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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Awesome. So, we're not dealing with, like, a biological inability or anything. Not in the same class as we might be dealing with if there was just, like, a clear IQ cutoff, such that a big percentage of people were literally just cognitively incapable of learning calculus or something.
Instead, we're in the fuzzy land of what incentives "should be" enough or how much "effort" people might have to put in. It's fuzzy, yes, but we're far from the land of, "People can't do this." We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"
Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation? Yes, as your cut gets deeper, you feel physical and mental effects. I've felt them. Intelligent strategies allow for a period of maintenance (a "diet break") to help alleviate these symptoms before continuing. They're annoying, but not that bad. When you return to maintenance, it's not all that bad in the long term.
Right now, we go the gym probably 3-4 days a week. Work has been weird for us lately, so not as often as we like, and not as much time as we'd like. Often just main lifts; basically no cardio. Almost negligible caloric impact, TBH. We eat good, tasty food. Literally just had Sichuan for dinner. We know about how many calories are in the recipe, and we portion it out accordingly in a way that we know approximately fits our maintenance calorie needs. Not a drop of Soylent or a crumb of a MealSquare in sight. Special occasions are nothing. Literally just had two of those this week. That is an outlier. But yeah, even if I blow my maintenance by 500cal on a special occasion, it's pretty trivial to make up for it long-term. We live in a city, four minutes away from multiple grocery stores (including a wonderful Asian market with excellently flavorful foods).
We live a normal life. This is normal life. We just know how many calories we need, because we tracked it for a while. We know about how many calories are in most of our foods, and we don't even track it anymore. Our portions aren't super exactly precise; they're in the right ballpark. It's normal life, and it's been about five years now since my wife got in on it, too. I honestly think you just don't know anyone who lives a normal life, but has the knowledge and experience.
I don't think the average person can pass the AP Calc exam even if you offer them a billion dollar reward and let them take 5 years of full-time prep.
When I was in college, I somehow got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do ROTC, so I spent all summer dieting and exercising to lose weight. I never quite reached the army height and weight standards for my age, but I got close, losing a ton of weight. However:
Anyway, I ended up dropping out of ROTC to focus on math, but that didn't work out, either.
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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.
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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.
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.
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eating is so subconscious
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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.
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