CICO is good enough almost all of the time. The complications and exceptions don’t really disprove it. Most people should start there. As someone who has lost

CICO is good enough almost all of the time. The complications and exceptions don’t really disprove it. Most people should start there. As someone who has lost a lot of weight and gotten very strong, and coached a significant number people in their efforts: calorie tracking works… you need to be truthful in your effort. The micro- level issues or margins of error in CICO are irrelevant to the macro- margins required by someone who has to reduce body fat by 50 lbs, or 100 lbs, or more. If you always record something wrong, and aren’t losing the weight, you’ll still need to make an adjustment to what you’re eating to accomplish the weight loss. There’s nothing magical about 2500 calories eaten or recorded, but there is something definite about losing 5 lbs over a period of time. That’s the baseline metric. The CICO is just an adjustable control. As an example: most people aren’t willing to cook 90% of their meals for a couple of years. Restaurants generally won’t feed you reasonable portions (or proper vegetables), which is fatal to the cause when you need to lose a significant amount of weight. Routing around those baseline truths isn’t an accurate response to the challenges. Most fit people in the gym… the ones who are there at 6am, aren’t eating out — or calorically freely —all the time either. The problem isn’t really the science of fat loss, but the world of crappy food products and restaurant meals. Restaurants do not follow a sustenance model.