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 -
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.
Good news! The CICO folks that you dislike have entire articles on how this works, what the ranges are, how to understand it, etc. To steal a little bit of the plane analogy from below (not adopting it entirely), when a plane uses fuel, its dynamics change, too. That doesn't mean that physics don't work or that we can't understand how to use the system effectively.
Much more than that. Once you dial in where you are within the population-level variance, you get remarkably good predictions for how the noisy process works. I have a lot of background in stochastic systems, too, and I think this part trips a lot of people up. It's not easy to filter noisy data appropriately or to even understand the right timescales to pick for your filters. That's why the CICO people don't jump to an imaginary bailey and instead do things like creating an app that has a lot of filtering built-in.
Even though my degrees are actually in aerospace, I'm not sure the plane analogy is the best one for this part. Instead, maybe let's push things to a bit of an extreme with an analogy to semiconductor fabrication. In this case, someone could have some familiarity with the published literature in semiconductor physics, could go through a variety of published patents, but then when they try to make their own semiconductors, they fail. One response could be to claim that everyone in semiconductor physics is lying to them or just blaming them for doing it wrong; that those baddies are claiming that semiconductor physics "just works and must be perfect" or whatever. Another response could be that there are parts of the process that do require some specialized background knowledge to do precisely, perhaps some experience with tuning certain processes along the way that aren't always shouted to the rooftops in the public domain.
I think that careful filtering of CICO data also requires some mathematical experience if you want mathematical precision. I haven't actually used the particular app that I linked, nor am I privy to the tuning/filtering decisions they've made, but I'm familiar with the work of the guys who made it, so I have a reasonable amount of trust that they're doing a pretty good job at tuning it in a way that will work pretty well for most users. But the good news is that most people don't need mathematical precision here (unlike in semiconductor fabrication). I think @07mk goes a bit overboard in how wide of an error bar is needed, but for most people, you really can just hand-tune a bit with a little fudge factor, not needing to be super precise on your filtering, and see the results. But at the same time, if you do get into the details of tuning filters well (or offload that work to something like that app that probably does that ok enough for you), then you probably do get pretty precise predictions.
A lot of this comes down to error analysis and ranges for estimation. One group of CICO-haters say that it's just flatly impossible to filter in a way that gets you even remotely close to usable data without metabolic ward precision. Another group of CICO-haters say that any quantity of error violates their strawman that "CICO is perfect in every way". Most of the time, they don't put numbers to their error ranges. They don't put any numerical analysis tools to the question of how much data must be collected to achieve some O(epsilon) error or how different filtering schemes affect this. Frankly, many do fall into a small number of common 'traps', just like how undergrads in a numerical analysis course often fall into a small number of common 'traps'. I am lucky in that I have the toolset to get a lot more mathematical precision than most people, so I don't have to learn all of that from scratch or trust somebody else's filter. And when I did those things for an n=2 experiment, knowing all of the caveats about how noisy things are and how difficult the numerics is, my technical assessment was that I was shocked by how precise it turned out to be.
Well, what can I say - good for you. Personally, I find that calorie counting does not work very well for predicting weight gain, even after a year of trying it. And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content, and it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out, then perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. If you put in garbage data, and you get an impossible result like a TDEE of 4000, then is it actually reasonable to persist?
It seems like false precision to me. CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil. When estimates of calorie content can be off by so much, how is that not false precision? Particularly in the context of weight gain, it's not even rational to refuse to eat food that can't be measured.
That's not true.
I mean, it is possible. Lots of people do manage it well enough. Just like lots of people manage to pass their numerical analysis class, even if there is some number of common 'traps'. It's only a few people who get bitter enough after falling into a common trap to decide that the professor is full of bullshit and the material is impossible, then dropping out of the class. Even apps do it pretty darn well these days.
We get it; you're a very accomplished strawmanner. You don't need to keep making bigger and bigger strawmen to try to prove some point. We didn't count almost any vegetables (some exceptions).
This is what people are telling me right here in this thread! I agree that it's silly to count vegetables. I never counted vegetables - I was told I was doing it wrong!
Look, call them weakmen if you like, but I was told, when I was not getting anywhere counting calories, that it was because I was lying, or crazy, or had a tapeworm, or that it was scientifically impossible to eat 4 thousand calories a day and not gain weight, or that the labels on my food were probably wrong. Who knows? As a non-scientist, I don't have the ability or authority to evaluate or challenge these claims. And if that takes the form of personal criticism, you definitely can't ignore it or defend against it. Maybe they are strawmen - how am I supposed to know?
Do you believe the person online who says that it's scientifically impossible to not be racist? (This one definitely personally criticizes you.) The one who says that lizardmen secretly rule the government? The one who has "119 scientific proofs" for why the earth is flat?
How are you supposed to know? Basic epistemic hygiene will get you a long way. Or, ya know, you can throw your hands up and decide that it's impossible to know anything.
Why not? Racism is a human category - if scientists, with their authority, deem it to include me, I am certainly in no position to stop them. Words mean just what we want them to mean, no more and no less.
I don't really mind who runs the government. It seems unlikely that it would be lizardmen.
But consider weight gain and weight loss. It becomes obvious that this is a much more important topic than racism, the government, or the shape of the earth. After all, being fat or small and weak are moral issues, as has been discussed in this thread. Not having a great physique makes you an inferior person, whereas living on a flat or round earth, having a lizard for President, or having a scientist deem you racist (water off my back, really).
Epistemic hygiene is a community practice, not an individual practice - nor do I think it includes ignoring criticism. But in my case, I think epistemic hygiene might include not treating with maximum charity a group of people who seem to be strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to the Laws of Thermodynamics as a defense.
It's an individual practice with community effects, like any other hygiene. You seem to have been inoculated against actually engaging with the research by focusing on some random people that you think are stupid. Reversed stupidity (if it does exist out there somewhere) is not intelligence. If you're finding such people, engaging with them, and responding by becoming strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to saying that you can't possibly know anything about how the world works, you're descending to the lowest of the lows that you imagine your enemies to be.
Part of epistemic hygiene is keeping away from people who themselves, don't argue in good faith. You yourself suggested that I not take everything written online seriously!
You can figure out how the world works. But the best way to do that is through direct experience. You yourself were forced to resort to Ultima Ratio - your own personal experience. That's also what I'm doing. What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?
Again, you fall back on the research. But it's not obvious to me what guidance the research gives. If you perform calorie tracking and get an incorrect result, like a TDEE estimate that is too high, there's no study that can tell you why you got an incorrect result or what to do about it.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Dictating the food that one eats and the calories one expends is nowhere near as complex as piloting a plane. There's a reason why there are very few plane pilots, most of whom had to train a long time even before ever flying a real plane, while basically everyone, even many children, choose what to eat and how much to move.
And it absolutely is possible to get reliable enough measurements of both in order to accomplish certain goals, specifically weight loss. It's not that common for packaged foods to have multiple times the calories as their label indicates, and so one can pretty accurately place an upper bound in CI by adding up all the calories in those labels and then applying some multiplier >1. I like to use 2. It's also not that common for one's real caloric expenditure to be lower than their calculated BMR, especially if they do things like stand or walk during the day, so one can pretty accurately place a lower bound in CO by just calculating BMR. Get the upper bound of CI lower than CO, and you can be quite confident that true CI is lower than true CO. For weight gain, it's more tricky, because of the physical ability of the body to reject food, as well as its ability to involuntarily expend energy through heat, but generally CICO isn't talked about when it comes to weight gain; people looking to gain weight are rarely just concerned with weight, but rather specifically gaining muscle more than fat (or even not gaining fat at all or even even losing fat, which, despite some myths, are possible simultaneously while gaining muscle), and the composition goals tend to take precedence over just pure mass goals, which tack on a whole host of other requirements. The mirror is also true, of course, in that people looking to lose weight tend to want to lose fat while maintaining muscle, but due to how weight affects joint stress, simply losing the mass is often beneficial in itself even if it's muscle, and general everyday life often tends to provide enough exercise to maintain enough muscle (still, a lot of the advice around weight loss does push people towards doing resistance training to better help to maintain that muscle while losing weight).
Are there any specific comments on this forum that are in this bailey? Without specific references to such, this just seems like, at best, weakmanning, and likely strawmanning, based on what I've observed from people talking about CICO.
The body's system of weight, hunger, and energy regulation is of comparable complexity to the forces on a modern aircraft. It is, of course, designed to be simple enough to interact with that even dumb apes can feed themselves, but it is also not foolproof, which is why dumb apes in a food rich environment sometimes turn into 600lb whales. And of course, even with the advantage of modern scientific knowledge, you actually don't really seem to know what's happening at any particular stage. The person eating 2000 calories a day could, according to what you've written, be in anything between a 2500 calorie surplus (4000 calories in, 1500 out) and a 1000 calorie deficit (2000 calories in, 3000 out, which would correspond to gaining five pounds or more in dry body weight in a week or losing two or more pounds of dry body weight in a week, a prediction so vague as to be totally useless. I don't calorie count and I never find my weight fluctuating that much. So what good actually is this method? Because it seems by what you're saying, that it's hopelessly imprecise to measure either calories in or calories out.
And, far from being based on the Laws of Thermodynamics, totally inviolable scientific principles, now you don't know what drives weight gain. Ex150 sounds better and better.
These are all things I have seen or heard CICO advocates write online in other places. Whether that is true CICO, or if they are CICOINOs, I don't know.
Yes, and none of these complex systems require you to have much knowledge or expertise about anything in order to control how many calories you eat or expend accurately enough to lose weight. The control levers for piloting a plane are extremely complex and require lots of training to use properly. The control levers for placing food into your mouth and chewing it and swallowing and for moving around are extremely simple, so simple that almost everyone does it by default with minimal training.
A better analogy would be to, say, studying. Studying isn't trivially easy, but it's still very easy and simple in many contexts. And everyone knows that studying is useful for helping to pass a class. But the hard part is getting the motivation and discipline required to study consistently. Like how the tough part of managing weight is getting the motivation and discipline required to control one's food intake and exercise.
This has no relationship to what I wrote, from what I can tell, so I honestly have no idea how to respond to this. This is a complete nonsense non sequitur.
If you have no issues maintaining weight without calorie counting, then it sounds like you don't need to count calories to successfully implement CICO. Great!
Please walk it through for me how anything I wrote could be interpreted as such, with an emphasis on the "hopelessly" part.
According to you, food can have up to twice the amount of calories listed on the packaging. Leaving aside whether this is reasonable, that means that the person who thinks he's eating 2000 calories could actually be eating 4000 calories. This is obviously a large enough variation as to blow any attempt at tracking calories out of the water, to say nothing of variations in BMR. It's like piloting a plane with only one button and no altimeter. The interface being simpler doesn't make it easier - it can make it harder, because you don't get feedback! As you yourself suggest, it can take many months to get accurate predictions of weight loss, and maybe never get accurate predictions of weight gain.
Controlling one's food intake is actually pretty easy. My favourite cheat meal, I joke, is nothing. Eating is honestly just a chore.
This is false. I said that 2x is a reasonable upper bound to place for the actual caloric content of food compared to the nutritional listing when you're trying to estimate CICO for the purposes of weight loss.
This is built on a misinterpretation of my statement, but regardless, this is also false. Even if it were regular for foods to hold 2x as many calories as is listed (I doubt that this happens often enough to matter, but I have no actual data on this), this wouldn't, in any way, be enough variation to blow attempt at tracking calories out of the water. You can just... eat less than half as many (listed) calories as your BMR. So, e.g. if your BMR is calculated at 1,600/day, you can just limit yourself to 800 calories per day. Again, in practice, I doubt that it's so extreme that that's necessary, but also in (my) practice, taking that extreme assumption and acting on it does work.
But there is an altimeter - your scale and your tape measure! The feedback isn't instant, but it's also not many months. A week is often enough to see the signal in the noise (since natural daily weight fluctuations can easily be over the expected weight loss in a week, even when weighing oneself at the same time under the same conditions every day (for this reason, I personally found it good to weigh myself multiple times a day in order to get a range for the day instead of single number)), with 2 weeks being plenty in the vast majority of cases, and certainly 4 weeks being easily enough.
And indeed, the interface being simpler doesn't make it easier - specifically it doesn't make it easier to motivate oneself to press the button at the right time, if we're going with this one-button analogy. But knowing how and when to and not to press this metaphorical button certainly is pretty easy, but the tough part is actually finding the will to push the button or not at those correct times that you figured out. The way I see it, the value in so many different diets is that they help to reinforce that will and to reduce the amount of will needed, kinda like having a teacher who motivates you to study by giving regular quizzes and homework and also guides you on how to study through lessons.
If you don't think that foods can contain twice the amount of listed calories, then why is it reasonable to assume so?
Suppose you do this, and eat 800 calories with a 1600 BMR, but don't lose any weight. What should you, go down or up in calories? Maybe you go down to 500 or something, but this week the portions are actually accurate, and you lose weight, but too much weight. So you go back up, and next week you don't lose weight, so you have to go back down... What information is being gained here? On any given week, you don't actually know if you're going to lose weight at all or too much weight.
I don't know why we're arguing about this. I think calorie counting works for weight loss, though I am less sure now that you have told me how inaccurate nutritional labels are.
I never said it's reasonable to assume that they contain 2x the listed calories. I said that 2x the listed calories is a reasonable estimate for an upper bound when your goal is weight loss. It's not the only reasonable estimate, and how reasonable other estimates are would depend greatly on the specific goals
If your goal is weight loss, I contend that losing "too much weight" is such a low-risk event, both in terms of likelihood and in terms of the "harm" that comes from it that you might as well treat it like it's not a thing. So yeah, if you somehow maintain weight at 800 calories at 1600 BMR, then you go down even lower, and if 500 makes you lose "too much weight," then you celebrate and keep at it. Or you go back to 800 calories with the knowledge that since you lost "too much" weight last week, it's okay to not lose weight this week*. CICO in weight loss just means to keep CI below CO; I didn't say that you want to keep CI at some specific amount below CO so that you can lose weight in some specific, predictable rate of X pounds per week or whatever. CICO is certainly helpful for that as a guide, but, as I've alluded to before, the accuracy of calorie labels, the accuracy of calorie expenditure measurements, and the regular fluctuations of weight that people experience through daily life make it so that you can't make very precise predictions in your weight loss, especially in short timeframes.
*You wouldn't adjust week-by-week anyway; that's just not enough time to see if there's signal in the noise. If your weight loss goal is based around losing weight each and every week rather than losing weight long term, then CICO isn't helpful anyway; you should be looking at things like fasting and dehydration, since in a week-long timespan, the literal physical mass of food and liquids you put in your body dominates over the mass that your body converts into itself in the form of fat, muscle, etc.
In that case, it seems that you have no problem with the concept of CICO. I'd also note that, again, I have not told you anything about how inaccurate nutritional labels are, because I have no special knowledge that I can provide about how inaccurate nutritional labels are. My layman's understanding is that they're mandated by the FDA in the USA to be within some reasonable range of error and tested for compliance, but I have no idea how good the enforcement of the compliance is, and I have little idea of what the range of error is (guessing I could probably look this up if I wanted to). I just use 2x as a reasonable estimate for a multiplier when trying to lose weight, since it seems doubtful that if nutritional labels were often underestimating their calories by 2x, this wouldn't have been caught and become a major enough scandal that I'd have heard about it.
If the only priority was weight loss, you would eat zero calories a day, not eight hundred or five hundred. You don't need a calorie tracker to do that. Most CICO advocates also suggest that you shouldn't do this and should target a small sustainable deficit of 500 calories. That makes sense to me because you couldn't target a deficit like that without calorie tracking.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link