7 ms·

CICO doesn’t work across individuals for reason you outline (just because I lose weight with a certain level of calories, doesn’t mean you will, etc.) But for

CICO doesn’t work across individuals for reason you outline (just because I lose weight with a certain level of calories, doesn’t mean you will, etc.) But for a single individual, working to establish your base metabolic rate by counting every calorie and weighing yourself regularly, you can always find a way to be successful with the CICO model. If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week. It does not mean that every individual’s baseline metabolic rate is the same. As you also outline, your base metabolic rate also changes as your weight does, so re-baselining by continually measuring caloric intake and your weight to recalibrate is always going to be necessary. Given the above CICO almost seems tautological: Measure the weight loss you actually observe at a given calorie level, and that tells you… how much weight you will lose at that given calorie level. So it is almost useless as you describe. BUT, the main reason I’m still a proponent of CICO is that it simplifies dieting away from thinking about what you eat, and instead focuses on how much you eat. If I establish that I need to eat 1800 calories a day, I can still have a Big Mac meal and drink some beers. But I may not be able to eat much else that day. That alone makes it useful for me. What isn’t useful to me, are diets that essentially limit the type of food you eat and tell you to just go nuts and eat however much you want: I will often find myself hating the foods I’m restricted to, and the quantity I eat may end up being such that I gain weight anyway. To me, CICO is simply a technique that says “actually measure how much you’re eating”, no more and no less. That is what makes it a useful tool.

waterheater 3y ago
Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1]. The bottom line is: you're welcome to eat your Big Mac and beers, just only two days out of the week. Also, stress has an important role to play on weight loss. Stress causes your adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol increases glucose levels through gluconeogenesis by making glucose from non-carbohydrate sources, such as proteins from muscles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism
- ninkendo 3y ago
  It sounds like any other of these diets that tell you when and how to eat but not how much. I’m pretty sure I could gain weight when doing everything you describe, if I eat really terribly during the days I eat “plenty of carbs”. The key to CICO is that you’re actually measuring not just the calories you eat, but the weight you gain/lose, and are continually calibrating. If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. This is trivially true: the calibration could technically push you all the way to zero calories per day (which will never happen in practice, obviously.) Case in point, I lost 50 lbs with this approach, eating McDonald’s nearly every single day. I kept it off for roughly 8 years. (I since became a dad and have let myself go tremendously, gaining ~30lbs back, but I will cross that bridge soon.)
  - waterheater 3y ago
    >If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. >With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's some great quotes from the book "The Obesity Code" (which I've just recently found and find an excellent book): >The abrupt increase in obesity began exactly with the officially sanctioned move toward a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. >A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure. >Total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and exercise. >Since hormones control both Calories In and Calories Out, obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric, disorder. >If hormones regulate fat growth, then obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric disorder. >Sugar will increase the blood glucose level and provoke an insulin response from the pancreas. Olive oil will not...[cause] significant increase in blood glucose or insulin. The two different foods evoke vastly different metabolic and hormonal responses." All of this is to say that it's not enough to simply adjust calories. Yes, calories matter to a point, and everyone knows that starvation (e.g., 0 calories for an extended period of time) is effective in the long-term, but starvation will also harm your body, and no reasonably-minded person can suggest it as a viable approach to weight loss. The best available scientific evidence shows that continuing to decrease caloric intake can make weight loss more difficult for an obese person.
throwup238 3y ago
This is the dogma that I'm talking about. > If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week. At this point it's pretty safe to say that's likely untrue at the population level. This is a cutting edge area of research but the UCP1 adaptations seems to happen really fast, for some people on the order of weeks. On the order of months for the vast majority of the population. It doesn't take long for the basal rate to fall to whatever your intake is because the system evolved to naturally have a lot of room to spare. The human body always adapts and if I were a gambling man, I'd say this is largely why most people fail at dieting: after a month or two the results stop and they have to further decrease their intake which interferes with other pathways and tanks motivation. If it works for you, that's great! You're one of the lucky ones, maybe because you've hit your floor for uncoupling proteins. But given just how hard dieting is for most people and how bad the obesity epidemic has gotten, it's probably not useful for the majority of people. A far more holistic approach that tackles macro- and micronutrient deficiency, motivation, lifestyle, and not just net calories is required.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  > It doesn't take long for the basal rate to fall to whatever your intake is because the system evolved to naturally have a lot of room to spare All this is accounted for in this sentence of my post: > your base metabolic rate also changes as your weight does, so re-baselining by continually measuring caloric intake and your weight to recalibrate is always going to be necessary If you’re actually measuring yourself at the scale to get the ground truth of your actual metabolic rate, and you’re doing this every single day, then there isn’t a single thing that can change this: UCP1 adaptations, fat viruses, leptin changes, hormones, stress… all of this is covered by the actual weight on the scale. If I ate X calories and gained Y lbs, I need to adjust my calories by Z, no matter the reason I gained those pounds. You can argue that such a diet is too hard, and that for some people the adjustment to your calories is going to leave you essentially starving, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter that it will work if you do it right. Now, whether it’s worth it for people, and whether the process is going to leave you utterly miserable or even extremely unhealthy as a result, I’m making no claim on.
paulpauper 3y ago
Genes play a big role. Some people have a faster (I think the more appropriate word is inefficient) metabolism, and can lose weight or stay thin despite eating more calories compared to someone with a slower/efficient metabolism, controlling for body size, age, and other factors. There was a thread on Reddit a while back where formerly or current obese people shared their old diets, and many people were commenting that it did not seem like much food. Even though people are generally bad at self-reporting calorie intake, that's called having a crap metabolism. Imagine two individuals who both both need 2,500 calories/day to feel satiated, but the second individual stores anything above 1,500/day as fat, and a second individual stores anything above 3,000 as fat. The first person will constantly be fighting his body to not overeat and will feel hungry constantly. The second individual can eat to fullness and not gain weight. Some men , particularly the formerly obese, have such slow metabolisms that anything stored above 1,200-1,700/day is stored as fat despite weighing 170 pounds or so, from reading personal accounts here and on Reddit. This is also why bariatric surgery patients regain weight and become obese again despite only eating around 1,200-1,500 calories/day. These people basically got short-changed when it comes to metabolism genes. If there is a famine, they will outlive everyone. But in abundance they become fat very easily. This does not answer why there are more obese people today compared to in the past, but there is still probably a genetic component nonetheless. And on the other extreme are people who can be very slim despite eating a normal amount of calories or only slightly less than 2,000. These people are much rarer, as it's disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective to have an inefficient metabolism, but they exist in the same way very tall or short people exist by virtue of phenotypic variance.
magicalhippo 3y ago
I found CICO very helpful in losing weight (from 120kg to 90kg). It was a relatively easy metric to track, and using it alone meant that I could still eat all the things I wanted, though I needed to balance what I wanted to eat with portion size. CICO also meant I started out slow, making small cuts. So it wasn't bad in the beginning. Over time I had to find ways to adapt so I wouldn't go feeling hungry (mostly increase protein and fiber ratio significantly), but I never needed big changes. On the flip side CICO also meant that if I messed up one day it wasn't so bad. It just moved the goal post one day or two further away. So it prevented me from feeling like there was no point and giving up, instead getting back into it the next day. By following CICO I had a very linear weight loss, which didn't feel like a restriction or such. I estimated my CO and aimed for roughly 0.5kg per week and that's almost exactly what I managed. Not being "prevented" from certain foods due to diet X was a big factor in making this bearable.
- crdrost 3y ago
  CICO is very nice if you put it into the proper context, which is, 1. The scale lies. Liar liar pants on fire it lies. (We could go into this in detail, my wife never seems convinced, but it is to my mind a basic fact of the physics of the system that the scale lies in multiple orthogonal ways.) 2. So you want multiple different probes into the same phenomenon so that you get a better insight into what is going on. 3. So, track calories as a second piece of data to try and check whether the scale is lying to you or not. 4. As part of that, they give you greater insight into the choices that you make. For instance you realize that it is functionally impossible to jog off a Krispy Kreme donut but very easy to replace half a meal with it. Or you discover that you can cut fruit juice for water with no dissatisfaction. Regrettably this is not peoples’ usual relationship with food and the scale, which is exemplified by the Cheat Day phenomenon. The calories are viewed not as a separate data stream but as a morality judgment, which is then turned off for brief periods because constant judgment is hard on us, and these periods contain a lot of very relevant data such that if you turn the metric off selectively for them, the metric is no longer useful.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
CICO simplifies dieting so much that 2000 calories from drinking cola are equal to 2000 calories from eating a stew of chickpeas, beans and nuts. The human body is not a furnace literally burning fuel, it's a complex chemical reactor in a tight feedback loop with what it actually processes.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  I mean, it’s not that far off. Take this guy who ate only twinkies/nutty bars/donuts/doritos for a month (with some veggies added in for fiber/ruffage): https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor... > His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds. > But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so. > Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.
  - GeoAtreides 3y ago
    I mean, yeah, of course if you eat less than your body needs, you will lose weight, nobody is denying that. You can lose weight drinking only coca cola every day. Now, how _easy_ that would be, how much hunger one would feel, the effect on health, mental health, energy, what the rebound is after the diet is done etc., that's a completely different discussion. And another discussion is how much the weight loss is sustainable/maintainable in the long term. So yeah, in a vacuum, with a perfectly spherical cow, it's not that far off.
Izkata 3y ago
> But for a single individual, working to establish your base metabolic rate by counting every calorie and weighing yourself regularly, you can always find a way to be successful with the CICO model. If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week. It does not mean that every individual’s baseline metabolic rate is the same. Anecdote: I did this over the past year and a half, weighing myself weekly and tracking all calories, including a period of weight loss and gain to get some good data points, and starting around 6-8 months in the linear regression stabilized: I found I burn on average 2200 calories per day even though I'm in my 30s and mostly sedentary. I've since found it to be pretty accurate.

waterheater 3y ago

Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1]. The bottom line is: you're welcome to eat your Big Mac and beers, just only two days out of the week. Also, stress has an important role to play on weight loss. Stress causes your adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol increases glucose levels through gluconeogenesis by making glucose from non-carbohydrate sources, such as proteins from muscles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism

ninkendo 3y ago
It sounds like any other of these diets that tell you when and how to eat but not how much. I’m pretty sure I could gain weight when doing everything you describe, if I eat really terribly during the days I eat “plenty of carbs”. The key to CICO is that you’re actually measuring not just the calories you eat, but the weight you gain/lose, and are continually calibrating. If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. This is trivially true: the calibration could technically push you all the way to zero calories per day (which will never happen in practice, obviously.) Case in point, I lost 50 lbs with this approach, eating McDonald’s nearly every single day. I kept it off for roughly 8 years. (I since became a dad and have let myself go tremendously, gaining ~30lbs back, but I will cross that bridge soon.)
- waterheater 3y ago
  >If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. >With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's some great quotes from the book "The Obesity Code" (which I've just recently found and find an excellent book): >The abrupt increase in obesity began exactly with the officially sanctioned move toward a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. >A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure. >Total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and exercise. >Since hormones control both Calories In and Calories Out, obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric, disorder. >If hormones regulate fat growth, then obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric disorder. >Sugar will increase the blood glucose level and provoke an insulin response from the pancreas. Olive oil will not...[cause] significant increase in blood glucose or insulin. The two different foods evoke vastly different metabolic and hormonal responses." All of this is to say that it's not enough to simply adjust calories. Yes, calories matter to a point, and everyone knows that starvation (e.g., 0 calories for an extended period of time) is effective in the long-term, but starvation will also harm your body, and no reasonably-minded person can suggest it as a viable approach to weight loss. The best available scientific evidence shows that continuing to decrease caloric intake can make weight loss more difficult for an obese person.

throwup238 3y ago

This is the dogma that I'm talking about. > If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week. At this point it's pretty safe to say that's likely untrue at the population level. This is a cutting edge area of research but the UCP1 adaptations seems to happen really fast, for some people on the order of weeks. On the order of months for the vast majority of the population. It doesn't take long for the basal rate to fall to whatever your intake is because the system evolved to naturally have a lot of room to spare. The human body always adapts and if I were a gambling man, I'd say this is largely why most people fail at dieting: after a month or two the results stop and they have to further decrease their intake which interferes with other pathways and tanks motivation. If it works for you, that's great! You're one of the lucky ones, maybe because you've hit your floor for uncoupling proteins. But given just how hard dieting is for most people and how bad the obesity epidemic has gotten, it's probably not useful for the majority of people. A far more holistic approach that tackles macro- and micronutrient deficiency, motivation, lifestyle, and not just net calories is required.

ninkendo 3y ago
> It doesn't take long for the basal rate to fall to whatever your intake is because the system evolved to naturally have a lot of room to spare All this is accounted for in this sentence of my post: > your base metabolic rate also changes as your weight does, so re-baselining by continually measuring caloric intake and your weight to recalibrate is always going to be necessary If you’re actually measuring yourself at the scale to get the ground truth of your actual metabolic rate, and you’re doing this every single day, then there isn’t a single thing that can change this: UCP1 adaptations, fat viruses, leptin changes, hormones, stress… all of this is covered by the actual weight on the scale. If I ate X calories and gained Y lbs, I need to adjust my calories by Z, no matter the reason I gained those pounds. You can argue that such a diet is too hard, and that for some people the adjustment to your calories is going to leave you essentially starving, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter that it will work if you do it right. Now, whether it’s worth it for people, and whether the process is going to leave you utterly miserable or even extremely unhealthy as a result, I’m making no claim on.

paulpauper 3y ago

Genes play a big role. Some people have a faster (I think the more appropriate word is inefficient) metabolism, and can lose weight or stay thin despite eating more calories compared to someone with a slower/efficient metabolism, controlling for body size, age, and other factors. There was a thread on Reddit a while back where formerly or current obese people shared their old diets, and many people were commenting that it did not seem like much food. Even though people are generally bad at self-reporting calorie intake, that's called having a crap metabolism. Imagine two individuals who both both need 2,500 calories/day to feel satiated, but the second individual stores anything above 1,500/day as fat, and a second individual stores anything above 3,000 as fat. The first person will constantly be fighting his body to not overeat and will feel hungry constantly. The second individual can eat to fullness and not gain weight. Some men , particularly the formerly obese, have such slow metabolisms that anything stored above 1,200-1,700/day is stored as fat despite weighing 170 pounds or so, from reading personal accounts here and on Reddit. This is also why bariatric surgery patients regain weight and become obese again despite only eating around 1,200-1,500 calories/day. These people basically got short-changed when it comes to metabolism genes. If there is a famine, they will outlive everyone. But in abundance they become fat very easily. This does not answer why there are more obese people today compared to in the past, but there is still probably a genetic component nonetheless. And on the other extreme are people who can be very slim despite eating a normal amount of calories or only slightly less than 2,000. These people are much rarer, as it's disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective to have an inefficient metabolism, but they exist in the same way very tall or short people exist by virtue of phenotypic variance.

magicalhippo 3y ago

I found CICO very helpful in losing weight (from 120kg to 90kg). It was a relatively easy metric to track, and using it alone meant that I could still eat all the things I wanted, though I needed to balance what I wanted to eat with portion size. CICO also meant I started out slow, making small cuts. So it wasn't bad in the beginning. Over time I had to find ways to adapt so I wouldn't go feeling hungry (mostly increase protein and fiber ratio significantly), but I never needed big changes. On the flip side CICO also meant that if I messed up one day it wasn't so bad. It just moved the goal post one day or two further away. So it prevented me from feeling like there was no point and giving up, instead getting back into it the next day. By following CICO I had a very linear weight loss, which didn't feel like a restriction or such. I estimated my CO and aimed for roughly 0.5kg per week and that's almost exactly what I managed. Not being "prevented" from certain foods due to diet X was a big factor in making this bearable.

crdrost 3y ago
CICO is very nice if you put it into the proper context, which is, 1. The scale lies. Liar liar pants on fire it lies. (We could go into this in detail, my wife never seems convinced, but it is to my mind a basic fact of the physics of the system that the scale lies in multiple orthogonal ways.) 2. So you want multiple different probes into the same phenomenon so that you get a better insight into what is going on. 3. So, track calories as a second piece of data to try and check whether the scale is lying to you or not. 4. As part of that, they give you greater insight into the choices that you make. For instance you realize that it is functionally impossible to jog off a Krispy Kreme donut but very easy to replace half a meal with it. Or you discover that you can cut fruit juice for water with no dissatisfaction. Regrettably this is not peoples’ usual relationship with food and the scale, which is exemplified by the Cheat Day phenomenon. The calories are viewed not as a separate data stream but as a morality judgment, which is then turned off for brief periods because constant judgment is hard on us, and these periods contain a lot of very relevant data such that if you turn the metric off selectively for them, the metric is no longer useful.

GeoAtreides 3y ago

CICO simplifies dieting so much that 2000 calories from drinking cola are equal to 2000 calories from eating a stew of chickpeas, beans and nuts. The human body is not a furnace literally burning fuel, it's a complex chemical reactor in a tight feedback loop with what it actually processes.

ninkendo 3y ago
I mean, it’s not that far off. Take this guy who ate only twinkies/nutty bars/donuts/doritos for a month (with some veggies added in for fiber/ruffage): https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor... > His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds. > But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so. > Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  I mean, yeah, of course if you eat less than your body needs, you will lose weight, nobody is denying that. You can lose weight drinking only coca cola every day. Now, how _easy_ that would be, how much hunger one would feel, the effect on health, mental health, energy, what the rebound is after the diet is done etc., that's a completely different discussion. And another discussion is how much the weight loss is sustainable/maintainable in the long term. So yeah, in a vacuum, with a perfectly spherical cow, it's not that far off.

Izkata 3y ago

> But for a single individual, working to establish your base metabolic rate by counting every calorie and weighing yourself regularly, you can always find a way to be successful with the CICO model. If you establish a baseline that your metabolic rate is (say) 2000 calories a day, then eating 1600 calories a day will cause you to lose roughly a half-pound to a pound per week. It does not mean that every individual’s baseline metabolic rate is the same. Anecdote: I did this over the past year and a half, weighing myself weekly and tracking all calories, including a period of weight loss and gain to get some good data points, and starting around 6-8 months in the linear regression stabilized: I found I burn on average 2200 calories per day even though I'm in my 30s and mostly sedentary. I've since found it to be pretty accurate.