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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!
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.
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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.
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.
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