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When it comes to CICO, the problem is that reducing your CI reduces your CO.
When an obese person reduces their caloric intake from 3000->2500 calories a day, their body reacts to this perceived deficit with increasing hunger levels and lower energy. If they burned 3000/day before, now they are only burning 2700/day as their activity levels falls to match the lower energy. Weight loss is minimal, hunger is high, and energy is low.
CICO can still work if you strictly monitor weight loss and caloric intake, but it's not easy, and it will revert as soon as the person goes back to eating naturally.
For myself, I've been doing keto for a few weeks now and I'd rate it as highly effective. I've lost a decent amount of weight and hunger levels are very low. I sometimes feel physically very full even without eating a large amount of food. The biggest downside seems to be moderately lower energy levels, which I've countered with targeted carb consumption (10 grams) before strenuous workouts.
Amazing. If you go back to the diet that was making you fat, you will get fat again. Will wonders never cease.
Sorry. I should probably hold back on the sarcasm, given that this is the motte, but this is the one 'secret' about dieting that I rarely see people point out - you can't stop.
Dieting isn't an on-off switch - it needs to be a conscious decision to moderate your diet aimed at long-term goals and body improvement. Once you reach a certain age, you can't just shovel crap into your face and expect to walk it off.
Dieting is a permanent change to your life, and the sooner people acknowledge that, the better.
Conversely, if someone wants to enjoy themselves sucking down baconators and Dr Pepper by the bucket, well, I can't stop them. Maybe they'll get more enjoyment out of life doing that then I will, I dunno.
While I don't disagree too strenuously, there is actually some light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. When you actually reach your goal weight you can bump up the calories slightly, because you actually want to maintain that goal weight rather than turn into a pro-ana skeleton person.
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Yep. In order to get permanent weight loss, you need to make a permanent lifestyle change.
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And a diet that causes hunger and lethargy can never be sustained in the long term. If your body is fighting to return to a higher set point, then you need to fix that somehow. Otherwise you must either be fat or miserable.
At this point, I'll mention that the best diet is never to become fat in the first place.
In a perfect world, yes. Ah, if I only knew growing up what I know now.
Can't say I ever hit the lethargy you're describing when I lost weight, however. Not sure if it was my overall slow path toward weightloss or not. If anything, I ended up with more energy, not less.
As for the hunger, eh. I just sucked up and dealt with it. I doubt that's good advice for other people, though.
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My experience as a formerly obese person was that the surest way to fix that issue of hunger and lethargy caused by a low calorie diet was to continue the low calorie diet and push it even harder. The exact same diet that caused hunger and lethargy on day 1 can be entirely fulfilling on day 10. Of course, days 1-9 might not be pleasant, but day 9 was significantly less unpleasant than day 8 which was significantly less unpleasant than day 7, etc., and it's not like going a couple weeks while suffering from hunger and lethargy is particularly difficult or painful, compared to going even a month of simply living while obese, much less the many years I lived as an obese person before the dieting.
This, I agree with. One thing I've personally noticed about having been obese is that I'll never be "un-obese." In the roughly 15 years since I came down from being obese, I've stayed within healthy-to-underweight range while keeping active and even athletic at times. Yet not once have I felt fit or, in fact, as if I was anything other than an obese person, even during the height of my fitness when I was sprinting about on the field with the best of my peers. Being obese an experience that can stay with you forever, no matter how you physiologically modify yourself out of it. It's one of those things that can irreversibly, permanently, change you, and I don't think in a good way.
You are an outlier. Congrats!
The probability of an obese person attaining normal body weight is very small.
I do think there is model where anyone can go from obese to slim within an extreme amount of exercise. If you're training for long-distance ski races or endurance swimming, you will burn so many calories that no amount of eating can overpower it.
I'm an outlier in terms of an obese person successfully becoming normal body weight, but I don't know that I'm an outlier in terms of an obese person who experienced a loss in appetite due to just reducing caloric intake. That study doesn't - and can't - say anything about that. I don't know how many obese people have really committed to even 10 days straight of strict caloric restrictions to see how their appetite, energy levels, and mood would react and how the experience was like for that subset of obese people who did try that.
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It's a common claim. I don't have any reliable data, but I have two anecdotes and one observation
I sincerely doubt that CO dips below CI at any point between CI=0 and CI=maintenance. This means CICO works, except you can feel like shit when dieting, for which the usual recommendation is to take it slow and maintain a small deficit. Are there people that are so calorie-sensitive that they can't properly function even on a very moderate deficit of 500 calories? And if there are, why?
At least in my experience (I'm not obese, but I've occasionally tried to lose modest amounts of weight to improve sports performance), my best results have come from trying to always be slightly hungry. Trying to be very hungry (presumably a large deficit) quickly led to poor decisionmaking -- "oh, just a small snack" doesn't stay limited very easily, although I've had some success with snacks I don't like, which starts sounding a lot like the potato diet.
But I have observed that this takes active thought, reminders, and is harder when I'm dealing with more IRL just because I have other things to think about.
There are at least a few recorded cases of people doing this: the linked guy lost 276 pounds by fasting for 392 days in the '60s. Not recommending this, but not impossible.
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Good point, it’s hard to know where hunger ends and addiction to the pleasure of tasting delicious foods begins.
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A few weeks ago I tried keto for a week, during which time I had to do a 26km run as part of my marathon training.
Huge mistake. I was basically hitting the wall from the get-go and it took me just shy of three hours to complete, at least half an hour longer than I'd planned. I felt utterly miserable for the duration of the run and was convinced that signing up for the marathon was a colossal miscalculation
I gave up on keto and went back to my regular carb-heavy diet. That weekend I did a 24km run and breezed through it, nearly an entire minute/km faster than my run the previous weekend, and I felt in fine form for the duration.
I think once I've completed my marathon I'll try to do keto for a bit longer, maybe a few months, as it seems effective at weight loss and doesn't seem to interfere with my gym workouts that much. But based on my personal experience it's completely incompatible with long-distance running.
Carbs are fuel, so yeah if you're running marathons you're burning fuel and not putting them on as stored fat.
The trouble is when people stop doing the exercise and still consume the fuel. Then it's not getting burned, so it will end up as fat stores. If you try the keto without the heavy fuel combustion of long-distance running, it may work better for you - let us know how it goes!
I'll report back in one of the Wellness threads.
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I also experience difficulty with completing workouts on keto.
There might be some options. On /r/ketogains they talk about targeted carb consumption around workouts and also cycling in/out of keto. Since I'm only about 4 weeks in, and the weight loss has been great, I'm just going to deal with bad workouts for now until my body fat gets down to where I want it.
I'd also point out that at 1 week, you are in "keto flu" territory. In the first few days, you lose a lot of water weight and need to consume a lot of electrolytes to compensate. Some people say that long distance work is doable on keto, but you need help for "explosive" activities like sprinting and weightlifting.
What's a good source of electrolytes?
I purchased some specifically for Keto on Amazon.
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It's complicated. You store around 2000 (IIRC) calories as carbs in your body. People regularly overestimate how much calories running consumes - aka you can't outrun a bad diet saying. So if we take 700 calories per hour running in normal times you have almost enough carbs for a three hour run. Of course your body changes the mix the more run progresses - it tries to stretch them. So the ratio of carbs you burn constantly decreases.
if you are on keto (and you are not used to being on it) - well you don't have your preferred fuel to burn. And fat usually takes time to be activated. On top of that by memory - on keto your endurance barely decreases but the peak performance and max load does.
So I think that your experience is absolutely by what science says on the topic.
It's so demoralising when you do a half-marathon in two hours, count the calories and realise that you've only burned about half of a kebab.
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I don't know if my diet was bad, but I've outran it several times. The way I gain weight is by ceasing to exercise, not by compensating for burned calories through increased appetite, or by weird metabolic shenanigans my body is supposedly pulling.
I don't have a conclusion here, but all the "exercise doesn't help that much" takes run counter to everything I experienced.
I think people say this because to the average sedentary person. "Exercising" means jogging for 20 min, 3 times a week. And it's true that just doing that doesn't burn a whole lot of extra calories. An actual long distance runner who's doing 100 miles a week can of course eat a lot and stay slim
I was once a jogger, like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee. Even then 100 miles a week would have sounded whack (wouldn't you have to run a marathon 4 days per week to do that?!), I was doing a bit more than double of your example of an average Joe. OTOH I wouldn't say I was eating "a lot", but I was allowing myself a decent amount of vices like beer and various sweets. "Slim" might also be in the eye of the beholder, I'm happy with "not fat" usually.
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I honestly think it's more of that "biology is complicated" problem. The way people exercise today is artificial; nobody was doing much of running marathons or three times a week visits to gyms in the past (except for certain people). You 'exercised' by manual labour and general work in keeping house or running a business, plus walking nearly everywhere. From Chesterton's autobiography:
People like that walked where they couldn't take buses, and if you read Jane Austen novels (I know, going much further back) the young ladies think nothing of walking miles to visit friends or go see the sights in a nearby town.
So I do think for most people, yeah - being moderately active is enough. For some people, if they want to lose weight (as distinct from toning muscles or increasing fitness), they need to do a lot of exercise. And for some people, like yourself, weight will drop off once you exercise but pile on when you stop, even if you're not eating more or being extra-lazy. Individual bodies respond individually.
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Exercise has one slim benefit that I sometimes see mentioned: if you put on muscle that way, the resting metabolism of muscle is higher than that of fat, so the fat loss doesn't stop the second the exercise does; you also get a "free" hundred calories a day per pound of muscle you can maintain.
But for me the biggest benefit is one I've never seen discussed: for some reason my body doesn't seem to "fight me" against exercising the way it does against dieting. If I burn 500 calories on the treadmill one day then I've burned 500 calories and that's done; even the immediate feeling of tiredness quickly goes away and I feel more rather than less energetic over the long term. But cutting 500 calories of food in one day leaves me somewhere between "ravenous" and "awful lethargy". I can't seem to lose much weight via dietary portions (rather than via the easy choices: no liquid calories, avoid sugar, etc) without using a calorie counter app to try to carefully thread the needle between "not eating less" and "my brain feels like it's starving".
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Where are you getting these numbers? Are they coming from a table/calculator based on published scientific data? Did you, like, plug a different activity level into the equations that were in the link I gave to the Canadian government's site? Are you going to some review paper that details this effect? For example, this meta-analysis of the effect of exercise programs on resting metabolic rate says that mayyybe the delta there is like 70-100cal/day. Where are you getting 300cal/day just from diet changes, and what are your assumptions?
The numbers were meant as an illustration, and would vary highly by individuals. For some people, the difference is much more stark.
In the linked article, morbidly obese people who lost a lot of weight were burning 450-800 calories fewer per day than a similar person of their weight, age, and gender.
This seems loosely correlated to my claim that reducing CI reduces CO. For one, it is related to exercise programs not dieting. Secondly, it deals with base metabolic rate and which is part of, but not the entire, cause of reduction in calories burned due to diet-based lethargy.
But you are correct. I am unsure of the exact figures. My own experience with CICO-based dieting matches that of the general population. It works, but it is possible only with strict calories counting. Hunger and low energy are one's constant companions, making the effort not worth the cost. In a calorie counting diet, people generally revert back to unhealthy habits as soon as they stop strictly counting calories.
According to this, that Biggest Loser study was an extreme outlier, and numerous other studies have found either no effect or a much smaller effect.
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Ok, so you're saying that you start CICO, you lose a bunch of weight, and then your caloric expenditure goes down? Yep! Sounds right. Why is this "the problem with CICO"? That doesn't sound like a problem at all with CICO. That sounds like the standard thing that CICO people say. You have less mass, often both fat mass and lean mass. So you use less energy. Uh, duh?
You had made it sound like it was something that just happened when you started eating less. That you just start eating less, then your body magically changes, and you never get around to losing weight. That would be a problem for CICO. But not the case where you start eating less than your maintenance, lose a bunch of weight, and then have a lower maintenance. That's just science.
My position (half of which I agree is unsupported by the linked article) is that maintaining a caloric deficit OR maintaining a low weight will cause lethargy and therefore reduced energy expenditure in people who are disposed to obesity.
The person (from the article) who is burning 800 calories fewer than a similar person their same size is going to find it nearly impossible time to maintain their weight. They are always hungry and tired. You might be happy at 2000 calories/day. How would you fare at 1200?
On a trivial level, CICO is correct. As far as I know, no one is saying that CICO doesn't work if you have full control of a person's eating and activity levels. Where is fails for most people is that dieting causes the body's homeostatis to be thrown out of whack, leading the body to compensate with higher hunger levels and higher lethargy. These signals are quite difficult to ignore for long periods, leading to the failures we see in nearly all dieting programs.
Keep in mind that a surplus of 35 calories per day will lead to an additional 36.5 POUNDS of weight gain per decade. To prevent this, the body maintains homeostatis by controlling hunger and energy levels. Until quite recently, most people maintained this homestatis effortlessly. Now, many people cannot. They naturally gain weight unless they maintain strict diet and exercise programs. Keep in mind just how small of a caloric surplus is necessary to result in obesity. A 200 pound person who eats an extra cookie every day will balloon to 300 pounds within a few years. Fortunately, their body sends the satiety hunger signals to prevent this.
I'm interested if you have any substantive disagreement with any of this.
Clearly, the latter half is supported by the linked article, and my contention is clearly with the former half. Do you have any evidence to marshal for this proposition? Any estimate of the magnitude of this effect? What assumptions are you using? Like, "An X Age, Y Sex, Zlb individual has a maintenance calorie requirement of A. They plan for a calorie budget of B, meaning an A-B deficit. At the moment that they start eating at that deficit, before they lose any weight, their body suddenly shifts to having a maintenance requirement of C, where, plausibly, C<=B." What numbers are you using, and where are you getting them from?
EDIT: Moreover, does this work in the other direction, too? If they start eating D calories, where D>A, does their body suddenly adjust to using more energy, so that their new caloric requirement is E, where, plausibly, E>=D?
At this point I have to ask, what are your numbers and where are you getting them from? The demands for rigor are all coming from one direction. What is the evidence that CICO diet messaging has any value in the long term? What's the evidence that you can lose weight with CICO and not experience hunger or lethargy?
CICO is the current bog standard advice. The results over the general population are miserable. I also want to know, do you even believe it works?
Let's say that you, as a trusted authority figure, are given the opportunity to design a 1 page infographic. This infographic will be distributed to everyone in your country who has expressed a sincere desire to lose weight. In 10 years, you will be measured by the BMI, mordibity, and diabetes level of your cohort. What do you put on your infographic? Do you really think CICO messaging will have any positive effect?
Please answer my questions rather than trying to change the topic. We're actually getting very close to a crux here. We can move to a different topic afterward, and I promise I'll be responsive, but let's not avoid the first topic.
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The physical laws are pretty solid here. The messaging may not work, but none of the messaging works.
You can't. You can't lose weight at all and not experience hunger or lethargy, except perhaps with amphetamines or some other drug. The subtitle of one of the CICO books is "How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition", and while it's obviously intended to be humorous, it's largely true.
My 1 page infographic will contain just two things: an 800 number that helps people find an Ozempic clinic and instructions for how to use e-Cigarettes. I guarantee success on all metrics.
There is some messaging that will work.
More seriously, people prior to the recent epoch didn't have to struggle to maintain a healthy weight. They just did it naturally. With keto diets, many people lose weight and maintain weight without hunger. In low fat diets, this doesn't generally happen. So there is some value in what you eat, beyond just CICO. I'm not sure that a keto-based infographic would work, but I know that a CICO-based infographic wouldn't.
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I'd like to drop a link this thoroughly researched and footnoted article about metabolic adaptation.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/metabolic-adaptation/
This doesn't immediately support or refute the 300 calorie a day delta here…but it's within the realm of plausibility that when an obese person loses a lot of weight, their system down-regulates non-exercise activity thermogenesis by somewhere in that range.
Trex is great. Love his podcast; glad he keeps inviting that guest co-host on. I am 100% confident that, were he a Mottizen, he would absolutely be binned as a CICO-guy. Literally everything he's saying in that article is starting from the premise of CICO. He would not start a sentence, as @jeroboam did, with, "When it comes to CICO, the problem is..." Like, no. Full stop. He would say, "CICO is absolutely true. Now, there is a question about metabolic adaptation as you're going through a cut. Let's dive in."
So, let's start from your comment, not the article:
Notice that the premise is "when an obese person loses a lot of weight". @jeroboam didn't grant that. To him, it seems like as soon as you start eating less, your body drops its metabolic rate through the floor, and you never ever get around to losing the weight. That's why I asked him to specify the assumptions he was working with. If he was going to sneak back in a qualifier of, "...after you lose a bunch of weight..." then I wanted that to be clear. In fact, Trex gives even huger sounding numbers:
But notice, that's after someone loses 10% or more of their body weight. I mean, obviously, there's some progression down to it along the way, but you actually do lose the weight! It's not just from the diet change, it's from actually losing weight. This is a standard piece of the standard understanding. If you lose a bunch of weight, your energy expenditure goes down. If you need to lose even more weight after that, then you're going to need to revise your calorie intake further downward. This is pretty straightforward.
It's something that, if you're trying to coach someone through weight loss, you need to understand from both sides, because you're going to have both types. You're going to have the person who is just trying to lose ten pounds, and you set them up with targets, but as they get into it a little bit, they're convinced that metabolic adaptation is super duper huge, and they suddenly need to eat, like 700 fewer calories a day than the target you already set for them. You need to reel them back and be like, "No dawg. It ain't gonna be that big for you. It might be there a little bit. Might push your timeline out a little bit, but just don't even think about it." And you're going to have the other person who legit needs to lose 100lbs, and they're absolutely going to need shifting targets on the way down, but that's going to be over the course of months. You will need to prep them for this at some point. And you'll need to prep them for the idea that they're probably never going back to the maintenance level they had before. That they're going to end up eating less forever, but after they've lost the weight, it will in fact be easier to do so, because it will be their new maintenance.
EDIT: I just want to quote Trex's concluding paragraph from Part 1:
This is not a man who is going to say, "CICO is a problem," or "CICO doesn't work", or whatever.
Anon, I...
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