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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time. The day you disprove it is the day physics gets really, really weird and reality as we know it ceases to make sense. So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe, no amount of obesity cheerleading will change that.

B) The effects noted in the study are frankly not that big. Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%. So conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy, which is only a benefit if you live in a post-scarsity world.

"You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.

conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe

The expansion of the universe violates conservation of energy. Think of all that CMB radiation that has been redshifted by the expansion of space, thereby losing energy over time.

Relativistic effects may explain why CICO doesn't work for people with high mass.

"Yo momma so fat she halted the expansion of the universe!"

Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%.

Over a long period, this can have an cumulative effect. A small daily surplus can lead to obesity after a decade. It may also mean a lower set point, in which eating a lot food results in much less weight gain than predicted or expected according to regression estimates and physical activity. Overfeeding studies show enormous individual variability as to what percentage of surplus calories are stored as fat or burned off.

Yes, this is trivially true for say, tall people burn more energy by virtue of having more surface area to radiate heat.

Overfeeding studies show enormous individual variability as to what percentage of surplus calories are stored as fat or burned off.

I have yet to see one of these, properly controlling for things like height and weight, that demonstrates an effect I would call "enormous variability". Low single digit percentages, sure.

A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

The naive version of CICO compares your meal plan to your gym time. The normal version compares all the food (including drinks!) you consume vs. all your planned or incidental physical activity. The true version compares the bioavailability of all the nutrients you consume vs. all of your metabolic activity, whether that's moving your muscles, thinking, growth, healing, generating heat, or anything else.

I have yet to see any diet plan that uses the true model of CICO. The closest I've seen is a single number for "base metabolism" that you back-calculate from your weight trends.

I think you're pushing a strawman, but I'm open to seeing a diet plan that uses the "true CICO" model I described. Anything less precise can't follow from raw thermodynamics.

As we are mere mortals, generally we can estimate a CO number that's within 5-10% of the appropriate one (regardless of hormonal and compositional differences) and then ensure a CI number that's a decent margin less than that. This whole thing seems to be trying to invoke the Zenos paradox of weight loss in which 'I cannot lose weight since I cannot know my exact expenditure and the only thing stopping me from adjusting my consumption is not knowing to 8 decimal places how many twinkies I can consume to achieve an exact 200 calorie deficit'.

CICO is not a diet plan, it is a description of the fundamental physics that govern bodyweight. My comment is not an endorsement of any diet plan, but a reaction against the, as demonstrated by the storm of replies, substantial contingent of people who will do absolutely anything other than admit you must create a net gradient in a body's energy flux to achieve change.

The strawman is comments about "willpower" or "different basal metabolic rates"- these are simply inputs to be considered but not a reason to pretend the fundamental equation is not what it is.

You don't need official diets for CICO it's self evident. Reduce food consumption and/or increase activity until you lose weight. Still haven't lost weight? Decrease/increase.

Problems:

  1. People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

  2. People tend to over-weight the activity part. So really just forget about CO and reduce CI until you start to lose weight. See problem one.

Expand to why you're poor and struggle with addiction.

"you're poor because you don't earn enough" A lot of dieting advice is similarly circular or unhelpful. Thankfully we now have GLP-1 drugs, which seem to work for many people

There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:

To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.

To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.

GLP-1 drugs

Be careful with that poison, I'm reading some horror stories about people going blind on that shit. And the media is staying as silent as possible for that one.

No, you're poor because you don't do relatively simple things. And yes, hopefully GLP-1s help a ton.

the SS was written a long time ago when a HS degree was good enough. now you need college

So it's down from 97% to what?

People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

Its well known that certain medications lead to weight gain: do you believe they do so because they reduce the self control of those who take them? Does hyperthyroidism cause significant increases in self-control, and does hypothyroidism erode self-control? Do GLPs work because they increase the individual's self-control?

If not, then factors other than self-control are at play.

Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.

Hypothyroidism typically reduces appetite, yet you still gain weight despite eating less. Similarly, hyperthyroidism typically increases appetite, yet you lose weight even though you're eating more. Thyroid hormones are needed to make a lot of metabolic processes run, and if you don't have enough (hypothyroidism) then your temperature goes down and a dozen other processes don't work well and stop using up calories, so most of what you eat ends up in fat storage. If you have too much (hyperthyroidism) then your body temperature goes up, a dozen metabolic processes go into overdrive, and you lose weight despite eating more.

You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.

You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.

Where this hypothetical is from?

I know it wouldn't be The Motte if it wasn't 10,000 words of caveats. Yes, these are exceptions that apply to a minuscule number of people, yet a bunch of people use them to make excuses for why they're fat.

It would not surprise me one bit that certain drugs and conditions reduce self-control and other's increase it. Some things make desired outcomes easier and some things make them harder. If you've got lots of self-control and you get some condition or start some drugs that make it harder to keep weight off, reduce CI until you stop gaining weight.

I would bet you think I have some normie conception of self-control: "self-control is easy! Just don't eat." Nope, self-control is really hard, and you're probably mostly born with it, like IQ. Can a midwit get a PhD in math from Harvard...? Well, are they black? No? Very unlikely.

Additionally hilarious when the majority of people making these arguments, if confronted with a similar 'transness is valid since super rare hormonal dysfunction that impacts 1-in-2-million people' would instantly side on the yes but side whilst since it's about their own bodyweights are suddenly reality relatavists.

I'm reminded of a twitter thread from Big Yud ages ago on similar lines about why he was unable to lose weight. Can't find it on a quick search but it was a similar matter of 'rationalist attempts to rebut CICO when it's fairly obvious he just likes eating and doesn't like exercising'. A post meming on him from back then https://x.com/MorlockP/status/1657098074139811876

I've personally struggled with my weight depending on a bunch of factors, swinging 20-30kgs either direction depending on circumstances but ultimately CICO's the only way I've ever been able to lose weight and generally I gain when I'm distracted by other things to the point of letting go of either moderation or exercise.

One CICO diet plan I know of is The Hacker's Diet. You don't need impossible precision because instead you borrow a page from control theory. You measure your change in weight, and if it's not as desired, you reduce CI to compensate. Closed-loop feedback.

That's exactly what I'm talking about: It's a Calories In, Calories Out, Body Weight system and that third variable is essential.

Skimming through the paper, it appears that the difference between cold and hot is about 100 Calories per cold day, or about one pound per month. A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

Body weight is not an independent variable. But it is easily observable the way CI and CO are not.

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

"Ostensibly".

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

h-What? My understanding of the claim is that those two people have slightly different COs. Therefore, a "pure CICO system" would explain it perfectly fine if we're able to quantize this component to individual variability. There are tons of different components to individual variability, and most of the time, we just don't bother quantizing them because they're often hard to measure and are small effect sizes anyway.

Show me the table entry for "brown adipose tissue heating" on a CO calculation and I'll believe it. Otherwise it's just part of the fudge factor.

Quantizing that component (and every other one) to individual variability is the weakness of CICO, as they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables.

These things are usually buried in textbooks. Often in the world of, "Yeah, it can kinda be done, but it's expensive and time-consuming and doesn't really change much."

they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables

I mean, not really? We have a pretty good handle on individual variability. It's not nothing, but it's not insane. And it doesn't generally change much from a practical standpoint. You can just use direct observation and measure your own point in that range of individual variability.

Its not every winter, they measured when exposed to 19 C. Which is basically room temp. So it would be every month about 3k calories (1 lb) for the warm conceived groud vs the cold. Just because they were born when its on average 10 C outside instead of 18 C.

Its ridiculous lol

Who are these 100% blank slatist CICO advocates? Especially around here in the land of "IQ is real and probably has a large genetic component."

Here.

CICO by the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds for force feeding and starvation. Everything between those extremes is confounded by biology.

Should I believe my lying eyes? When my wife and I tracked our weight and caloric intake for a couple years, we had a range of different intakes, and the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. It was noisy, yes, but probably about as noisy as any measurement we have for any biological research.1 Taking another look at the data now, it would be kinda dumb to think about modeling it as a step function, S-curve, or deadzone or whatever. Generally, one needs some justification for moving to some other weird modeling assumption.

1 - Moreover, it is utterly unsurprising that it is so noisy, due to the mathematical realities of numerical analysis and differentiation. If anything, it was extremely surprising that it worked so well!

the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk

It's very strange to me this is controversial. You don't have to rely on an small sample studies or individual anecdotes. Thousands of serious bodybuilders track year round. To the point of using an activity tracker to track general physical activity, having a detailed log for total resistance training volume, and eating & measuring common foods to the gram. Essentially universally they find that an offset of 500 kcal/day from maintenance is good for a pound a week, with maybe a variability of 100 kcal.

Now tracking everything too the gram is annoying. Peoples sense of hunger and motivation differ, etc. As hunger develops it's supper easy to spray that cooking spray for 1 second instead of 0.2. It says 0 Cals on the back, but it's not it's 9 kcal per gram. For two items per meal, four meals per day, and 1 gram per spray that's 7.5 pounds of body weight per year. Additionally, in a deep deficit, if you don't use an activity tracker, it's easy to go down to 5k steps a day from 10k steps a day.

So if your eating and activity are driven by intuition or satiation knowing about CICO does not make you lose weight. Particularly the longer and deeper the deficit the easier it is to deceive yourself. You can bypass this problem in approximately two ways. One, is to exercise extreme levels of detail and self-corrective feedback in tracking. The other is to suppress appetite, which is the obvious mechanism by which GLP1s and gastric work.

Did you calculate your base metabolic rate (or whatever the fudge factor is called in your system) so that it all worked out? If not, you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time. If you have adjusted it, then that means your calculations are on target, and adjusting the inputs so that 3500 kcal = 1 lb resulted in a trendline at 3500 kcal per lb.

This study gives some people a 20% headstart on your dieting goals (admittedly they didn't measure "CI"), which is a pretty notable difference.

you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time.

I don't know what you mean by this. I didn't need something to happen to be correct. I gathered data, I looked at that data, and I saw that the trend line (across a range of inputs) was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. I didn't have to adjust for anything. That was just what the data said.

This is certainly what I do - weigh myself every couple of weeks, if my weight's gone up stop eating lunch for a few days, if it's gone down start eating dessert for a few days. Hadn't heard the name "Hacker's Diet", though; it seems kind of too obvious to need a name and I kind of thought anyone who's actually at target weight would be doing it.

It's pretty much what I do as well. Also anticipating excess calories, "Gonna get drinks and have a big dinner so going light on lunch.". Bonus, less booze to get tipsy.

Also knowing your indulgences and where calories sneak in. For most I think that's liquids and snacking. I have a huge sweet tooth. I keep snacking to a minimum and cut out sugary drinks over 20 years ago so I can have an extra slice of cake every now and then. Over the last 5 years I've started "light" intermittent fasting so it's even easier to keep tabs on things. Also I think being comfortable with the feeling of being hungery is a good thing.

To be clear; I'm anorexic (in the proper sense); I don't get hungry*. Obviously, this largely negates the "ate too much" side of the coin.

*I recently discovered that I can get cravings for specific foods; when I started training with my bow, I started getting meat cravings, presumably because I needed protein to add muscle.

Well, it is, but how much do we know about the CO part of the equation? There seem to be often-cited figures for calories burned by various activities, but for example it seems quite obvious that whatever people poop out is not actually of zero caloric value, and that moreover the difference between, say, diarrhea and wombat poop cubes must be nontrivial, but this seems to never be addressed in those arguments.

There is a kind of motte and bailey going on. The motte criticism of CICO is that it's actually very difficult to calculate exactly how many calories are exhausted per second of exercise given how many variables go into such a thing and it's also difficult to calculate how much food is able to to be absorbed by an individual's digestive system therefore we can't calculate out the exact to the calorie differential. The bailey is therefore it's impossible to just consume less calories each day until you find the equilibrium where you're losing weight. You absolutely don't need to have an exact measure of Calories in and calories out to make sure the sign of the difference is negative and the broad tools of calorie restriction will easily allow you to flip that sign to negative. We can't make sure it's -500 and not -485. But this swing aren't even that large as things average out.

CO is the more important one . two people can be identical yet have TDEEs that vary by over a thousand calories despite boing being nearly equally active . that is the power of CO

be indentical yet have TDEEs that vary by over a thousand calories despite being nearly equally active

Either we have very different definitions of the word "identical", or i am going to need a source on that claim. It seems to be farcically untrue at face value.

CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time.

This is why, should I ever have a child, I will feed him a pound of uranium. He won't have to waste time eating for the next 20,000 years.

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory

That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.

conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy

The significance is in the extrapolation. The takeaway is to not have babies in winter in Japan (that would be silly), but that we may be able to modify obesity significantly through pre-conception cold exposure, the limit cases of which are explored in the study. Japan is probably not even a top 100 place in the world where residents experience genuine cold for prolonged periods, due to their urban living and wealth to buy clothes.

You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.

Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)

I'm sorry, but you have disproven nothing, and your comments about willpower are frankly irrelevant. Willpower is just a modifier to your calories input, and calories output. If you completely lack the will to put down the donut and go for a run/swim/whatever, and have no interest in balancing or reversing the energy flux of your body, then sorry your ass is fat and will get fatter barring external intervention. For proof of this, I refer you to Novo Nordisk's stock price.

All successful diets must deal with the fundamental truth of CICO, it cannot be otherwise. You can adopt any number of strategies for managing the two halves of the equation, but you cannot pretend the equation does not exist. The universe has no complaint department.

It is easy for me, and presumably you, to not eat the donut. You believe that this is a power by our will, though you don’t believe that this should be deemed “willpower”. However, we can’t peer inside the hunger of an obese person. What is considered a power of our will may in fact be a less strong sensation of hunger. How easy would it be for us to not eat the donut if we stopped eating for two days? Because our hunger would increase, the power of our will to control it decreases, and we would likely succumb to the donut. In the same way that we are liable to nap after not sleeping. The thought is simply: what is the evidence that the skinny and the obese experience the same level of hunger? It’s possible that they experience more hunger. The circumstantial evidence indicates this. The above study suggests environmental factors influence hunger. Etc.

It’s something of a theory of mind issue to think that everyone experiences the same level of hunger or that our own ability to manage weight would remain if our hunger doubled.

Okay, you are off on some tangent responding to a staw man I cannot even conceive of. I have not, and am not saying anything about experienced levels of hunger, or the theory of mind of an obese person. All I am saying is that the basis of a successful diet must be the recognition of the fundamental equation that determines whether body mass increases, decreases, or remains the same. Use whatever strategies you want to manage both sides, but to claim that CICO is somehow disproven, as OP does, is grossly incorrect.

Willpower is just a modifier to your calories input, and calories output

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

The success of GLP-1 drugs shows how medicine is more effective than lifestyle modification.

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines

You are wrong in about fifteen different ways here, but I'll highlight this one: humans are in fact machines, just very complicated ones made out of meat.

You are wrong in one way, but only because you made a single assertion. Humans are not machines as they have particular evolutionary forces at play that need to grasped to make sense of their behavior.

If you had perfect knowledge of the physical makeup of a human body and perfect knowledge of physics, you could perfectly predict the results of any input on that body, no need for cludging together predictions with meta-knowledge like what evolutionary pressures led to that physical arrangement of atoms. People are deterministic machines like literally everything else.

Similarly, a car is in fact just a simplified animal that's made out of steel.

While we have advanced pretty far on the "reacts to sensory inputs" front lately, the "autonomous reproduction" is still sorely lacking.

It's intentionally disabled by breeders so they could have a profit for themselves. Unlock this feature with one simple...

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

No, it is not disproved. The second law of thermodynamics does not apply to only machines, it applies to everything.

You are conflating "calories in" with hunger. In a thermodynamic system sense, hunger does not matter. Hunger is not a thermodynamic property. Hunger has nothing to do with the second law.

  1. A person can be hungry and intake no calories.

  2. A person can be not hungry and intake many calories.

  3. A person can be hungry and intake calories.

  4. A person can be not hungry and intake no calories.

Yes, humans generally eat when they are hungry and do not eat when they are full. But this is outside of the second law.

So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory

That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.

I have never heard of CICO used in any other manner than "eat less calories than your burn and you lose weight". But why not engage with what CICO actually means instead of how you think people use it? What does it matter how it is used?

What you describe is not actually a blow to CICO, it is a blow to what you contend is the common usage of CICO. Which, what would you like the second law of thermodynamics to say to that? "Congratulations, you have defeated your own definition of CICO?" Ok?

Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)

CICO does not actually fail in a thermodynamic sense. People just don't have the self control to limit the "CI" part to below the "CO" part. Maybe you could consider it a failure in a "people have a hard time limiting their diet because hunger is powerful" sense. Or "when people get hungry for a long time their metabolism slows down and reduces the CO which makes it harder to lose weight" sense. But in a energy in = energy out + energy accumulated system sense, it does not fail.

The metabolism slowdown is the major problem. Some people see such a huge slowdown despite still being fat and cutting calories to low levels. those people are screwed . you can only cut so much

you can only cut so much

Wrong.

Its a major problem for people trying to lose weight, its not a major problem for "your body is made of matter and therefore obeys the laws of thermodynamics; so CICO is unambiguously true to the extent it is a thermodynamic statement"

The principal works. The problem I see with CICO is that it’s kinda like telling a drug addict that they just need to not do drugs. It’s true, the best thing a drug addict can do is not do drugs, but the advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does tell people how to actually stop using the drugs. Better advice would include changing your routines and habits to avoid triggers and easy access to drugs, and finding things to do that fill your days with happiness without the drugs.

Food wise, the advice, in my view is to eat Whole Foods, unprocessed foods, favoring plants and protein, and limiting carbs especially simple carbs. Then you add in some exercise especially muscle building exercises though even walking has benefits.

Food wise, the advice, in my view is to eat Whole Foods, unprocessed foods, favoring plants and protein, and limiting carbs especially simple carbs. Then you add in some exercise especially muscle building exercises though even walking has benefits.

Do you expect that following your advice will cause people to consume fewer calories than they expend? Otherwise, I would find that this

advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does [not] tell people how to actually stop using the drugs

This is really the rub. People want to claim that there is a "problem [they] see with CICO", but it's not actually a problem with CICO. It's a problem with advice for behavioral modification. That advice needs to be linked to a realistic approach to achieving the desired objective, given the reality of the underlying facts.

Imagine saying that the problem with math is that telling people that math is correct doesn't tell them how to actually learn math. ...that's a problem with math?!? That means that math should be viewed as useless or something? No, man. That's not a problem with math at all. Math is just fine. Math is correct, actually. People can, and do, learn math. Obviously, simply saying "math is correct" will not immediately and instantaneously result in someone learning math. Work still needs to be done. But people wayyyy overcorrect and want to imply that there's something wrong with math if they can't just easily, instantaneously, learn math with zero effort and nothing but an incantation of math being correct.

It’s a problem because it’s generally the standard advice given by everybody, with no follow-up to help people actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it. Just don’t eat as much, bro. It’s not useful in getting to the goal. And since tge reason for giving weight loss advice in the first place is to help people reach a goal weight that’s appropriate for their height, advice that doesn’t lead to them getting there is a loss. Yes, any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less, much like various budgeting plans still generally result in spending less money, and study tips generally result in people spending more time reviewing for tests. That doesn’t mean the underlying principle for those things doesn’t work, it means that you need more than the technically correct answer to make it possible to do it.

with no follow-up to help people actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it

I mean, frankly, I don't believe you? I think what you're seeing is that most online discussion is not between a person who acknowledges physical reality and is looking for strategies to actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it and a person who has been through it and has even a quarter of a millisecond to start describing follow-up advice. Instead, within a tenth of a millisecond, the discussion is just totally swamped with people claiming that the entire framework is bogus, unhelpful, or not paired with follow-up.

What you're probably missing is not-online discussions that don't get bombed in this way. Where people actually have a serious conversation about goals and strategies to accomplish it. Again, I think the biggest reason you don't see this online is that any such discussion doesn't have a chance to even get off the ground.

Yes, any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less, much like various budgeting plans still generally result in spending less money, and study tips generally result in people spending more time reviewing for tests.

Correct. You don't see those other discussions getting bombed and derailed by hoards of people saying that it's totally bogus to even think about trying to spend less money or to study more.

Perhaps test the thesis? Maybe post in the Small-Scale Questions Sunday Thread? Unlike this one, which started immediately out the gate just saying that the entire conceptual schema was bogus, perhaps start by saying that you think that "any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less", and you'd like some follow-on advice on how to accomplish it. See what response you get. I would predict that you'll get some realistic advice, probably with some variation, because different things have "worked" for different people. You may also get bombed by folks saying that your entire premise is bogus.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.

Imagine that, for some reason, wanting to learning calculus was as common as wanting to lose weight (perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam), but that mathematical talent remained as low as it is our world (where, after we spend 13 years force-feeding everyone math in an attempt to get them to at least understand algebra, it turns out most people cannot deal with negative numbers or division, let alone variables, and top out their mastery of mathematics at memorizing multiplication tables; i.e., 3rd grade). However, the masses were not willing to accept this, and flooded message boards asking for advice on learning derivatives, purchased index cards with terms like "critical point" on them, etc., despite conclusive empirical evidence that the vast majority of people who attempted this failed.

It seems like the very first thing that should be said in such discussions is that most people are not capable of learning calculus, and that if you failed geometry in high school you are probably wasting your time. Specially when it became obvious that OP could not tell the difference between 7-3 and 3-7.

perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam

Let's go further. I posited this one on reddit a while back. Let's suppose an eccentric billionaire credibly offered a literal billion dollars to a somewhat-randomly-selected obese person, on the condition that they lose a certain, reasonable amount of weight for their height/gender/etc. and keep it off for, say, five years (this is often a cited duration). Let's say they take drugs/surgery/whatever off the table and it's agreed (perhaps monitored) that it's going to be only "diet and exercise", "CICO", or whatever descriptor. They could plausibly take out loans against the future payout to the extent that lenders think they're likely to collect, which they could use to pay for professional advice (let's say it's highly likely that the person will accept the billionaire's recommendation for a professional who deeply understands caloric balance, macro/micronutrients, sports science, personal training, etc.) or even, say, quitting their job in the meantime or whatever if the numbers allow it. What do you think their chance of success would be?

I've got some other great hypotheticals along opposite lines, but let's just do a direct hyper variant of yours first.

If you can borrow enough money against your expected billion to quit your job and literally redesign your life around being thin, and are willing to do so, my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years. But I expect the required measures to be extreme; exercising for several hours every other day, chugging water all day to kill hunger, moving to a cold climate to burn more calories maintaining body temperature, eating bland food like Soylent and MealSquares, avoiding social occasions like birthdays and weddings so that you are not tempted to break your diet, etc. In the worst case, they might have to move to an isolated rural area in Alaska to avoid just driving down to the Walmart for a snack raid. It'd be something like a medical residency, where you endure four years of hell in exchange for a greatly improved rest of your life. And, of course, I expect the weight to come roaring back as soon as the 5 years are over and return to a normal life.

In 2025, a normal life makes you fat. It shouldn't take an extraordinary life to avoid being fat. And, for most of human history, it didn't. Sometime in the last few decades, something changed such that ordinary levels of exercise and satiety and willpower simply aren't enough anymore to avoid being fat. Since most people do not have the slack to redesign their entire lives around being thin, a realistic solution to the obesity epidemic needs to involve either identifying and removing the orange soda or inventing some kind of orange soda antidote. Telling people to just consume less calories than they spend is a useless distraction, like telling an adult who counts on his finger to just study harder for the AP Calc exam.

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The principal works. The problem I see with CICO is that it’s kinda like telling a drug addict that they just need to not do drugs. It’s true, the best thing a drug addict can do is not do drugs, but the advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does tell people how to actually stop using the drugs. Better advice would include changing your routines and habits to avoid triggers and easy access to drugs, and finding things to do that fill your days with happiness without the drugs.

Providing optimal advice to drug addicts is something I have neither the education nor inclination to do, but I'm still going to snort when a bunch of crackheads on Facebook or whatever start badmouthing the "drugs in drugs out theory" and telling me they get high no matter how little they smoke.

Drug addicts can admit that they're doing drugs. Doing drugs is a discrete act from non-drug, non-destructive acts.

Speaking from direct experience: Food addicts either don't know or actively convince themselves that they haven't crossed the threshold between eating and gluttony. Their mental math never bothers to account for that extra quarter cup of canola oil they dumped into the pan. They don't have a good sense or willfully refuse to investigate how calorie dense a cup of berries is compared to a cup of Nutella compared to a cup of jam. The direct relationship between that snack (which they may forget when they go back to tally at the end of the day) and the amount of time it'd take to burn it are conveniently uninvestigated.

When some people are forced to stare this in the face with strict CICO, they make better decisions.

Which goes back to better decisions, which is precisely what CICO by itself doesn’t do. Telling someone to just CICO is like saying “dude, just spend less than you make” with no other advice. Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck. It’s not wrong, but from the POV of getting people to make better food decisions it’s not going to work because it’s woefully inadequate to that task. Telling someone to choose Whole Foods over crap is useful because it makes you feel full and therefore eat less. Telling someone to exercise gives them more calories to work with.

Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck.

CICO without cheating (which is why we always emphasize actual tracking) makes this clear. Or clear enough for weight loss.

Knowing the calories you get out of a Snickers bar, given your daily caloric needs and the satiation you get from it, lets you know how bad a decision it is. Once you set a ceiling you can easily see which foods are inefficient.

And, if you choose to indulge, you'll have to fast or exercise later (which you'll probably enjoy even less, proving the point) or compensate with some satiating, low-calorie foods.

People who come up with a fixed budget and can't decide between Netflix or rent have a problem but it isn't ignorance.

eating is so subconscious

To be a little tighter, it's like telling them to have some willpower and just use drugs in moderation. Which is precisely what they have proven to be unable to do.

I don't even know why Japan is mentioned. In the mountainous regions (and there are many,) it gets cold as a mother f*ck, and apart from the modern era where everyone has become a pansy people suffered through all kinds of cold. Japanese houses, in particular traditional houses, are extremely poorly insulated, if at all. But so what? Surely the steppes of Russia with its ample babushka have always been colder.

As for diets failing, that's willpower, as you point out yourself. It's not the reasoning behind the dieting. Finally, water retention, liver functionality based on one's lifetime eating habits (and thus metabolism) and heredity (variations in adipogenesis) are all factors in any one person's potential for weight gain.

But so what? Surely the steppes of Russia with its ample babushka have always been colder.

Russia has serious insulation and heating where it's cold. Our homes are a lot warmer than typical European is used to. Plus, major hbd confounder.

How are Russian houses insulated? I hear a lot about brick and concrete, especially on the old housing blocks, which hardly insulates at all. Huge district heating probably helps in a lot of places though.

The outer walls are very thick. Common is "2 and half bricks" i.e. 640 mm. And mineral foam layer in modern houses.

The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored" follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but the bailey version used to dismiss other people's difficulty in losing weight as only self-control issues, which you've expressed as "You eat too much and you dont exercise enough", does not, because exercise is not the only way calories are output, fat is not the only way an input can be stored and absorbtion rates can vary.

I am not advocating for dismissing anyones self-control issues, in fact I think they are fundamental for any successful diet plan. All I am advocating for is recognition of fundamental truths that, for reasons I do not understand, are vociferously denied by a portion of those interested in loosing weight.

If you do not have the self control to stop eating in abundance, plan around that- maybe substitute foods that can be eaten in large amounts with few calories. Maybe have that donut, but as a treat for a good exercise session. Many wiser people have many better thoughts. But throwing up your hands and saying "CICO is wrong" is not going to help.

fat is not the only way an input can be stored

What other ways are there?

Muscle can be built

Even if absorption rates vary, the thing is that you cannot absorb more energy than there is in the food you eat. So sufficiently restricting calories necessarily results in reduction of mass.

Yes, but it may not result in a stable reversion to a healthy weight. Some people's absorption rate might be dysfunctional such that they lose any middle ground between "obesity" and "starvation". If all you care about is making them thin, you can technically keep them forever balanced on the razor's edge of starvation, but this is neither a practical solution (because their willpower will crack) nor a good one if what you want is to make the patient healthy.

Scott described a rare case of genetic leptin deficiency.

Usually they are of normal birth weight and then they’re very, very hungry from the first weeks and months of life. By age one, they have obesity. By age two, they weigh 55-65 pounds, and their obesity only accelerates from there. While a normal child may be about 25% fat, and a typical child with obesity may be 40% fat, leptin-deficient children are up to 60% fat. Farooqi explains that the primary reason leptin-deficient children develop obesity is that they have “an incredible drive to eat”…leptin-deficient children are nearly always hungry, and they almost always want to eat, even shortly after meals. Their appetite is so exaggerated that it’s almost impossible to put them on a diet: if their food is restricted, they find some way to eat, including retrieving stale morsels from the trash can and gnawing on fish sticks directly from the freezer. This is the desperation of starvation […]

Unlike normal teenagers, those with leptin deficiency don’t have much interest in films, dating, or other teenage pursuits. They want to talk about food, about recipes. “Everything they do, think about, talk about, has to do with food” says [Dr.] Farooqi. This shows that the [leptin system] does much more than simply regulate appetite – it’s so deeply rooted in the brain that it has the ability to hijack a broad swath of brain functions, including emotions and cognition.

i guess this is how some people also feel around alcohol

I have no reason to think this is real. In fact I suspect it is entirely imaginary.

Some people's absorption rate might be dysfunctional such that they lose any middle ground between "obesity" and "starvation".

I'd be interested to see a controlled medical case study of such a person. So far in many hours of conversation about this, none has been produced. I am not confident that such people exist.

Yeah this sounds like fattycope.

This is unnecessary, low effort, and obnoxious.

So sufficiently restricting calories necessarily results in reduction of mass.

Yes, indeed, but the "sufficiently" part can be much crueler on some people than others for reasons outside of self-control.

Agreed, and hopefully nobody would dispute that. I think what's being pushed back on here is the very strong claim in the OP of "A blow to the CICO theory of obesity". Given that due to the basic laws of physics CICO must be true, it's not really accurate to say that it has received a blow. That does not mean that focusing on CICO is the best strategy for any given person to effect weight loss, but the basic physical principle is true for them even if they struggle to make use of it in their lives.

I hate both extremes of the obesity conversation. One extreme -- of which there are examples -- is people who just flat out hate fat people, hate looking at them, have no compassion or understanding of any obstacles that have kept them in that state, and desire to shame and bully them for its own sake. I recall one motte user said something like, "people don't like fat people, don't want to be around them, and don't want to be friends with them."

I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about. But when that post happened, I had to update in their direction. I had to update in the same way that seeing tumblrinaction posts that went "KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN." forced me to update my views on feminism, and started my turn from feminist-sympathetic to anti-feminist. There are certainly some people who hate the obese enough to segregate away from them.

The other extreme, of course, says that CICO is wrong not only as the sole guidance, but as the biochemical explanation of what's going on at a basic level. That's obviously false.

But I'm convinced there are more in the anti-obese extreme than in the pro-obese extreme, which is why I consider myself a moderate anti-fat-stigma person. Not in the sense that I believe being fat is good or healthy, but in the sense that I believe the shaming doesn't do the job, and just makes a bad situation worse, isolating people who need support rather than helping them take agency and affect their choices in whatever ways they can.

Health positivity, and not fat shaming, is the way to go. We should be promoting healthy, delicious meals that provide balanced nutrition, and socially boosting drinks that aren't drenched in sugar while providing the social and psychological appeal soda has. (Right now, soda is one of the only beverages you can get everywhere at a consistent quality. That should change.) Insofar as the fat activists oppose that, I oppose them.

The point is that people's desire for the obese to lose weight should be based in a concern for their health and a desire to see them live long, healthy lives, not from an aesthetic revulsion or contempt. The point of a lot of the discussion about set points is to encourage the view that "but for the grace of God go I."

The reality is that the cause of the obesity crisis is directly related to sedentary lifestyles, easily available cheap, calorie-dense food, and more sweets on store shelves than in a Wonka factory. They're social factors. We've put the human organism in an environment where our instincts -- like craving sweet fruit, which is relatively uncommon and seasonal in nature, or prizing meat, which was always the result of a bit of cleverness or a bit of strength -- backfire on us. What was once rare, and thus craved and hoarded, is now commonplace. And so like a dragon in a treasure vault, we hoard and we hoard. We're built for an environment where the most rewarding food takes the most work, but we live in a world of convenience foods and candy. Of course many people are going to lose control! (I believe the same about pornography. It should not be possible for millions of strangers to see Belle Delphine's vagina.)

The solution has to be social changes -- I think liberals are right and car culture is a big problem -- coupled with regulation, and medical marvels that help shift the needed willpower into a range more people have, as we're seeing now. But the big problem is that people's emotions, aesthetics, and experiences are getting mixed up with the data, and it seems impossible to talk about the ability of personal choices to improve health without getting called 'fatphobic', or to talk about the real and enduring social, biological, and psychological barriers that make it hard for many people to use willpower to control the problem without getting accused of using 'fatty logic'.

I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about.

I actually don't hold that view! I have seen plenty of that behavior (all over the Internet and even on this very forum), so that I know that there is a very real problem with people who just have seething hatred of fat people. Some try to couch it in terms of "we need to shame them so they improve", but that's a lie (maybe even lying to themselves) used to justify picking on easy targets.

I also agree that shaming does not work, nor am I proposing it. I've written impassioned arguments against shaming fat people, in fact. It sucks major ass to be obese, and it's full of constant shame every time one looks in the mirror (ask me how I know, lol). If the soul-crushing shame we already apply to fat people hasn't fixed it, no amount of shaming will.

So as far as that goes, I don't think we really disagree at all. What I'm trying to push back on is the overcorrection I perceive in activists all over the Internet (and which, in fairness, I may have incorrectly read into this discussion - prejudice can do that to you). I've seen way too many fat acceptance activists (ironically, including on TiA like you said) take positions that are untrue and unhelpful, such as:

  • You don't need to change, the goal is to be healthy and not to lose weight
  • People [meaning loving friends and family, not fat people hate posters] are bigots who can't accept that you are fine the way you are
  • You can't be expected to change, you have a medical condition that means it's impossible
  • You didn't do anything wrong in the first place, this is the result of external conditions in society (or genetics) which mean you have no culpability in where you are

Needless to say, I find these positions to be not only incorrect, but actively harmful to the people they purport to help. I think they're coming from a place of love (which is good), but that isn't the only thing that matters imo. You also have to not allow people to continue in the unhealthy direction they are going, at least not without being gently nudged into a better direction. What I'm advocating for is an approach where we are frank (but kind) with people about their own culpability in the mess they are in, while also not falling back on empty "just do better bro" advice. I think it's possible to both be honest with people that yes, they bear responsibility, while also being compassionate about the difficulty of the change they need to make and how they may need strategies that go beyond simple effort of will.

I'm going to make an analogy in the hopes that it'll help to make my position clearer. I view the obesity problem as being somewhat similar to the disease of sin in Christian thought. While in a sense sin isn't any individual's fault (due to original sin corrupting man and the world), each individual still bears culpability for the sinful choices he made. And while a sinner can't fix himself (only Jesus can do that), he still has to acknowledge that he is a sinner, do his best to sin no more (even though that won't be enough), and accept the Lord's help in fixing the disease of sin within him. So while the problem is beyond the individual to fix himself, there is a personal choice that must be made to turn away from the old bad path. I see the obesity problem as having a lot in common with that.

I've written impassioned arguments against shaming fat people, in fact.

I think it's helpful to distinguish two behaviors:

  1. Shaming fat people: "hey lardo, put down the donut, you're gross"
  2. Being ashamed of fat people: "the other day, I saw lardo eating a donut, it was gross"

IIUC, you're addressing (1). (1) is actively directing sentiment at fat people. It's unkind for sure, and unlikely (?) to be helpful. Fat people aren't unaware they're fat.

I think (2) is more common, and that you may be conflating it with (1). (2) is a valid, common, reasonable, borderline inevitable way to feel. Any suggestion that people should strive to eliminate (2) is naive. People like beauty, health, and symmetry. The same reflex that makes us avoid corpses, shit, and disease makes us avoid obesity.

That doesn't mean we can't have empathy for the difficulty of losing weight, or the tribulations of being fat. Willpower is hard! Free will is a fuzzy concept at best. But, it also doesn't mean it's reasonable to want people to not have the disgust reaction they so commonly do - that's not the same as "shaming" fat people.

Fair distinction. And yes, I was addressing #1. We had a thread on the motte a few months back where people were arguing that the solution to the obesity problem in America is to try to shame fat people even harder, which I felt was not a realistic solution (even aside from whether we should do it for kindness reasons).

I would say I agree that eliminating #2 is not feasible. I think all we can reasonably expect is that even if people feel disgusted by someone, they don't then start saying "wow fatty you really ate that donut like the fat fuck you are" to the person in question. But how they feel is not really a problem as long as they aren't being mean to others.

Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".

People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action. It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".

People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action.

I mean, the OP is denying thermodynamics.

You're right that CICO in itself is not a practical guide to action. It's a description of what's happening. A practical guide to action would be one that helps you burn more calories than you eat. There isn't a universal solution for that, though unless you have an extremely unusual metabolism, the low-hanging fruit of "eat less and exercise more" will work, and the reason it doesn't work for you is that you don't like to eat less and you don't like to exercise more. This is true of most people, and while entirely understandable, it does not actually debunk the reality of CICO.

Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".

To be blunt: it is people's own fault that they are fat. It doesn't just happen, they made choices that led to that point. Perhaps there exists the occasional edge case where someone has a genuine medical condition that is hindering them, but the overwhelming majority of cases come down to bad personal choices and the consequences thereof.

And this isn't just about assessing blame - much like with addictions, you can't make progress until you acknowledge your own agency and the fact that you will need to make different choices if you want to get to a different place in life. The battle doesn't end there, and you might need to come up with different strategies based on your unique circumstances. But the fundamental truth is that it really is about personal responsibility in the main.

It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".

That is in fact also true. Lots of people who are fairly poor bust ass, live within their means, and get ahead as a result. It's hard, and you can suffer setbacks from circumstances even when you do everything right. But the fundamental truth holds.

Is it fundamentally the poor's own fault they are poor?

Depends on where you draw the line at for poor really. Wealth is a lot swingier than weight, you can't in a single evening consume enough calories to be the equivalent of gambling away your life savings. If by poor you just mean they are low wage earners with minimal skills for upward mobility then it is not their "fault" that they're poor. Although maybe having minimal skills could be thought of as a fault in some sense, usually we use fault to mean a problem with conscious decisions but it could also mean just having a unfortunate qualities. If someone is poor because they gamble away 20% of their paycheck and carry credit card balances then yes it's their fault.

In the United States, in the sense that it's relatively simple not to be poor? Yes. No, in that having lowing intelligence, high time preference, low conscientiousness makes it very hard to do the simple things.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the point is that staying poor is very often the result of bad personal choices. Not always, but often enough that trying to remove personal responsibility from the equation (as many activists do) is misguided.

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Up to a point. I recall stuffing myself with food, at least 4-5kcalories/day for 15yrs and my weight never got above 190 even though i was sedentary (all day on computer). That was three large meals, lots of snacks, and lots of soda. I didn't need willpower because my body decided to not store enough fat for my weight climb any higher. It's not a personal failing if for some people this threshold where surplus leads to fat storage is set too low or unreasonably low.

Sure, I'm happy to acknowledge that it varies. For example, I never had the supposed "teenage metabolism" even when I was a teenager. I gained weight from a very young age. But my frustration when people push back on CICO is that in my experience they usually blow right past "everyone's body is different and so the diet that works for one might not work for another" (which is reasonable), and into "CICO is nonsense and therefore people can't be expected to even try" (which is not).

It's really more like saying "the way to get poor is to spend more and earn less".

I feel it is a necessary tonic to people who claim it is physically impossible for them to lose weight, choosing to blame the outcome on other people or nature itself. CICO is the reductio ad absurdum which proves that the ultimate locus of control cannot be found elsewhere.

The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored"

No, the motte is "it would violate the laws of thermodynamics to gain weight without consuming an energy-equivalent number of calories." CICO people don't deny that some people have metabolisms that permit them to consume excess calories without gaining weight. They only claim that someone who claims to have gained fat while restricting calories below that threshold is lying.

I see two viable mechanisms to get rid of food energy with an inefficient metabolism:

  • You could never absorb the nutrient molecules in the first place
  • You could run your body (especially the extremities) at a higher temperature

Both of these could be easily measured. I wonder how common these are. In the ancestral environment, wasting energy was strongly selected against. But then again, so was nearsightedness, and yet here I am.

But then again, so was nearsightedness, and yet here I am.

Nearsightedness appears to be primarily caused by lack of sufficient exposure to sunlight during childhood while the eye is developing. So in all likelihood if you had been raised in the ancestral environment you would not be nearsighted.

Really it’s just “you eat too much” I can go months without exercising without gaining weight. But if I eat more? Yeah I gain.

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