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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.
Sure. Because food was expensive, and/or lead exposure and cigarettes. The latter two help with hunger, the former... eh, you just live with some slight hunger most of the time.
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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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