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Notes -
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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