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A calorie is a measure of energy used, for example there is a direct conversion to kWh. If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat (weight los

A calorie is a measure of energy used, for example there is a direct conversion to kWh. If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat (weight loss). Our bodies aim to be efficient and won't expel energy, so if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight. This is true regardless of macronutrient composition. Calories are therefore at least a necessary consideration in diet and a healthy weight, but calorie consumption alone is by no means a sufficient measure of a healthy diet.

ilammy 5y ago
> if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn. Calories are amount of energy... released as heat when the food is burned. Or rather, the numbers you see on food products is some value derived from food composition. Anyhow, this is no way directly related to how much of resources your particular body will extract from food. Counting calories has a benefit of making you aware of your habits, but dietology is not as simple as arithmetic.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  > The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn. Depends how you read "eat less than you burn" One way you can interpret the quoted section is that you haven't even eaten less than you burn, you're still eating more or equal to, since the amount you burn has gone down.
mavhc 5y ago
Problem is you only know the max potential input, not the actual input, which depends on your gut bacteria. And also you're not directly measuring the output, which is different for everyone, and adjusts based on the input. It's useful for making you think about everything you eat though, shall I eat this thing? Well, I'd have to record it in my spreadsheet, won't bother.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Direct control over an upper bound is quite sufficient to force a number downwards. All of the error terms point in the direction of undereating when the problem is overeating. The real problem with calorie counting is that it is difficult.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    You aren’t even controlling the upper bound, because as explained these calories have not much to do with how your body processes them. For instance you might think you reduced the calorie count by forgoing 200 calories of bread to eat 150 calories of tofu, but if your body processes tofu better than bread, you’ve effectively increased your energy consumption while the count is lower on your spreadsheet. Same way you might be eating the same amount of tofu everyday, assuming you have a steady calorie intake, while your actual ingestion rate will be all over the board. If/when you’ll be decreasing quantities your ingestion rate might go up enough to effectively increase the energy you take from it, creating weird states that don’t make any sense looking at the numbers from outside. The lowering the upper bound only start to make sense when the body is really starving, in that your daily life has become hell, and you start lacking elements other than calorie. Some see that as a success, I see it as dangerous for most people. The people dropping out of these diet don’t do so because they don’t have the guts, but because they end up worse that where they were at the beginning. It’s not everyone ending up there, so we’ll still hear the success stories of course.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Generally you not only count potential calories, but also measure you weight. You can then adjust calories up or down to keep hitting your targets as your body and your activity levels change.
elil17 5y ago
The whole point of the article is that measurement inaccuracies and variation in energy extraction efficiency make that information practically useless.
topaz0 5y ago
If you read the article, you'll notice that this fact is acknowledged there. The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem. For example, different amounts of energy are consumed in the process of digesting various foods, and some energy is excreted undigested, in a way that depends on the food and the person. Similar complexities apply on the "calories out" side, where a large fraction of your energy expenditure is not directly controlled by your choice of activities like exercise. Ultimately there is some arithmetic of calories in minus calories out, but it is not captured by the simplistic calculations that are normally done.
- naasking 5y ago
  > The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem. "Calories in calories out" is a rule of thumb that is as true as "what goes up must come down". Which is to say that it's not true on the extreme margins, but it's true for virtually all of the cases anyone is likely to encounter in their lives.
- fredophile 5y ago
  I think this problem gets overstated by the anti CICO crowd. Most people will habitually make and eat the same, relatively small, collection of meals. If you're eating the same foods and nothing outside has changed (travel, stress, sleep, exercise, etc) then the difference between what the nutrition facts show and what your body gets out of the food should be pretty consistent.
jaqalopes 5y ago
> If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat This is totally wrong. The body can also slow down your metabolism, twitch less, think slower (if you had read the article you'd see this is addressed), decrease the effectiveness of your organs, not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass. The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. It is super clear to me as a person who has bounced back and forth between fit to overweight for my entire adult life that there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all. CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. ...I've lost over 150lbs and am a staunch advocate of CICO as really the only thing that matters for weight loss. > there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all. Let's be fair here: you can be as skinny as them, it'll just be extremely hard and very unpleasant. I get where you're coming from though, it is difficult not to harbor an extreme amount of resentment for these people and the universe that didn't favor you in the same way. I have literally said to some people like this that, if I thought it would work, I would eat them to gain their power. For people like us, it is incredibly difficult to pull off. > CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either. CICO works, and yeah I'd definitely say that for people like us it amounts to developing an eating disorder[0]. I'm also continually frustrated by my skinny unable-to-gain weight friends and workout collogues who, mistakenly, believe they know something I don't. Some of them have hyperthyroidism, their experience of food and weight gain is a completely different reality from minie. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=AnIdiotOnTheNet%20eating%20disorder&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

ilammy 5y ago

> if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn. Calories are amount of energy... released as heat when the food is burned. Or rather, the numbers you see on food products is some value derived from food composition. Anyhow, this is no way directly related to how much of resources your particular body will extract from food. Counting calories has a benefit of making you aware of your habits, but dietology is not as simple as arithmetic.

xboxnolifes 5y ago
> The converse isn't necessarily true: if you eat less than you burn, you might not lose weight but instead your body adjusts how much you burn. Depends how you read "eat less than you burn" One way you can interpret the quoted section is that you haven't even eaten less than you burn, you're still eating more or equal to, since the amount you burn has gone down.

mavhc 5y ago

Problem is you only know the max potential input, not the actual input, which depends on your gut bacteria. And also you're not directly measuring the output, which is different for everyone, and adjusts based on the input. It's useful for making you think about everything you eat though, shall I eat this thing? Well, I'd have to record it in my spreadsheet, won't bother.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Direct control over an upper bound is quite sufficient to force a number downwards. All of the error terms point in the direction of undereating when the problem is overeating. The real problem with calorie counting is that it is difficult.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  You aren’t even controlling the upper bound, because as explained these calories have not much to do with how your body processes them. For instance you might think you reduced the calorie count by forgoing 200 calories of bread to eat 150 calories of tofu, but if your body processes tofu better than bread, you’ve effectively increased your energy consumption while the count is lower on your spreadsheet. Same way you might be eating the same amount of tofu everyday, assuming you have a steady calorie intake, while your actual ingestion rate will be all over the board. If/when you’ll be decreasing quantities your ingestion rate might go up enough to effectively increase the energy you take from it, creating weird states that don’t make any sense looking at the numbers from outside. The lowering the upper bound only start to make sense when the body is really starving, in that your daily life has become hell, and you start lacking elements other than calorie. Some see that as a success, I see it as dangerous for most people. The people dropping out of these diet don’t do so because they don’t have the guts, but because they end up worse that where they were at the beginning. It’s not everyone ending up there, so we’ll still hear the success stories of course.
adrianN 5y ago
Generally you not only count potential calories, but also measure you weight. You can then adjust calories up or down to keep hitting your targets as your body and your activity levels change.

elil17 5y ago

The whole point of the article is that measurement inaccuracies and variation in energy extraction efficiency make that information practically useless.

topaz0 5y ago

If you read the article, you'll notice that this fact is acknowledged there. The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem. For example, different amounts of energy are consumed in the process of digesting various foods, and some energy is excreted undigested, in a way that depends on the food and the person. Similar complexities apply on the "calories out" side, where a large fraction of your energy expenditure is not directly controlled by your choice of activities like exercise. Ultimately there is some arithmetic of calories in minus calories out, but it is not captured by the simplistic calculations that are normally done.

naasking 5y ago
> The issue is that energy in and energy out are not so simple as the Nutrition Facts make them seem. "Calories in calories out" is a rule of thumb that is as true as "what goes up must come down". Which is to say that it's not true on the extreme margins, but it's true for virtually all of the cases anyone is likely to encounter in their lives.
fredophile 5y ago
I think this problem gets overstated by the anti CICO crowd. Most people will habitually make and eat the same, relatively small, collection of meals. If you're eating the same foods and nothing outside has changed (travel, stress, sleep, exercise, etc) then the difference between what the nutrition facts show and what your body gets out of the food should be pretty consistent.

jaqalopes 5y ago

> If your body uses more energy than you eat, it must burn fat This is totally wrong. The body can also slow down your metabolism, twitch less, think slower (if you had read the article you'd see this is addressed), decrease the effectiveness of your organs, not to mention "eat" some of your nonfat muscle mass. The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. It is super clear to me as a person who has bounced back and forth between fit to overweight for my entire adult life that there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all. CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> The people advancing the CICO idea have obviously never struggled with their weight. ...I've lost over 150lbs and am a staunch advocate of CICO as really the only thing that matters for weight loss. > there is nothing I could ever do to be as "skinny" as the skinny people I know, all of whom eat and drink way more than me, and usually don't exercise at all. Let's be fair here: you can be as skinny as them, it'll just be extremely hard and very unpleasant. I get where you're coming from though, it is difficult not to harbor an extreme amount of resentment for these people and the universe that didn't favor you in the same way. I have literally said to some people like this that, if I thought it would work, I would eat them to gain their power. For people like us, it is incredibly difficult to pull off. > CICO is not real advice, it's telling people to develop eating disorders, i.e. starve themselves. And for what? To bolster the ego of you and the ~60% of people who are naturally less likely to accumulate body fat, who like to believe they are just smarter or know something about nutrition that people like me don't. But it's exactly the opposite. I know more about nutrition than any of my skinny friends. Social pressure has demanded that I do so. It doesn't actually help, and the smugness of commenters on HN doesn't either. CICO works, and yeah I'd definitely say that for people like us it amounts to developing an eating disorder[0]. I'm also continually frustrated by my skinny unable-to-gain weight friends and workout collogues who, mistakenly, believe they know something I don't. Some of them have hyperthyroidism, their experience of food and weight gain is a completely different reality from minie. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=AnIdiotOnTheNet%20eating%20disorder&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...