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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.
It's better to target zero calories per day than one. When we want something we know is bad for us, we find a way to rationalize getting it. The simpler the rules, the harder to rationalize them away. It's easy to subtly exceed a 500 calorie budget and think you're being diligent. It's a lot harder to put food into a mouth that's totally barred it.
Intermittent fasting probably works better than calorie counting for this reason.
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