[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.

[jghn]

Indeed. But it cuts both ways.

The typical person who is maligning CICO because it doesn't explain why they're still fat, that person would do much better by better focusing on CICO and performing the all time best exercise for weight loss - the "table push away"

Meanwhile the typical strict advocate of CICO as the end all be all also needs to understand that there's a lot of nuance in both the CI and CO variables.

[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

[jvanderbot]

Here's one more. CICO ignores the effects of the types of food (CI) and activities (CO) that might make you hungry quicker than others, for example from sugar or fatigue or anything else. Appetite control is very difficult. Those soft factors make it poor guidance as well.

[jghn]

> CICO ignores the effects

It doesn't though, at the end of the day there's an objective amount of CI and an objective amount of CO. Further, CO isn't just "activities", for instance you burn calories merely by existing. Things you're describing will impact CI and CO, but at the end of the day if one had the ability to fully and 100% accurately measure CI & CO it'd be apparent that the math works.

But this is why "it's just CICO" is at best a tricky phrase. Because the hard part is in the nuance you describe.

[jvanderbot]

I get this over and over on every issue where "math" becomes "guidance". Let me try to bridge by restating:

Math truth is not always good policy guidance.

It is true that CI==CO. It must. It is not true that telling someone that CI==CO is a good way to get them to manage their weight, because (as mentioned) it's hard to measure and (as I added) even if you measure correctly, you _reduce likelihood of compliance_ by ignoring appetite effects when you call all calories equal.

I think we agree, just trying to find the right words anyway.

[jghn]

Exactly, yes we agree. It's why I think the debate is inane from both angles. CICO is both true and yet not useful.

[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)

[snovv_crash]

Some people can do macro tracking, others don't have the discipline for it. For those people, shifting to foods with a higher satiety to calorie ratio is a better strategy, or intermittent fasting, or cutting out a food group. As you said, what matters is CICO, not how you achieve it.

I like to compare it to programming. If you tell a C++ developer that their software should have good uptime, your advice here is the equivalent of saying "don't have memory leaks, null pointer dereferces or use-after-free". Yes, all true, but everyone know that. What we need are behaviour patterns like RAII, an extensive test suite, running those tests in valgrind/ASAN, etc. that actually help in a forward looking perspective achieve this goal of not making those mistakes which lead to poor performance.

[tekla]

> For those people, shifting to foods with a higher satiety to calorie ratio is a better strategy, or intermittent fasting, or cutting out a food group.

If they can't have the discipline for CICO, why would you give them benefit of the doubt they have the discipline to "follow" the other methods? It makes no sense.

[unaindz]

The discipline needed to resist hunger and the discipline needed to stick to a healthy and varied diet is wildly different. The second may require more thought and skill but a lot less willpower.

[ses1984]

It does matter in the real world because practically no one is going to adhere to a diet unless care and consideration has been given to things like satiety.

Adherence is way more important than getting pedantic about thermodynamics.

[tekla]

People fail to adhere to diets because its SO EASY TO MAKE EXCUSES.

People can do intermittent fasting all they want, but if they're eating a stick of butter during feeding times, its worthless. Eating to satiety is useless as a marker because satiety is subjective.

Measuring your food does not give you an excuse to cheat, except the person simply choosing not to do it properly. There are no weird ways of getting around the fact that you have a maximum calorie limit, and thats it.

[const_cast]

This is just a reductionist mindset.

Of course satiety and gut microbiome matters.

I'm thin. Do you know what I do to maintain that? Fuck all. I eat what I want, when I want. Do I exercise? No.

Why is it that I don't have to try at all, but you do? Shouldn't you be a little curious, a little jealous? How cool would it be if you could maintain what you have now, but without any of the effort?

There's a lot of stuff I don't care about. I don't care about alcohol consumption either. I drink what I want, when I want. And it works out great for me. For others, that plunges them into a life of alcoholism and they die young of cirrhosis. Why? Why does it work that way? Why is it that I can do whatever but other people can't?

These are the questions we should be asking. You're solving the symptom, not the cause here. Eating too much is a symptom. The root cause is the propensity to overeat. I don't have that propensity, so guess what - I never have to try. But why don't I have it? Will I one day get it?

[anonymars]

I'm the same way, and I'm pretty sure there's a big part of the "CO" part that differs among people, namely absorption vs excretion. Suffice it to say I think some bodies "hoard" more than others

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376760

[tekla]

I'm not curious or jealous at all.

I lost 150 pounds in 2 years and all I did was eat less, and I kept it off easily. I'm not curious because I saw pictures of myself before I lost weight and I saw the plates of food in front of me and it was absolutely disgusting amounts of food.

I feel sick when I eat large amounts of food and I like to keep it that way, and all it needed was getting used to eating less.

[nunez]

Most diets are completely unsustainable by design, hence why dropout rate is so high.

[stasa]

I actually said that CICO works if you control everything and weigh your food and calculate the macros. It may work for you, it works for bodybuilders, but this approach is not necessarily the best. All diets work though reducing calories. Dietary adherence is much more important. Most people are not going to obsessively weigh all their meals. And if you feel sick or hungry all the time, you are much more likely to break the diet.

So, I maintain that, yes, CICO works and calories + macros is the most important. But unless you control intake 100%, then the types of food you consume affect how much you eat, energy levels and compliance. This is especially true long term (over 5 years).

[flustercan]

"None of that shit matters" in purely thermodynamic sense, but it matters immensely to the actual goal of getting people to be healthier by having less body fat. In that sense, CICO is an oversimplification.

I personally don't think that anyone without enough will power and discomfort tolerance to feel hungry for long periods of time when surrounded by limitless food should be forced to live a shorter more painful life.

The key to getting people to quit smoking is for them to stop smoking. Very simple. Why on earth do we have nicotine gum and patches?

[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.