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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.
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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
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.
here you go https://greyenlightenment.com/2024/08/12/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-the-slow-metabolism/
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