[rootusrootus]

> choose

You're letting that word do some very heavy lifting.

> To make a comparison

I think the comparison is very weak, very superficial. The human body is way more complex than CICO. But your comparison does have some intuitive value -- there are more than a few people who consistently spend every penny they make, and sometimes more, just trying to survive. We don't see a lot of them on Hacker News, to be sure.

[pugets]

What word would be better than “choose” in this context? For the majority of people who aren’t prisoners or toddlers, there is a good deal of personal choice that determines what foods we eat and how much.

Even if fate has it that I must end up at a Wendy’s drive thru tomorrow night, couldn’t it be true that I could choose to eat the 400 calorie meal instead of the 800 calorie meal, or order water instead of Sprite?

[grayhatter]

Will. Will is a better word. Every day you will consume calories less than, equal to, or greater than the amount of calories you expend.

The problem with choose is it implies an intentional, free choice. I can manufacturer plenty of contrived examples to show it's not always the choice of the person. But I'll use a real one I remember.

Yes, you, who I assume has thought deeply about personal responsibility and and willpower and how to obtain the best life for yourself over what I assume to be between years and decades of practice doing that, are able to choose water over Sprite.

but I can tell you from the experience of somebody who strongly believes in the responsibility of your own decisions, and how willpower is a learnable skill, and about being healthy, and about how every decision matters. When I'm tired, and depressed, and feel like I'm about to break. Even knowing, even having the thought that I should choose water over soda, I've still chosen soda.

Fair choice though right? There were no other factors, or influence over why I drank 200 calories of sugar? I should just have remembered water would be healthier?

That's what I assume they said the word choose is doing a lot of heavy lifting. because often choose is presented exactly the way that you did.

> Even if fate has it that I must end up at a Wendy’s drive thru tomorrow night, couldn’t it be true that I could choose to eat the 400 calorie meal instead of the 800 calorie meal, or order water instead of Sprite?

When often, humans tend to be slightly more complex than just that.

[Ferret7446]

> The human body is way more complex than CICO

The human body is way more complex so as to defy the laws of physics as we know it? The human body cannot create matter. In order for it to increase in mass, you must be inserting extra mass into it.

[immibis]

Note that none of the known laws of physics say that excess energy is saved by converting (which raw materials?) into fat and storing them.

[grecy]

Sure, a mammal does not HAVE to store excess energy.

But that is entirely irrelevant when a mammal eats less energy than they consume for a while. In that instance they MUST burn some stored reserves or break the laws of physics

[immibis]

An equally plausible hypothesis is that the mammal feels lethargic and does not consume more energy than it eats.

[grecy]

> * The human body is way more complex than CICO*

Genuine quesion - if I eat 1500 calories today and do a measured 2000 calories of work on a treadmill, where did that extra 500 calories of energy come from?

Are you suggesting my body can create energy from nothing?

[grayhatter]

Generally your liver will store between 12 and 24 hours of calories in the form of glucose. After that, it's likely fat stores from adopose tissue (fat cells)

[grecy]

Right.

So how can CICO not work?

[grayhatter]

Given the observational evidence that it doesn't work, what are you really asking?

Imagine a computer with a primary source of power, and a backup supply. You're measuring CICO of the primary supply. And you're tightly regulating the power available on primary to keep a power deficit. Unfortunately, during periods of high load, this computer is able to switch to the backup supply which you aren't able to exert tight control over.

There's a huge number of things that could cause a human to ignore their best interests. Ignorance to consequences, the long-term implications of any decision, degraded mental health, external social pressures, the list goes on and on.

Humans have impulses just like every animal, and proper training can convince a dog not to immediately lunge and eat every morsel of food they can smell. but it takes a lot of work and external pressure to train that into a dog, and even then given the right circumstances a dog will still eat food above their caloric needs. Humans behave the exact same way.

> it's easy for me to regulate my weight using cico, so obviously it should be easy for everybody

I know that's not the claim you're making, but it seems like it is and it is the one many other people in this thread are making. just like it's easy to train some dogs than it is train others. it's easier for some humans to control their caloric intake than it is for others.

CICO doesn't work for most humans. Claiming otherwise is on par with the saying just run this IOS app on Android it's easy it works for me! Perhaps a sufficiently capable engineer could make it work, but most humans aren't sufficiently capable.

[grecy]

> Given the observational evidence that it doesn't work

I think you need to be very careful about your language choice here.

Physics says it has to work. Every athlete on earth knows it works. Everyone that has ever been in a prison camp, concentration camp or had their calories restricted outside of their control knows it works.

It absolutely, factually, 100% works. Our entire understand of mammals and energy depends on it working.

What you are saying, is that people are unable to exercise enough self-control to actually consume less calories. If they did, it would work. But they don't.

That's like saying "pointers in C don't work" because when many people try they get seg faults.

I really don't think it's constructive to say "CICO doesn't work" when what you mean is "many people find CICO difficult to implement, because having the self-control/will power/determination/control to do that is hard."

I became heavily involved in weight watchers (which is essentially just CICO - their "points formula" is basically calories/50). Over many years I watched hundreds of people lose hundreds of pounds by being careful about what they ate. It was hard. There were a lot of tears, there were a lot of false starts and plateaus and hard times. The people that stuck with it had incredible transformations and live different lives now. My room mate at the time lost almost 200lbs and became head of the WW in that city and when I saw her after 10 years I did not recognize her at all, and actually refused to believe it was her for 5 minutes.

CICO absolutely works. Like most things worth doing in life, it's hard. And it's worth it.

[grayhatter]

[flagged]

[arcticbull]

I mean, it works in the sense that if you keep your calories out higher than your calories in you will lose weight.

Studies show that it's basically impossible to know your calories out without indirect calorimetry (and updating it regularly, no less, since your BMR + NEAT can vary significantly over time and in direct response to contemporary efforts to lose weight) -- and studies show that humans are dreadful at estimating their calories in.

So yes it works in a lab setting where your CI is pre-portioned in the form of milkshakes and your CO is measured via calorimetry. In reality though it makes people hella hungry and your hunger tends to increase in excess of changes to body weight.

Which is why the average weight regain after loss is 80% over 5 years.

So naturally it would seem we would look to develop ways to reduce our CI subconsciously. Enter GLP-1s. This is literally all they do. They reduce your hunger so your CI remains below your CO which studies show almost nobody can do without help.

Yes some people are genetically going to lose 200lbs and become the head of Weight Watchers in the same way that some people are going to win the olympic gold medal in swimming. That doesn't mean that you are going to win an olympic gold medal in swimming and it certainly doesn't mean that if the average person follows Phelps' training plan that they'll get an olympic gold medal in swimming.

Ultimately a treatment that works but nobody can actually maintain is a treatment that does not work. Hence GLP-1s. The question is why they are unable to keep their CI below CO. Not whether that’s how they lose weight.