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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.
I frankly do not believe you here. Citations are needed, and I having a very difficult time conceiving of how a plan deliberately discarding information critical to its success would somehow be more successful than one that actually acquires said information.
I don't like trading citations, we both have access to search engines.
The simple problems with calorie counting:
Your body is not a simple calorie machine. It has a complex digestive system that has evolved over the entirety of our evolutionary history. It's designed to work whether or not an animal can count. Fat in the body does not just serve a single purpose, it's not just energy storage. It's a form of protection and heat retention as well. The body works to maintain a certain level of fat, because having having too little in bad weather is just as much of a death sentence as being too hungry.
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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...
During the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara developed a strategy based on objective, quantitative measures such as body counts and kill ratios. The infamous Project 100,000 was based on the idea that a soldier was a soldier (compare, a calorie is a calorie) and that the Army could get the warm bodies it needed by recruiting literal retards.
America lost the war.
Sounds like they followed his advice, and it lead to failure, which is completely different from the failure mode of not following the advice.
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The Chinese and Mongols were in a semi eternal conflict. Every few hundred years the Mongols would ride in and conquer China. They'd then grow fat and content in China and then get conquered by the next set of mongol invaders.
An adviser proposes that the Mongols go back to living in the harsh Mongolian steps after conquering China. That way they will stay a hardy people and not be conquered by the next set of mongol invaders.
Everyone recognizes this is a good idea, but the whole reason the Mongols conquered China was for the loot and the prospect of not living in Mongolia.
The adviser dies in China reading reports of the next Mongolian horde gathering on the border.
If there was evidence that the idea would work, if carried out, it would still be a good idea. If the Chinese-Mongolians didn't want to do it because they got too comfy, and failed to come up with an alterntive approach, that's a perfectly valid decision, but they don't get to blame the advisor for coming up with a bad idea.
The likelihood of being carried out is part of being a good (or a bad) idea.
It might be part of being well suited for someone, but I don't think it has much impact on whether it's good in itself.
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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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