[twoslide]

A calorie is a measure of energy used, for example there is a direct conversion to kWh. If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat (weight loss). Our bodies aim to be efficient and won't expel energy, so if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight. This is true regardless of macronutrient composition.

Calories are therefore at least a necessary consideration in diet and a healthy weight, but calorie consumption alone is by no means a sufficient measure of a healthy diet.

[jaqalopes]

> If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat

This is totally wrong. The body can also slow down your metabolism, twitch less, think slower (if you had read the article you'd see this is addressed), decrease the effectiveness of your organs, not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass.

The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. It is super clear to me as a person who has bounced back and forth between fit to overweight for my entire adult life that there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all.

CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight.

...I've lost over 150lbs and am a staunch advocate of CICO as really the only thing that matters for weight loss.

> there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all.

Let's be fair here: you can be as skinny as them, it'll just be extremely hard and very unpleasant. I get where you're coming from though, it is difficult not to harbor an extreme amount of resentment for these people and the universe that didn't favor you in the same way. I have literally said to some people like this that, if I thought it would work, I would eat them to gain their power. For people like us, it is incredibly difficult to pull off.

> CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.

CICO works, and yeah I'd definitely say that for people like us it amounts to developing an eating disorder[0]. I'm also continually frustrated by my skinny unable-to-gain weight friends and workout collogues who, mistakenly, believe they know something I don't. Some of them have hyperthyroidism, their experience of food and weight gain is a completely different reality from minie.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[makeitdouble]

You lost 150lbs and might be in a somewhat decent health, but will it be true for that person over the internet that might have nothing in common with you ?

The crux of these discussion on diet is that there is no universally reproductible method (CICO in isolation is just a principle and not a method) and starving he body will have different consequences for different people. Advocating any practice as “the only thing that matters” is a recipe for disaster.

Imagine if the actual solution for that person is to change jobs, or that starvation lead them to worse health issues than where they are now, stuffing CICO down their throat would just be cruel.

[fredophile]

I'd agree with the GP that for weight loss CICO is the only thing that matters. However, if you can find some method (restricting carbs, restricting fats, only eating during set times, etc) that naturally results in a calorie deficit and you can stick with then go far it. Just because you don't think of it as CICO doesn't mean it isn't the underlying cause of your weight loss.

[makeitdouble]

If you define CICO as losing calorie some way or another, it really just means “weight reduction”. Telling someone 「“weight reduction” matters for dieting」 doesn’t feel very meaningful to me.

[fredophile]

If someone with low financial literacy asked your advice on how to start a rainy day fund would you tell them to cut expenses and find ways to improve their income or would you just say "start saving". What's the difference between money in, money out and "start saving"?

In both the finance and nutrition examples you have two variables that you can adjust. In both cases they are not independent and changing one may affect the other or may affect other parts of your life that make it unsustainable. Eat less and do more is the correct advice for most people who want to lose weight.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I find that to be unlikely, frankly. There are a lot of strategies to achieve a better CICO ratio, and I think those have incredibly varied success rates for different people, but when it comes right down to it if you don't find a way to change that ratio then you will never succeed. In my experience, the most expedient way to do it is to count calories.

I also don't think this is anywhere near as "unhealthy" as people want to believe it is. I think that largely arises from our discomfort with being hungry, and our general intuition about which foods are "healthy" and which aren't. However, consider the case of nutrition professor Mark Haub, who ate nothing but garbage convenience store snacks for 10 weeks at a caloric deficit and not only lost 27lbs, but had all of his health metrics improve: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

[makeitdouble]

Reducing overall stress is a pretty well known way to improve health, and it often leads to better diets/lower fat ratio one way or another. I don’t think it’s hard to find stories of people losing weight after getting out of shitty jobs/damaging relationships.

Focusing on numbers (calorie counting etc.) can help people who like numbers and need to focus on something. But these people don’t need any push to go find numbers to follow. The same way I fundamentally like sport, I needed nobody’s advice to go do hours of sports when I felt my body was getting rusty.

[mountainboy]

not surprising to me. fasting has many health benefits. I've experienced it for myself.

If interested, check out "The science of fasting" documentary.

[magicalhippo]

> The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. > CICO is not real advice

I used CICO effectively to reduce my weight considerably. Indeed it is not a real advice, however for me it was a very good guiding principle that I feel was essential to help me achieve my goals.

By focusing on CICO it became clear that I had to find foods that I enjoyed eating and that made me feel fuller per calorie. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about meal compositions before starting due to this. I found ways to adapt my favorite dishes, both in portion size and ingredients.

Using CICO I only had the goal that my meals had to fit my calorie budget, had to be enjoyable to eat and had to keep me full till the next meal.

The principle also helped me stay on track, as it effectively means that it doesn't really matter what you do any given day, rather what you do each day. This made me avoid getting depressed and feeling hopless if I couldn't follow my plan for a day. My finish line got pushed ahead a day or two, no worries, just get back on track the next day.

I think the key though is that people are different. What worked for me will not work for everyone. For me, CICO was great.

[geoka9]

> This is totally wrong. The body can also slow down your metabolism, twitch less, think slower (if you had read the article you'd see this is addressed), decrease the effectiveness of your organs

But all of those factors are included under "body uses less energy", no?

UPDATE: But I do understand what you're saying. Exercise can lower your BMR as the body tries to conserve energy. If that reduction is not met by a reduction in calories consumed, it stands to reason that you can actually gain weight after starting exercising. So gotta watch out for those lethargic days after lots of exercise.

> not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass.

From my unscientific experience, for most people that should be accompanied by reduction in fat, too.

[twoslide]

You are right that your body can burn muscle as well as fat. However, decreases to energy consumption ("metabolism") are minimal. Our bodies are evolved to use energy efficiently, if it were possible to do everything we do (or even some semblance of it), with far lower energy consumption, we'd already be doing it.

A good analogy might be fuel consumption in a car. Some savings can be made through efficient driving techniques, but ultimately there is a core amount of energy needed to transport the car across a given distance.

[ilammy]

> if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight

The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn.

Calories are amount of energy... released as heat when the food is burned. Or rather, the numbers you see on food products is some value derived from food composition. Anyhow, this is no way directly related to how much of resources your particular body will extract from food.

Counting calories has a benefit of making you aware of your habits, but dietology is not as simple as arithmetic.

[xboxnolifes]

> The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn.

Depends how you read "eat less than you burn" One way you can interpret the quoted section is that you haven't even eaten less than you burn, you're still eating more or equal to, since the amount you burn has gone down.

[mavhc]

Problem is you only know the max potential input, not the actual input, which depends on your gut bacteria.

And also you're not directly measuring the output, which is different for everyone, and adjusts based on the input.

It's useful for making you think about everything you eat though, shall I eat this thing? Well, I'd have to record it in my spreadsheet, won't bother.

[jjoonathan]

Direct control over an upper bound is quite sufficient to force a number downwards. All of the error terms point in the direction of undereating when the problem is overeating.

The real problem with calorie counting is that it is difficult.

[makeitdouble]

You aren’t even controlling the upper bound, because as explained these calories have not much to do with how your body processes them. For instance you might think you reduced the calorie count by forgoing 200 calories of bread to eat 150 calories of tofu, but if your body processes tofu better than bread, you’ve effectively increased your energy consumption while the count is lower on your spreadsheet.

Same way you might be eating the same amount of tofu everyday, assuming you have a steady calorie intake, while your actual ingestion rate will be all over the board. If/when you’ll be decreasing quantities your ingestion rate might go up enough to effectively increase the energy you take from it, creating weird states that don’t make any sense looking at the numbers from outside.

The lowering the upper bound only start to make sense when the body is really starving, in that your daily life has become hell, and you start lacking elements other than calorie. Some see that as a success, I see it as dangerous for most people.

The people dropping out of these diet don’t do so because they don’t have the guts, but because they end up worse that where they were at the beginning. It’s not everyone ending up there, so we’ll still hear the success stories of course.

[adrianN]

Generally you not only count potential calories, but also measure you weight. You can then adjust calories up or down to keep hitting your targets as your body and your activity levels change.

[topaz0]

If you read the article, you'll notice that this fact is acknowledged there. The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem. For example, different amounts of energy are consumed in the process of digesting various foods, and some energy is excreted undigested, in a way that depends on the food and the person. Similar complexities apply on the "calories out" side, where a large fraction of your energy expenditure is not directly controlled by your choice of activities like exercise. Ultimately there is some arithmetic of calories in minus calories out, but it is not captured by the simplistic calculations that are normally done.

[naasking]

> The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem.

"Calories in calories out" is a rule of thumb that is as true as "what goes up must come down". Which is to say that it's not true on the extreme margins, but it's true for virtually all of the cases anyone is likely to encounter in their lives.

[fredophile]

I think this problem gets overstated by the anti CICO crowd. Most people will habitually make and eat the same, relatively small, collection of meals. If you're eating the same foods and nothing outside has changed (travel, stress, sleep, exercise, etc) then the difference between what the nutrition facts show and what your body gets out of the food should be pretty consistent.

[elil17]

The whole point of the article is that measurement inaccuracies and variation in energy extraction efficiency make that information practically useless.