[Jimpulse]

You do have me intrigued, what are you general arguments against CICO?

The mechanism from article really does suck, but what does that have to do with CICO? While white adipose cells are created, it's still excess calories that fills those cells.

[jghn]

> You do have me intrigued, what are you general arguments against CICO?

Not the GP, but based on their abstinence-only sex comment I imagine the point being raised is that it's something that is technically true but not a practical guideline.

CICO is a true statement. But you're not going to be able to accurately measure CI and especially not CO. So why bother using that as your guideline on how to proceed? Instead it is known and understood that there are mechanisms for things such as improving CO efficiency, and it's much more practical to focus on that.

[tekla]

You can't outrun your fork (Of course some smart guy will bring up Olympic level athletes, but we're not freaking talking about Olympic level athletes are we?

A 5K run for 30m burns ~300-600 calories. A single serving of a candy bar is ~250 calories. You NEED to restrict the CI portion since its the easiest part of the equation to control.

[coffeebeqn]

Shouldn’t you at least have a ballpark correct CI and CO numbers? If you’re doing +1000 calories per day then whatever CO efficiencies you find won’t do anything

[bulletsvshumans]

CICO is necessary but not sufficient. You also need some strategy for how to achieve CO > CI. Different strategies have vastly different implications in regards to willpower, health outcomes, suffering, time, cost, etc.

[neuralRiot]

CICO is the equivalent of engine tuning, to produce more power you just need to burn more fuel in the same amount of time, easy as a concept but not so easy to achieve sometimes.

[stasa]

In a perfect world where you measure and control everything 100% CICO rules. However, in the real world, different types of food cause variation both on in and out. E.g. some foods promote feeling to satiety and some foods cause some people to overeat. Diet would also affect gut microbiome which affects hormones/mood etc... If you calculate CICO, then it will still be valid. But from the practical diet approach, CICO is oversimplification.

[tekla]

> But from the practical diet approach, CICO is oversimplification.

No, CICO IS the practical diet. Satiety, microbiome, none of that shit matters. All excuses to not properly stick to the diet. You weigh your food, calculate the macros, and that's it. Zero thought required past that.

It is literally impossible to not lose weight even if you are eating nothing but 500 calories of pure corn syrup every day (Though you may feel pretty sick)

[WorldMaker]

CICO is an oversimplification that generally assumes that "all calories are equal" on both sides of the equation. On the one side it assumes uniform density of energy in foods and is based on a lot of rough estimates from burning foods in ovens. On the other side, most of our concepts of how much calories we "burn" in a day or given activity and how we use those calories in the complex biology of our bodies is not very far divorced from "assume the body is an ideal spherical furnace" based a lot on CO2 exhaled and temperatures raised. It is a greatly over-simplifying model on both sides of the equation.

Of course, greatly over-simplified models are still useful. CICO as a useful first approximation of a diet still has its uses and its places where it is more useful than some alternative models.

I think food calories and the way we talk about them (like food "contains" them, always burning them) feel a lot to me like the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences. Chemistry has moved away from the "Calorie" as an approved unit of measure for the more accurate/more reliable "Joule", but also to remove some ties to old Phlogiston baggage.

I think most people would laugh at this idea pushed to its current Physics extreme that food should be measured in Joules by Relativity's infamous E = mc^2 mass-to-energy conversion ratio and that we should assume that the human body is some efficiency percentage of an ideal spherical fusion reactor. Joules In/Joules Out, right?. Why does it sound more accurate to so many as a model when it is "heat particles"/Calories?

(Which again, isn't a call to entirely toss the model, it serves many as a first approximation well enough. But it seems past time to develop better, more targeted models.)

[bkandel]

It's an oversimplification of how the body works to the point of not being useful. For example, if you eat 2500 kcal a day and maintain a steady weight of 150 lbs, it is not the case that if you change your diet to 2200 kcal you will consistently lose X pounds per week. You would more likely lose a bit, then plateau at some level that's hard to predict, because now your body adapted to an input of 2200 kcal a day. Add to this the complication that where those calories come from matters a lot, because when you increase your blood sugar, your body increases insulin which builds up body fat, but if you have eat a low-sugar/carb diet, that happens less. And if you eat sugary foods, you will tend to get hungry more quickly than eating protein-based foods. It's all so person-dependent and food-dependent that just saying "eat less calories and you'll lose weight" does not accurately describe most people's reality.

[jghn]

Your example is the oversimplification that causes people to disbelieve CICO. In your example the body adjusted and the CO wasn't stable. CICO still holds, the flaw is the person assuming their CO was stable.

People who staunchly support CICO as the end all be all talking point miss what you describe. At the same time people who decry CICO as being bogus are missing what I describe. Both are true and both are wrong. It's really just a semantic argument.

[simonbarker87]

If you dropped your calories you wouldn’t expect to loose weight forever, you would expect to loose a bit of weight while your body adapted and then stay at that new weight if you stay at the new lower calories. CICO works well for the vast majority of people, it’s just very hard to know what the balance is and the averaging window is weeks not days.