hours ago

    It makes no sense that a mammal that needs to keep 150 pounds of tissue at 98.6 degrees could do so on so many fewer calories than dogs and chimps. I think you're restricting to the point your body is cutting its calorie expenditure, not finding an equilibrium for a healthy human.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • paulpauper 11 hours ago

    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.

    Yup welcome to the bad genetics club. Those calculators of TDEE vs weight/height are only an approximation. Many such cases of people who fall well-below those estimates. Many people need far less food than commonly assumed.

    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.

    Not just from less consumption, but also reduced productivity--people being tired all the time, irritable, unable to work as effectively or unable to concentrate. This is why tech companies put so much emphasis on food and having cafeterias stocked with snacks or catering.

    Reply View 0 replies