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If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem. It gets tri

If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem. It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.

trophycase 7y ago
The point is that the body adapts to burn more or fewer calories depending on how much you eat. Restricting calories can possibly have the side effect of just lowering your metabolism, rather than just losing weight.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't change the calories in calories out equation. If your metabolism goes down, so do the calories out. That's one of many reasons that counting the calories out is extremely difficult.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    That's also one of the reasons this equation is not very useful in practice.
- LameRubberDucky 7y ago
  Restricting your calories and causing lower metabolism only works for so long. Otherwise a person would not be able to starve to death, which is obviously not the case.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Why are you bringing extreme cases when they're not relevant? Reduced metabolism when dieting is a thing, and it's also correlated to weight loss. Less weight, less base metabolic rate. Down to a point which is irrelevant.
omginternets 7y ago
>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here. Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves". We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").
- lurquer 7y ago
  I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods. "It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.) Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.
  - hcurtiss 7y ago
    Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that. In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight. It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight. Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
taurath 7y ago
Your bodies absorbsion of nutrients and yes calories is not a system in a vacuum. Nor it’s decision to store excess calories as fat. There’s a wide range of how much different types of foods affect different people. I had a friend who would eat (we counted) 4000 calories a day and couldn’t get over 120lb. Turns out they had a soy allergy and their bodies didn’t absorb the food. Simplifying it to calories in calories out is a generalism of a generalism.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Just because your friend was pooping out the calories instead of burning them for energy doesn't change that it was still calories in vs calories out. Like I said, calculating both ends of the equation is tricky.
  - taurath 7y ago
    I think by definition it does change that it was calories in vs calories out.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Which is why it's just easier to tune and (as accurately as possible) monitor intake until expected results happen. Which is weight loss and/or belt size loss. And watch for side effects which may require dietary adjustments. (not necessarily caloric) Variable you cannot control is relatively worthless. Focus on what you can control.
- dpark 7y ago
  So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right. Also this is still calories in, calories out.
  - jeffyee 7y ago
    Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.
glogla 7y ago
Your body of course doesn't use energy it doesn't have. But it can balance the equation by restricting the output - lowering muscle repair (so post-workout recovery is slower), lowering brain supply (lowering concentration), lowering heating (so you fell cold), etc. Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem. Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.
mtreis86 7y ago
You're not counting the amount of energy gained through o2 and released as co2. That changes the calculation.
- tobylane 7y ago
  That’s the same process, the lungs are only collecting oxygen and returning waste carbon dioxide for the muscles doing said work.
- scarface74 7y ago
  That is still part of your BMR or if you are exercising part of the increased calories out.

trophycase 7y ago

The point is that the body adapts to burn more or fewer calories depending on how much you eat. Restricting calories can possibly have the side effect of just lowering your metabolism, rather than just losing weight.

RandallBrown 7y ago
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't change the calories in calories out equation. If your metabolism goes down, so do the calories out. That's one of many reasons that counting the calories out is extremely difficult.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  That's also one of the reasons this equation is not very useful in practice.
LameRubberDucky 7y ago
Restricting your calories and causing lower metabolism only works for so long. Otherwise a person would not be able to starve to death, which is obviously not the case.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Why are you bringing extreme cases when they're not relevant? Reduced metabolism when dieting is a thing, and it's also correlated to weight loss. Less weight, less base metabolic rate. Down to a point which is irrelevant.

omginternets 7y ago

>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here. Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves". We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").

lurquer 7y ago
I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods. "It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.) Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.
- hcurtiss 7y ago
  Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that. In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight. It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight. Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.

taurath 7y ago

Your bodies absorbsion of nutrients and yes calories is not a system in a vacuum. Nor it’s decision to store excess calories as fat. There’s a wide range of how much different types of foods affect different people. I had a friend who would eat (we counted) 4000 calories a day and couldn’t get over 120lb. Turns out they had a soy allergy and their bodies didn’t absorb the food. Simplifying it to calories in calories out is a generalism of a generalism.

RandallBrown 7y ago
Just because your friend was pooping out the calories instead of burning them for energy doesn't change that it was still calories in vs calories out. Like I said, calculating both ends of the equation is tricky.
- taurath 7y ago
  I think by definition it does change that it was calories in vs calories out.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Which is why it's just easier to tune and (as accurately as possible) monitor intake until expected results happen. Which is weight loss and/or belt size loss. And watch for side effects which may require dietary adjustments. (not necessarily caloric) Variable you cannot control is relatively worthless. Focus on what you can control.
dpark 7y ago
So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right. Also this is still calories in, calories out.
- jeffyee 7y ago
  Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.

glogla 7y ago

Your body of course doesn't use energy it doesn't have. But it can balance the equation by restricting the output - lowering muscle repair (so post-workout recovery is slower), lowering brain supply (lowering concentration), lowering heating (so you fell cold), etc. Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem. Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.

mtreis86 7y ago

You're not counting the amount of energy gained through o2 and released as co2. That changes the calculation.

tobylane 7y ago
That’s the same process, the lungs are only collecting oxygen and returning waste carbon dioxide for the muscles doing said work.
scarface74 7y ago
That is still part of your BMR or if you are exercising part of the increased calories out.