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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

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.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Uhh... Isn't the whole thing pointless because of your last sentence?
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    No, I’m saying I’m making no claim on that because I very much don’t want to get into the (very) subjective and context-dependent argument about whether a diet is a good idea for someone or not. My claim is much narrower: CICO works if you follow it. Whether it’s right for you, I can’t say. (For my part, CICO worked amazingly well for me, and I was able to follow it without much trouble. But that’s just me.)
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Empirically it's really quite rare that eating less than your caloric expenditure is going to make you unhealthy for obese people. It's a rare caveat, not ground for blanket dismissal. Feeling hungry or being unhappy with such a diet is more common, but it's generally also fixable, and it doesn't defeat the point either.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  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. then CICO is not practical for weight loss. the "CO" becomes so small that you're screwed
  - mrmlz 3y ago
    The cope. What normal human reduces its CO so that you wont lose weight? Are you talking about someone in a coma?
    - HEmanZ 3y ago
      You will lose weight, in fact if you cut to 0 for long enough you are guaranteed to lose all soft tissue weight. Can I recommend you the “0 calories till you die” diet? The issue is that: - many people can cut from a diet of 2200 calories per day to 1800 calories per day and pretty quickly and sustainably lose weight. This kind of calorie reduction is very manageable, and anyone who has lost weight this way starts saying “it’s just CICO man, so easy, just do it” - meanwhile, in order to lose weight, some (probably not huge but very real) amount of people who maintain at 2200 calories need to drop to 1000 calories per day, or even lower, consistently, for months, in order to lose weight at a 0.5 lb/wk. This is miserable, not sustainable, and probably a net negative on your life (damage not worth the weight loss) unless you are morbidly obese. The people in category 1 yell “you’re just coping, it’s not hard, just CICO” at group 2. Meanwhile they have never had to reduce calories in that way and have no idea how unsustainable it is. They are so sure their experience is universal, that they usually utterly deny the other groups existence, and smugly go about the world assuming people struggling with weight are just weak.
com2kid 3y ago
Renaissance Periodization just did a video on calorie cycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY (the video is titled carb cycling, which he dismissed in the first few minutes and he moves on to calorie cycling) and in it he discusses some of the benefits and disadvantages of calorie cycling vs just eating at a deficit. The tl;dr is follow your body (e.g. not sleeping well, exhausted all the time, eat more for a bit), but try starting out around 2:1 for eating a fair bit under vs slightly above maintenance. (e.g. diet 6 days, eat a bit extra for 3 days, repeat). In another video he also mentions that after weight loss, that it is a good idea to slowly increase calories until the scale doesn't move, and then eat at that level for a few weeks to reset the body's hunger signaling. (I am dramatically simplifying there). > 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. This is why "cheat days" or even "cheat weeks" work. People are on a strict diet, weight loss stalls, they go on vacation and eat at a surplus for a bit, and then they find that after vacation they are able to resume losing weight. Likewise a big thing in Keto awhile back (not sure now) was cycling off Keto for the weekend, which unless a person is very careful, ends up with people eating at least a little bit to "excess". Plenty of people do "lazy keto" and eat a big Sunday family meal and so long as the excess calories on Sunday don't exceed the sum total of deficits from the other 6 days, they'll be A-OK, and now it turns out they may actually be better off.
- _dark_matter_ 3y ago
  I highly recommend this article from the MacroFactor team on this: https://macrofactorapp.com/refeeds-diet-breaks/ https://macrofactorapp.com/refeeds-diet-breaks/ Basically their view is that refeeding (aka cycling) probably doesn't do much physiologically speaking, but there may be advantages to adherence when people use diet breaks (typically longer than a cycle or refeed).
  - com2kid 3y ago
    > As shown in Figure 9, results indicated that “intermittent energy restriction interventions,” which include relatively long diet breaks, led to a fairly negligible weight loss advantage that was not statistically significant. The problems I am seeing with all these studies is that the participates in the control groups (just regular dieting) are still losing weight throughout the study. Instead, do a study where you have a bunch of people who are calorie restricted, and when the scale stops moving, have half the participants do a re-feed before trying to cut again, and the other half keep soldiering on as is. Or to put it another way, we all know people plateau with diets. Running a study that where participants do not hit a plateau, and instead having science just go "oh well! Sorry can't help you!" aren't of much use. (It is funny because the author of that article starts out talking about plateaus, and then runs a bunch of studies that.... don't encounter plateaus.) I've met people, who are grossly obese, who after going from 400lb to 300lb, find that they aren't losing weight at even 2500 kcals a day. So they drop it to 2000kcal. 25 pounds later the scale stops, and they try 1500kcal, feel like shit, and they give up. Math says at 250lb they should be shedding tons of weight at 1500kcal, but they aren't. I want to see a study that investigates that, instead of "oh someone lost 10kg, woohoo!" 10-15kg is a lot of weight to lose, but almost any dietary intervention will pull of a 10-15kg weight loss (which is what all the studies looked at show!) > Theoretically, reverse dieting should be most effective in scenarios where metabolic adaptation is most extreme, and to my knowledge, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment reports some of the most dramatic metabolic adaptation ever observed in the scientific literature. Except it was taking people at healthy weights and having them drop to an unhealthy low weight, and then having them regain weight. The situation we are faced with now is people at unhealthy high weights, with all the hormonal problems that entails, losing a bunch of weight, and messing up their hormones in a different way, and now the goal is to stabilize their body at that new lower weight. > As previously discussed, the available research hints at a number of subjective and behavioral improvements related to hunger, satiety, diet adherence, mood, and perceived energy level, in addition to improved performance All of those "subjective" feelings have basis on the body's physiological systems. With better measurements, the underlying cause of those "subjective feelings" can be found. Edit: FWIW I think the extreme weights we are seeing in developed societies have multiple underlying causes, and that pure dietary interventions are not the solution for everyone. From gut microbiome to environmental pollutants, to the # of ads for fast food on TV, IMHO the problem is multi-causal.
paulpauper 3y ago
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. Yes this is it. People with shit genes simply do not burn enough calories , so these people need to diet to absurdly low levels of calories to merely not be overweight, way lower than predicted by formulas/tables. Which is not sustainable , hence regain.
- mark38848 3y ago
  This is all so obviously refutable if you look at the fact that this affects the USA so much more than other countries and even there if you go back three generations, peolr with essentially the same genes just at fewer calories and - surprise - were less fat.
  - waterheater 3y ago
    It's not the calories, it's the carbs (aka sugar). The modern Westernized diet is carb-heavy, and carbs are the main macronutrient contributing to obesity (see the clear increase in obesity following the creation of the food pyramid). Many Pacific Island nations also saw massive obesity rates. The reason was carbs, not calories. Soda contributes to obesity because of sugar, not the calories.
  - HEmanZ 3y ago
    This person didn’t say “everyone in America”, they said “people with shit genes”. Are you assuming this is the same set of people? Amazingly, some people are different. Who knew. We shouldn’t gaslight them into thinking they aren’t different because they aren’t like the aggregate, and we get to feel so morally superior if every individual is like the aggregate.

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.

whatshisface 3y ago
Uhh... Isn't the whole thing pointless because of your last sentence?
- ninkendo 3y ago
  No, I’m saying I’m making no claim on that because I very much don’t want to get into the (very) subjective and context-dependent argument about whether a diet is a good idea for someone or not. My claim is much narrower: CICO works if you follow it. Whether it’s right for you, I can’t say. (For my part, CICO worked amazingly well for me, and I was able to follow it without much trouble. But that’s just me.)
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Empirically it's really quite rare that eating less than your caloric expenditure is going to make you unhealthy for obese people. It's a rare caveat, not ground for blanket dismissal. Feeling hungry or being unhappy with such a diet is more common, but it's generally also fixable, and it doesn't defeat the point either.
paulpauper 3y ago
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. then CICO is not practical for weight loss. the "CO" becomes so small that you're screwed
- mrmlz 3y ago
  The cope. What normal human reduces its CO so that you wont lose weight? Are you talking about someone in a coma?
  - HEmanZ 3y ago
    You will lose weight, in fact if you cut to 0 for long enough you are guaranteed to lose all soft tissue weight. Can I recommend you the “0 calories till you die” diet? The issue is that: - many people can cut from a diet of 2200 calories per day to 1800 calories per day and pretty quickly and sustainably lose weight. This kind of calorie reduction is very manageable, and anyone who has lost weight this way starts saying “it’s just CICO man, so easy, just do it” - meanwhile, in order to lose weight, some (probably not huge but very real) amount of people who maintain at 2200 calories need to drop to 1000 calories per day, or even lower, consistently, for months, in order to lose weight at a 0.5 lb/wk. This is miserable, not sustainable, and probably a net negative on your life (damage not worth the weight loss) unless you are morbidly obese. The people in category 1 yell “you’re just coping, it’s not hard, just CICO” at group 2. Meanwhile they have never had to reduce calories in that way and have no idea how unsustainable it is. They are so sure their experience is universal, that they usually utterly deny the other groups existence, and smugly go about the world assuming people struggling with weight are just weak.

com2kid 3y ago

Renaissance Periodization just did a video on calorie cycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY (the video is titled carb cycling, which he dismissed in the first few minutes and he moves on to calorie cycling) and in it he discusses some of the benefits and disadvantages of calorie cycling vs just eating at a deficit. The tl;dr is follow your body (e.g. not sleeping well, exhausted all the time, eat more for a bit), but try starting out around 2:1 for eating a fair bit under vs slightly above maintenance. (e.g. diet 6 days, eat a bit extra for 3 days, repeat). In another video he also mentions that after weight loss, that it is a good idea to slowly increase calories until the scale doesn't move, and then eat at that level for a few weeks to reset the body's hunger signaling. (I am dramatically simplifying there). > 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. This is why "cheat days" or even "cheat weeks" work. People are on a strict diet, weight loss stalls, they go on vacation and eat at a surplus for a bit, and then they find that after vacation they are able to resume losing weight. Likewise a big thing in Keto awhile back (not sure now) was cycling off Keto for the weekend, which unless a person is very careful, ends up with people eating at least a little bit to "excess". Plenty of people do "lazy keto" and eat a big Sunday family meal and so long as the excess calories on Sunday don't exceed the sum total of deficits from the other 6 days, they'll be A-OK, and now it turns out they may actually be better off.

_dark_matter_ 3y ago
I highly recommend this article from the MacroFactor team on this: https://macrofactorapp.com/refeeds-diet-breaks/ https://macrofactorapp.com/refeeds-diet-breaks/ Basically their view is that refeeding (aka cycling) probably doesn't do much physiologically speaking, but there may be advantages to adherence when people use diet breaks (typically longer than a cycle or refeed).
- com2kid 3y ago
  > As shown in Figure 9, results indicated that “intermittent energy restriction interventions,” which include relatively long diet breaks, led to a fairly negligible weight loss advantage that was not statistically significant. The problems I am seeing with all these studies is that the participates in the control groups (just regular dieting) are still losing weight throughout the study. Instead, do a study where you have a bunch of people who are calorie restricted, and when the scale stops moving, have half the participants do a re-feed before trying to cut again, and the other half keep soldiering on as is. Or to put it another way, we all know people plateau with diets. Running a study that where participants do not hit a plateau, and instead having science just go "oh well! Sorry can't help you!" aren't of much use. (It is funny because the author of that article starts out talking about plateaus, and then runs a bunch of studies that.... don't encounter plateaus.) I've met people, who are grossly obese, who after going from 400lb to 300lb, find that they aren't losing weight at even 2500 kcals a day. So they drop it to 2000kcal. 25 pounds later the scale stops, and they try 1500kcal, feel like shit, and they give up. Math says at 250lb they should be shedding tons of weight at 1500kcal, but they aren't. I want to see a study that investigates that, instead of "oh someone lost 10kg, woohoo!" 10-15kg is a lot of weight to lose, but almost any dietary intervention will pull of a 10-15kg weight loss (which is what all the studies looked at show!) > Theoretically, reverse dieting should be most effective in scenarios where metabolic adaptation is most extreme, and to my knowledge, the Minnesota Starvation Experiment reports some of the most dramatic metabolic adaptation ever observed in the scientific literature. Except it was taking people at healthy weights and having them drop to an unhealthy low weight, and then having them regain weight. The situation we are faced with now is people at unhealthy high weights, with all the hormonal problems that entails, losing a bunch of weight, and messing up their hormones in a different way, and now the goal is to stabilize their body at that new lower weight. > As previously discussed, the available research hints at a number of subjective and behavioral improvements related to hunger, satiety, diet adherence, mood, and perceived energy level, in addition to improved performance All of those "subjective" feelings have basis on the body's physiological systems. With better measurements, the underlying cause of those "subjective feelings" can be found. Edit: FWIW I think the extreme weights we are seeing in developed societies have multiple underlying causes, and that pure dietary interventions are not the solution for everyone. From gut microbiome to environmental pollutants, to the # of ads for fast food on TV, IMHO the problem is multi-causal.

paulpauper 3y ago

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. Yes this is it. People with shit genes simply do not burn enough calories , so these people need to diet to absurdly low levels of calories to merely not be overweight, way lower than predicted by formulas/tables. Which is not sustainable , hence regain.

mark38848 3y ago
This is all so obviously refutable if you look at the fact that this affects the USA so much more than other countries and even there if you go back three generations, peolr with essentially the same genes just at fewer calories and - surprise - were less fat.
- waterheater 3y ago
  It's not the calories, it's the carbs (aka sugar). The modern Westernized diet is carb-heavy, and carbs are the main macronutrient contributing to obesity (see the clear increase in obesity following the creation of the food pyramid). Many Pacific Island nations also saw massive obesity rates. The reason was carbs, not calories. Soda contributes to obesity because of sugar, not the calories.
- HEmanZ 3y ago
  This person didn’t say “everyone in America”, they said “people with shit genes”. Are you assuming this is the same set of people? Amazingly, some people are different. Who knew. We shouldn’t gaslight them into thinking they aren’t different because they aren’t like the aggregate, and we get to feel so morally superior if every individual is like the aggregate.