This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For the most part, pro-CICO people seem to reject the idea of fast or slow metabolisms.
I don't know what pile of straw you've found your "pro-CICO people" from, but in my experience, they are happy to point you directly to places where you can see the variability for yourself. I'll even preempt any digging in the straw you might do to claim that "pro-CICO people" simply reject the concept of metabolic adaptation, because they actually write entire articles about it, what it is, what it isn't, and what it practically means for people.
At the end of the day, they say things like that the Cunningham equation (or a few others) actually do a pretty good job of getting you to the right ballpark, but then you probably need direct observation if you want to really nail down where you are with precision. My wife and I proceeded with direct observation, and sure enough, the population-based equation estimates got us pretty darn close, but what was really incredible was that even though the data was insanely noisy (which was expected, and I have enough background in numerical analysis to know how awful that noise would be for estimating derivatives), the trend line over a couple years of tracking (through periods of cutting, periods of maintaining, and periods of gaining) was bang on at exactly 500cal/day = 1lb/wk... for both of us. The "pro-CICO people" that you strawman are actually doing things like putting direct observation into an app rather than making ridiculous claims like there being no variability whatsoever.
The thesis of CICO is that it's not just a useful guide, but literally an iron law of the universe. Ever heard of something called thermodynamics? So it's not obvious to me how a "metabolism" (whatever that is) can conjure up, or delete, energy or mass.
Personally I found CICO useful for losing weight and not useful for gaining weight. But, based on my own direct observation, you'll probably just call me a liar or say that I was tracking wrong. That is of course, what every CICO advocate does immediately. After all, CICO is (apparently) totally perfect and based on thermodynamics.
Perhaps you should read the link, discussing variability in the calories out portion. Saying that CICO is thermodynamics and that there is variability at least in CO is perfectly consistent. I'm not sure what windmill you think you've slain.
I will not call you a liar, but this is indicative of the mindset with which you are entering this conversation. You have tarred the people you hate with a scarlet letter and then simply closed your mind to any meaningful discussion. Very bad epistemic hygiene.
I don't hate CICO advocates, I just don't know if there's a constructive conversation to be had with people who consistently respond to everything with "you're lying" or "you must have missed something". This is also epistemic closure - anyone who struggles with CICO is always accused of lying.
As I've already said I did get some benefit from calorie tracking. I think it's useful even just to learn how many calories are in your food. So of course, I don't hate CICO, but of course this kind of defensiveness is also very typical of CICO advocates.
If the defense of CICO epicycles is that "uh, actually sometimes people just burn extra calories for no reason", that's not that compelling. Isn't the point of CICO that it should always give you predictable results, and that if your results are wrong, it's because you made a mistake or are lying?
The fact that CO is difficult to accurately assess in the real world - even moreso than CI, which is itself very difficult to accurately assess - isn't some epicycle of CICO, it's just a component of it. CICO does always give you predictable results, as long as your predictions are based on actual fact, i.e. the simple fact that you can't accurately assess CO in the real world.
In practice, the vast majority of CICO is directed at weight loss, which means simply making CI < CO. This can be accomplished consistently even without accurate measurements of either, by making them accurate enough such that the error bars don't overlap. That is, you can get a somewhat reasonable estimate for upper bound of CI by taking the nutrition label of every food you eat and then doubling it. And you can get a somewhat reasonable estimate for lower bound of CO by calculating your BMR and adding on half of what those caloric expenditure tables for exercise or your fitness band or smartwatch or your stationary bike says. Make the upper bound estimate of CI lower than the lower bound estimate of CO, then you can have fairly high confidence that you've gotten actual CI lower than CO.
For weight gain, the fact that the body has ways of physically refusing to take in more food or causing the food to pass through without nutrition being extracted makes things trickier, I believe, but that's an area that I've not had the privilege of needing to explore.
More options
Context Copy link
You're mashing up two different things which should be clearly distinct at this point in the conversation. There is no epicycle that there is variability in CO. There is just variability in CO, given the things we are generally able to control for. That's just the data and the labels we have to go with it. I've seen some attempts to quantify things like calories consumed by individual organs and how that correlates to their sizes and such, but on a population scale, we're basically never going to have measurements like that to control for, nor is an individual likely to go to the effort of taking precise measurements that could, in theory, more precisely predict individualized CO. So, absent that, we take a few factors that are easily measurable, fit the curves, see that they work pretty well, with some variability. Before, you had been claiming that this population-level variability was flatly denied by your enemies. Now, you think it's an epicycle. These are both Obvious Nonsense claims. This is just data and empirics.
Now, what you're stuck on is the second part, given that the population-level curves aren't able to precisely control for everything, how do these curves and the variability they contain provide predictable results for individuals? Well, you need individualized observational data to figure out where you are within that variability. The population-level curves get you close, but if you want precision, you need good individualized observational data. My experience with tracking for my wife and I is that the data is extremely noisy and must be handled with care. But after that care, the trend line is, indeed, 500cal/day = 1lb/wk, only with very noisy measurements. I don't think either of our maintenance levels from the trend line were precisely what the population-level data predicted, but they were both pretty close, and our tracking decisions were probably suitable to explain the minor deviation. It's this part, after you've already gotten a lot of individual observational data to avoid the population-level variability problem, where the vast majority of people (and all tightly-controlled lab experiments) get predictable results. The population-level variability doesn't magically jump into this part as an epicycle.
My actual experience of CICO was exactly the opposite. It worked initially but when I tried to bulk, I found it predicted weight gain very poorly. Since CICO is of course, perfect and never wrong, it must have been a mistake I was making, and since I couldn't find my mistake, I decided to spare myself the stress and anxiety and stopped tracking.
I am sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately, it is probably unlikely that I will be able to figure out whatever was going on in your individual case through comments. But I'm not sure what is supposed to change about my understanding of the published literature from your example.
FYI, my personal experience included periods of gaining, and my trend line from the noisy data was bang on at 500cal/day = 1lb/wk on that side, too (and my wife's). But I'm not sure how you might/might not want to update your understanding of the published literature based on my example, either.
I have a similar understanding of the published literature to you, I think - but knowing that planes crash when their altitude decreases is not enough to avoid crashing a plane. The published literature tells us, for example, that calories out should probably exceed calories in by about 500 and then you'll lose weight. But as I've heard in this thread there is no reliable way to measure either, calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content. Which is a reasonable start.
But all this amounts to is a fine motte. The actual bailey of CICO is that everyone who follows a calorie tracker and gets an incorrect result is lying or denying science, that it's physically impossible to fail to lose weight on 1800 calories or to fail to gain weight on 4000 calories, and that hormones don't affect weight.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes. The problem is that CO is not directly measurable outside of a metabolic ward. That's why successful CICO approaches dial in CI (which is measurable) to hit a certain rate of weight change (also measurable).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It exists. But I think the CICO denial position puts way too much variability on metabolism and hunger cues and so on. Yes people do vary at bit in how much they burn. But I’d be surprised if the difference was more than 10% or so at normal levels of activity. Likewise with hunger it’s a fairly small variation unless you have a disease of some sort. It’s not going to make you gain fifty pounds over your normal weight range for someone your height. 20 lbs maybe, but that’s about it. If you’re conscious of your diet at all, those 20 lbs are preventable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link