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CICO is descriptively correct. Basically everyone agrees with that. There are huge disputes about whether it's prescriptively correct, with adjacent arguments about what constitutes "prescribing" it. One might even say that prescribing ozempic is, in a roundabout way, prescribing CICO, because the primary mechanism by which it causes you to lose weight is that you eat fewer calories than you use.
The meme is that you don't lose weight from cardio, or more pithily, "You can't outrun a bad diet." Harvard has some estimates of calorie usage by weight/activity here. Double them if you're thinking, "I'm going to do this for an hour." Well, are you going to do that every day? 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/week. I have a good friend who is an MD and a prof in public health who just flatly said, "We've known that number in the literature for a long time." It is descriptively correct. Many of those activities get you ≈500cal/hr. IF you do that every day AND eat at what is otherwise your maintenance, you will lose ≈1lb/week. Oh, you're only doing it three days a week? Reduce that rate by half. Oh, you're having an extra bottle of gatorade while you ride your bike (on top of what is otherwise your normal maintenance), that's 140cal (just whatever random flavor came up first in a search, 20oz bottle), taking you down another third. "I exercise all week so I can eat good"? ROFL.
One cannot determine whether a sink will overflow just by looking at the rate at which water is going down the drain. You need the rate that water is going in, too. Implicit in the meme is, "You don't lose weight by cardio alone," because if that's your plan, and your plan is to completely ignore what you're eating, it's extremely likely that you're just going to eat more.
Herman Pontzer has shown that the body adapts by burning fewer calories at rest, so your total CO is constrained. This is assuming you don't overeat due to hunger after working out. This goes to show why weight loss is so hard. The only viable option is to eat less, which is uncomfortable and unsustainable for most people.
Ah, see, we were in the land of memes, not the finer points of research. This is a fine point, indeed, and most people should probably mostly ignore it. The meme version of the constrained daily energy expenditure model is mostly wrong, anyway (as opposed to the real version). It's certainly not 100%. It's dose dependent, etc. One can get into the estimates of this and that, but it's probably mostly swamped by individual variability for most people, and most people are probably not taking a genuine step function with their exercise in a way that lends itself to making these sorts of estimates useful. If anything, if someone is actually paying close enough attention for this sort of thing to matter, the step function is likely to be a step down function, where a normally-highly-athletic person who is paying close attention to their energy balance gets injured or something and their physical activity level goes down significantly for an extended period of time.
I literally cited someone's research
Yeah, and like I said, before that, we were in the land of memes. I went on to talk about the research that you sort of kind of cited. You didn't actually cite it in enough detail to tell if you were just invoking the meme version of that research or the real version of that research.
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