[appel_user]

The poster added a link from Harvard Medical.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting....

""" "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. """

[towaway15463]

An absurd statement. If you put someone on a calorie deficit they will lose weight, period. If I work you 12 hours a day at a gruelling physical job and don’t increase the amount you eat then you will lose weight, end of story. All this faffing around about with metabolism and gut bacteria is only applicable when people have the absolute luxury of sitting all day with their only physical activity being walking to the kitchen to get another bowl of pasta. The human body was designed for long distance running and a fast/feast diet of mostly fruit and meat, of course you’re going to get fat if you don’t move and just eat pure carbs for every meal.

[sph]

It's not absurd, quite the opposite. "Calores-in, calories-out" on the other hand is laughably reductive.

If the body was an actual furnace, calories in calories out would be an excellent mantra.

But it is not. It's a complex chemical machine with complex feedback loops. You do not ingest pure energy, you ingest matter that might be processed into food and stored using a ton of different chemical pathways, some more efficient than others.

If I ingest 2000 kcal of cellulose, I indeed get 2000 kcal of cellulose out, not as energy but as undigested faeces. If I ingest 2000 kcal of fat, my body behaves completely differently than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pure carbohydrates, than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pasta.

So, please let's stop with his reductive CICO meme. We all know thermodynamics, but it's a very bad model for explaining how the body handles food, hunger and long term energy storage. Focusing on calories is like comparing vehicle speeds by solely focusing on their horse power. There's a relation, but it conveniently ignores hundred of other variables that might show an opposite outcome.

[alldayeveryday]

No, it is also absurd. To carry your example forward, it would be like someone saying "the idea of horsepower when it comes to vehicle speed is not just antiquated, it is just plain wrong!'

The shape of the car, as a variable effecting the vehicle speed, does not make horsepower plain wrong.

[sph]

I'm not saying thermodynamics is wrong, and I've never said CICO is wrong, please re-read my comment. I'm saying it oversimplifies.

An RC car with 10 bhp is faster than a truck with 20 bhp.

Putting 1000 kcal of kerosene in your engine has a completely different effect than 1000 kcal of diesel.

A 2000 kcal diet is not like another 2000 kcal diet, unless it is composed of the same foods, and the two subjects have a similar genetic makeup and gut flora.

[alldayeveryday]

Right, and my comments are not about your POV. They are addressing the claim of the doctor from the Harvard article who is saying that CICO is wrong, and then responding to your comments about whether or not her claim is absurd. In truth, we cannot prove or disprove whether the claim is absurd as this is a subjective claim. And so I suggest we focus instead on the validity of the claim rather than our subjective opinion of it. To that end, it seems we are in agreement that the doctor's claim is not true.

[mister_mister]

Actually that is right. Horsepower is quite meaningless, engines of today with same horsepower will out perform 40 years old engines in all metrics that are important to us.

[alldayeveryday]

> all metrics that are important to us.

what does this even mean?

[mister_mister]

It means that are other metrics such as torque, Fuel economy, Noise/Vibration, Power-to-weight ratio.

Here is a link to the metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_metrics

Here is video explaining why horsepower doesn't really make that much sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2-JKO0c2I

Just like calories, horsepower doesn't explain much.

[alldayeveryday]

Agreed. The proof of the claim in the article is effectively that people are different. John and Sarah burn calories differently, which means that calorie-in/calorie-out is wrong! You heard it here here first - soon Harvard will decry calorie counting as a form of white supremacy. Joking aside, the Harvard article is hardly more than clickbait. It appeals to people who refuse to put in the work to maintain an effective diet. They merely need to label what they eat as "whole" and can then eat as much of it as they want.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

This post strikes me as weird because it clearly glanced at the article but it misses a major point which is ensuring a healthy diet and regular exercise which this post is criticizing as if that entire section of the article isn’t there

[mrmlz]

Well Harvard Medical should probably take a trip to the physics department and do some book learning..

But I´ll give her the benefit of a doubt that the quote is pulled from a larger reasoning.

[shmel]

I don't understand this post. "CICO is wrong", they say. "We put people on two different diets, one group ate 500kcal more and gained weight". So, CICO is wrong? How does it make any sense? Nobody has ever said that food with the same amount of calories gives you the same feeling of satiety.

It is like saying that Newtonian mechanics is wrong because we now have smart bombs.

[mrmlz]

All these studies always mix things up.

Everyone who reduces their caloric intake below their expenditure will lose weight.

Those that try to eat their daily intake in pure sugar will 1) feel like absolute garbage and lie in a comatose state further reducing their expenditure 2) overeat.

Those that eat something at least close to being actual food. Like.. a potato that hasn't been fried in palmoil will feel full and less like a bag of shit.

[FpUser]

I do not give a flying fuck about what she says. I can see how "Calorie in calorie out" works on my own example and with some tolerances it is definitely a case. I keep myself in a nice shape and am physically active but since I have very healthy appetite I have to curtail it. Otherwise I just gain weight. And yes since I can afford it I do eat "whole foods".