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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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