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As others pointed out, CICO cannot be debunked in so far that thermodynamics is immutably true. It's just different factors can contribute to these variables on either side.
agree. Too many people, including even on the 'HBD side', downplay the role of metabolism in regard to obesity. Consider that having a faster metabolism (or more specifically, a less efficient metabolism) means being able to eat more food without becoming obese, hence less willpower is required.
The best way of thinking about it is that, CICO as an accounting tautology may be true, since it just describes weight loss/gain. But CICO as actionable dietary advice absolutely can (and has been) refuted. Simply deciding to eat fewer calories or exercise more (without doing something hacky like keto) doesn't work.
I don't think the study in that link, which is just about The Biggest Loser participants, refutes that. In terms of CICO as actionable dietary advice, I see it as a meta-dietary advice: follow whatever scheme it takes to lower CI to be beneath CO, and you'll lose weight. If you can reduce CI by just counting calories and willing yourself really really hard not to succumb to hunger, then do that. If you can do it by following a keto or Atkins diet because that leaves you less hungry for the same caloric intake, then do that. If you can do it by following intermittent fasting or one-meal-a-day because you find it easy to just not think about eating during the non-eating-mode times, then do that. If you can do it by just cutting out alcohol from your life and following whatever other eating habits you already were doing, then do that.
Similarly, to increase CO, do whatever it takes to increase your total caloric expenditure, as averaged out per-day, per-week, per-month, etc. That doesn't mean necessarily optimizing by finding the exercise that burns the most calories per second, that means finding an exercise that you will do regularly. Which could mean finding something that's fun enough that you don't have to fight with willpower to do it (or even better, one that's so fun that you have to fight with willpower not to do it), that's convenient enough that you don't have to reorganize the rest of your life just to do it, that doesn't injure you enough that you have to take long breaks, etc.
Of course, when it comes to CICO, it's also often paired with the advice that CI is far more influential than CO, so the latter part barely matters. Perhaps it should be called CIco.
Isn't that just moving the tautology up a level? Since CICO in its thermodynamic sense is just a description of weight loss, then giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme it takes to lower CI to be beneath CO' is the same as giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme leads to long-term weight loss' (which frustratingly doesn't include deliberate CICO).
Yes, and I think the usefulness of this has to do with how often people don't seem to consciously understand this tautology. Which seems very often in my experience, with how much talk there is about "healthy foods" (or variations like "natural foods" or "unprocessed foods") as keys to weight loss. Which they often are, but only indirectly, modulated through the effect on CI. And I've observed that many people tend to obsess over that indirect portion, making them lose sight of the actual goal of modifying the values of CICO.
There's the point that healthy foods offer health benefits other than weight loss, of course, but generally one's fatness level has such a high impact on one's health that, even a diet of "unhealthy foods" that successfully reduce CI will tend to result in a healthier person than one of "healthy foods" that fail to reduce CI (keeping CO constant in these examples).
I heard an incredible story about a person who got mad at her doctor after she asked, "What food can I eat to offset the fact that I'm eating this other thing?" and, unsurprisingly, her doctor did not seem to answer the question that she had posed in the way she posed it.
I've heard all sorts of other misinformation and bad fundamental beliefs from people. If anyone has a better strategy besides, "Ok, so let's talk about the fundamental basics of how calories and macro/micronutrients work, and how they might have different considerations," I'd be all ears. But it's genuinely difficult to progress if they literally just do not have any concept of the "tautology", what I would perhaps word as the "descriptive fact of the matter". It really feels like trying to teach someone how to play baseball, and they just keep saying, "Where's my racket? I need a racket. When are we going to get to how to use the racket? I just want to know how to use the racket; I'll figure out the rest of it later."
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Simply deciding to do anything doesn't actually get the thing done, it's not exactly a novel insight, and I'm not aware of anyone denying it. CICO proponents don't argue for merely deciding to have a calorie deficit.
You misunderstand me. I'm arguing that successfully following CICO as diet advice is counter-productive. The Biggest Loser study showed that contestants who purposely decreased their CI (through having their food intake managed by the producers of the show) and massively increased their CO through exercise permanently reduced their metabolic rates, even after they regained the weight after the show was over. These people, who absolutely did follow CICO as advice ended up making things worse for themselves.
A person can choose to eat less. But eating less increases hunger (duh) and reduces metabolic rate. Homeostasis trumps willpower.
But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see. What caused the broken lipostat is still up for debate, I think it's vegetable oil but it could be something else.
First google hit: *Some obese people have high body weight because they have broken lipostats, but these are a rare minority. *
I'm not sure what the page you're referencing is referring to (can you link it?), because I'm referring to the consensus among obesity researchers for explaining the obesity epidemic:
There: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15284410/
I am hesistant to think of it as "consensus" with so few google results.
The 1970s also didn't see a novel virus or chemical triggering adverse reaction leading to "broken lipostat".
I wonder how much is there overlap between people claiming Russian citizens should raise and change government and people critiquing CIco. At least you can get fit just by yourself.
I mean, the paper says that obesity isn't caused by a 'broken' lipostat but one that is set too high, which is what I meant by 'broken'. I assume they use 'broken' to refer to things like Prader-Willi Syndrome.
That is precisely what I'm arguing. CICO (as in calorie controlled diet) doesn't work.
No, but it did see a stratospheric rise in the consumption of vegetable oil, which is what I think caused the obesity epidemic. Seed oils are definitely novel, as is a diet with 5-10x the amount of linoleic acid that humans need.
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A thing can be true and be mostly bad advice. CICO is like that. If you get your gas car towed to a mechanic and the mechanic asks "have you tried filling it up with gas? You know you can't just get free energy from nothing. To change an object from at rest to in motion requires a force acting up on that object." You'd probably get a little annoyed. Cars cannot run without some form of energy this is true from a physics perspective, but as a way of diagnosing all car problems it's dog shit. You don't need the physics lesson, you need the engine checked by an expert.
But sometimes there is actually no gas in the car and that mechanic would be right that one time. Sometimes calorie counting works for some people. It just seems to fail for most people as a dieting measure. I tend to think of it as a diet for people who think accounting is fun.
that's the people who don't like CICO usually claim - "I eat virtally nothing and still gain weight".
For a car, mechanic has prior experience of what must be broken. Fat people usually have surplus of calories. SELECTED BY CAPITALISM TO MAXIMIZE CONSUMPTION AND REDUCE WAITING TIME
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That would be a good analogy if people were lecturing you on CICO while you're bleeding out. You can't fix a broken engine with more gas, you can't fix a broken body with CICO.
But pretty much every case of being overweight can absolutely be solved with CICO. Calorie restriction always works if you actually do it. It's just that 90%+ of people prefer to dump a bottle of sauce on every salad they eat but still count it as 100 calories. Which is very understandable - I also struggle with plenty of things that are 100% willpower issues - but pretending that CICO doesn't apply or even claiming it is wrong is just silly. Even Ozempic is nothing but CICO at its core.
CICO is fine as a physics explanation. I disagree with OP that it can be "debunked".
As dieting advice it is crap. The main failure point of diets is compliance. CICO has terrible compliance rates.
I completely disagree with this framing. Advice that has it's intended effect, if you follow through on it, is good advice.
No it's not. And if it was I have a series of the best advice for various topics:
On sports: you should win
On war: kill anyone that opposes you
On politics: convince everyone you are correct and wield all the power.
That "advice" is basically saying what the end state is without good help on how to get there.
You are completely misstating the point of CICO- it is the fundamental truth of body weight from which all other successes must derive, but it is not a prescription for success. Upthread 07mk has a good description- you have to look at the CI and CO components and make for former smaller than the latter. Whateve strategies work for you to accomplish that goal is your path to success, but denying fundamental truths of physics are not one of them.
What I said above, and elsewhere:
A thing can be true and also bad advice.
Good advice in my opinion helps you achieve a desirable outcome.
CICO often manifests as calorie counting. It's the most straightforward interpretation of CICO. Calorie counting has historically and scientifically been shown to have just about zero impact on dieting and positive health decisions. It works for a tiny minority of people. I called it the diet for people that love accounting.
I don't dispute the physics, I never did. Just like I wouldn't dispute the physics of motion and free energy with a car mechanic. A car mechanic that started lecturing me about physics and the need for fuel would be an asshole and I'd never go to him again. Telling a fat person about CICO is the equivalent of that mechanic.
Consider two possible situations. In Situation A, a customer just had their brand new car towed to the shop, because it stopped working. The mechanic investigates and discovers that it's out of fuel. "Good news!" he thinks. Perhaps the customer just had some minor issue with a new car, not quite seeing how it displays the fuel situation, and there's no need for any expensive repair, just some fuel. But when they tell this to the customer, the customer gets angry. "That's bullshit!" the customer says. Fuel has nothing to do with it. After all, look at the statistics! Cars almost never stop working in the real world because they run out of fuel! Hundreds of millions of hours of operations, and it almost never comes up! There must be something else going on, they swear. Maybe they need a vortex generator or something. That seems more likely to them to help get them going again.
In Situation B, the car shows up, and the mechanic determines that the alternator has gone bad. Nevertheless, they lecture the customer on the need to put fuel in the car.
Yes, in Situation B, the mechanic would be a bloody stupid asshole. But in Situation A, the customer has displayed that they are fundamentally ignorant of scientific reality. You would be shocked as to how many people are legitimately fundamentally ignorant of the scientific reality of body weight dynamics. There is no point in moving to some more refined conversation of different octane levels, different additive packages, fuel filter replacement timelines, etc., or even just a conversation of how they might want to approach planning for when to refuel to accomplish whatever goal they have (saving money, reducing transactions, whatever) until the absolutely extreme lack of basic understanding has been remedied. Your choices are to try to get the customer to understand the basic scientific reality... or just slap some fuel in their tank, charge them some money, let them continue being fundamentally ignorant of the world, send them on their way, and maybe hope they don't come back to your shop. You simply have zero chance of providing them with any sort of good advice that can reliably lead them to achieve desirable outcomes if they have so utterly rejected the fundamental reality of the world.
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And you will, if you follow the advice. Advice is not supposed to be a magical spell that binds you to follow it.
I have this weird belief that advice should be helpful. That if you want outcome X then good advice will improve your chances of achieving outcome X. Bad advice is something that just restates outcome X or has no impact or a negative impact on achieving outcome X. Do you have a different word for helpful advice as I've defined it?
Apparently you believe differently, and think that advice does not have to assist towards achieving a desired outcome. That simply haranguing someone for not doing the thing counts as advice. Thats fine. I'm not gonna convince you otherwise, I'd just ask that if you ever see me asking for advice is a wellness thread, know that I'm asking for helpful advice, and whatever it is you are offering can be better left unsaid.
No, we're in agreement. I think where we differ is that I don't believe that not following advice makes it bad. Take your war example, if your advisor hands you a carefully crafted battle plan, it's your right to dismiss it or to go with your gut and improvise, but if you lose, you have no right to blame your defeat on your advisor's battle plan.
You'll have nothing to worry about here, as I don't participate in Wellness threads as a matter of principle. Though I must admit, torturing fellow Mottizens with good advice they just won't take has a certain appeal...
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No, it's the other way around: if you will, you'll have followed the advice.
Not necessarily, there are other ways of getting the same result.
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