[InitialLastName]

I've only been using it since I saw it recommended a few weeks ago, but for Hacker's Diet[RIP, 0]-style diet tracking MacroFactor has been unbeatable. Nothing dumb or meaninglessly social, just weight+nutrition tracking. In recognition that humans are imperfect and that both sides of CI/CO are more complicated than is apparent, they have built the system around a "best effort" vibe; systematic bias gets filtered out through feedback (if you regularly underestimate the calories you actually eat, the system will feed back by lowering your limits).

[0] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

[wredue]

CI/CO is what I used to lose weight (back to normal BMI as of today, actually).

I won’t lie and say it was “easy”. I had to make real changes, and some were not easy for me (cheese. Peanuts…). But after I bought a scale and weighed my portions, it was readily apparent what was wrong for me.

The other things most “experts” (who are trying to sell you their brand of dieting) will sell you about CICO not being “everything” is that some food are awkward. Like celery, which has 5 calories uncooked, 30 cooked.

Ultimately, as long as you are weighing your portions, those oddities should generally not be “breaking” a CICO diet.

I appreciate this other suggestion, for the app. I will check it out.

[InitialLastName]

Congrats on your loss! I used the aforementioned Hacker's Diet (CI/CO with some habit-forming structure) a decade ago to get my BMI from ~33 to ~23 (at which point people started telling me I looked sick, so I backed off).

CI/CO definitely works, but both sides of the equation need to track a feedback loop in order to function correctly. On the one hand, your body will reduce its base metabolic rate as you start depriving it of nutrition; on the other, the nutrition labels on food aren't necessarily representative of what your body can get out of them.

The other issue is that often the foods people with weight issues eat aren't the same foods that are conducive to weight loss... it's psychologically very difficult to maintain a calorie deficit when many of those calories are taken up by sugar water, for example, where it's much easier when the calories come from nutritionally complete, fresh foods.

As usual, proactive lifestyle change is rarely about the facts of what should be done (literally everyone knows they should be eating vegetables and exercising) as much as the psychology (it's difficult to consistently make decisions that add stress to your life).