4 ms·

The evidence of anything other than simple CICO is marginal in both quality and impact. Sure, all sorts of things might make you feel hungrier or make you want

by msy 3y ago

The evidence of anything other than simple CICO is marginal in both quality and impact. Sure, all sorts of things might make you feel hungrier or make you want to eat more or less but whether you actually gain weight or not is a product of how much food you put in your mouth and how much you move. But this is not a popular fact when everyone wants an excuse for failures of attention, discipline and willpower. Only real exception here are medications that affect water retention, but that is entirely separate to fat gain/loss.

tsimionescu 3y ago
CICO itself is actually at best an approximation, since neither CI nor CO are measurable, especially in any kind of real-world setting. Eating less and working out more will lead to reduced weight loss, but how people may be able to achieve this, especially on the long term, is unclear. The evidence for any kind of nutrition finding is slight. CICO has the advantage that it matches very basic thermodynamic principles, so it has to be true to some extent. But beyond this basic level, all you get in reality are some broad strokes. We know how much calories maximum can be extracted from a piece of food. We know how much energy minimum you need to consume to perform a particular excercise. But no one really knows how much calories one particular person will actually get from eating one particular piece of normal food, no one knows how much it will actually vary between people, no one knows what might affect that difference. No one also knows how much energy you'll actually use for doing a particular exercise given efficiency losses from your movements; and no one actually knows how much energy your body is passively consuming - nor everything that affects both of these. Beyond the problem of actually measuring CICO, there is the additional problem of treating humans as fre will agents when it comes to food, when we know full well we are biological machines that have biological imperatives. We may be able to suppress our base instincts to achieve longer term goals, but this ability is obviously limited. Things like appetite are not within our control, and our ability to prioritize the longer term goal versus the short term need that our body is signaling is also obviously limited. And not only are these limited, we know very well that they are affected by all sorts of internal processes. There are many psycho-active medications that are very very strongly proven to have an effect on appetite (lithium, SSRIs), as are certain diseases (thyroid issues for example). But sure, keep blaming people for their diseases. It worked great for curing AIDS, so I'm sure it will work on obesity any day now.
scrollaway 3y ago
No. The evidence largely points to CICO being harmful bullshit. Reducing things to thermodynamics is not useful to people trying to lose weight. Any more than talking about the speed of light is useful to people trying to run faster. Metabolism influences passive weight loss. Fiber influences caloric absorption. Muscle mass influences calorie burn. Gut microbiome impacts fat and caloric absorption by the body. Food quality and type influences all of the above. Say it with me: CICO is harmful, reductive bullshit. If it helped you lose weight, great; it doesn’t help most people though and there is an obesity epidemic to handle.
- mozman 3y ago
  We don't know it all but CICO is most definitely not bullshit.
  - scrollaway 3y ago
    Just because it’s technically correct doesn’t make it useful or helpful. It’s technically correct that computer instructions are all in binary. Yet learning binary is not useful to people trying to code in Python. If the python community started to tell learners “it’s all binary in the end”, it being true wouldn’t make it any less of an unhelpful reductive bullshit claim.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    There are two things people understand by CICO: 1. The broad idea that your weight loss/gain is affected by the caloric content of the food you eat and the amount of excercise you get. This is almost trivially true from simple thermodynamic arguments, and no one contradicts it. 2. The specific belief that weight loss is completely reducible to using your free will to eat less calories and do more sports, and that there is no further discussion to be made on how to help someone lose weight (e.g. no medical checkups for hormone issues, no therapy for mental health, no look at the fattening effects of medication or pollutants, no caring about microbiomes, etc.). This part is what is harmful bullshit, since it posits that human beings of strong moral character should not let their basic biology affect their behavior.
hattar 3y ago
While I believe this to be technically correct, this approach to diet and weight is like saying “poor people just need to make more money, or spend less”. It misses a lot of important nuance. I would recommend you check out a book called” The Hungry Brain“ by Stephan Guyenet. It changed my perspective on this topic and made me much more empathetic to people who struggle with weight issues.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  homeless ? just buy a house!

by msy 3y ago

tsimionescu 3y ago

CICO itself is actually at best an approximation, since neither CI nor CO are measurable, especially in any kind of real-world setting. Eating less and working out more will lead to reduced weight loss, but how people may be able to achieve this, especially on the long term, is unclear. The evidence for any kind of nutrition finding is slight. CICO has the advantage that it matches very basic thermodynamic principles, so it has to be true to some extent. But beyond this basic level, all you get in reality are some broad strokes. We know how much calories maximum can be extracted from a piece of food. We know how much energy minimum you need to consume to perform a particular excercise. But no one really knows how much calories one particular person will actually get from eating one particular piece of normal food, no one knows how much it will actually vary between people, no one knows what might affect that difference. No one also knows how much energy you'll actually use for doing a particular exercise given efficiency losses from your movements; and no one actually knows how much energy your body is passively consuming - nor everything that affects both of these. Beyond the problem of actually measuring CICO, there is the additional problem of treating humans as fre will agents when it comes to food, when we know full well we are biological machines that have biological imperatives. We may be able to suppress our base instincts to achieve longer term goals, but this ability is obviously limited. Things like appetite are not within our control, and our ability to prioritize the longer term goal versus the short term need that our body is signaling is also obviously limited. And not only are these limited, we know very well that they are affected by all sorts of internal processes. There are many psycho-active medications that are very very strongly proven to have an effect on appetite (lithium, SSRIs), as are certain diseases (thyroid issues for example). But sure, keep blaming people for their diseases. It worked great for curing AIDS, so I'm sure it will work on obesity any day now.

scrollaway 3y ago

No. The evidence largely points to CICO being harmful bullshit. Reducing things to thermodynamics is not useful to people trying to lose weight. Any more than talking about the speed of light is useful to people trying to run faster. Metabolism influences passive weight loss. Fiber influences caloric absorption. Muscle mass influences calorie burn. Gut microbiome impacts fat and caloric absorption by the body. Food quality and type influences all of the above. Say it with me: CICO is harmful, reductive bullshit. If it helped you lose weight, great; it doesn’t help most people though and there is an obesity epidemic to handle.

mozman 3y ago
We don't know it all but CICO is most definitely not bullshit.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  Just because it’s technically correct doesn’t make it useful or helpful. It’s technically correct that computer instructions are all in binary. Yet learning binary is not useful to people trying to code in Python. If the python community started to tell learners “it’s all binary in the end”, it being true wouldn’t make it any less of an unhelpful reductive bullshit claim.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  There are two things people understand by CICO: 1. The broad idea that your weight loss/gain is affected by the caloric content of the food you eat and the amount of excercise you get. This is almost trivially true from simple thermodynamic arguments, and no one contradicts it. 2. The specific belief that weight loss is completely reducible to using your free will to eat less calories and do more sports, and that there is no further discussion to be made on how to help someone lose weight (e.g. no medical checkups for hormone issues, no therapy for mental health, no look at the fattening effects of medication or pollutants, no caring about microbiomes, etc.). This part is what is harmful bullshit, since it posits that human beings of strong moral character should not let their basic biology affect their behavior.

hattar 3y ago

While I believe this to be technically correct, this approach to diet and weight is like saying “poor people just need to make more money, or spend less”. It misses a lot of important nuance. I would recommend you check out a book called” The Hungry Brain“ by Stephan Guyenet. It changed my perspective on this topic and made me much more empathetic to people who struggle with weight issues.

LoganDark 3y ago
homeless ? just buy a house!