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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 descri

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.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  whoosh That was the sound of you zooming right past my argument and pretending I was saying something I wasn’t. I’m not saying CICO is a good idea. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it will have a high chance of success vis a vis people actually being able to stick with it. I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight. This is trivially and tautologically true (to the point of CICO being useless to most people!), but it’s extremely tiring having to explain it over and over that it still works despite all of this. To put it another way: there are two operative definitions of “works” for a diet: 1. Will it work if you do it exactly as directed? 2. Is a typical dieter likely to have success by attempting this diet? CICO fails miserably at 2. It passes with flying colors at 1. Its best not to conflate the two definitions in the middle of an argument because you end up talking right past one another.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    This is something I've said repeatedly in other places and this is a certain segment of people who can't understand it. CICO is, especially at the population level, terrible dieting advice. We have decades of experience and oodles of research showing that, as advice it does not work. However, it is, as you point out, basically tautologically true/correct. For CICO to _not_ be correct would essentially be breaking physics and generating mass/energy from nothing. Yes, your body can change it's energy expenditure in response to dieting, but this is accounted for in the CO part of CICO. If you consume fewer calories than your body expends (in all the myriad of ways that your body can/does expend calories), then you _must_ lose weight. The fact that CICO is true does not make it good advice but the fact that it's bad advice doesn't make it false.
    - lliamander 3y ago
      I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working. E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods. CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape. But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.

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.

ninkendo 3y ago
whoosh That was the sound of you zooming right past my argument and pretending I was saying something I wasn’t. I’m not saying CICO is a good idea. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it will have a high chance of success vis a vis people actually being able to stick with it. I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight. This is trivially and tautologically true (to the point of CICO being useless to most people!), but it’s extremely tiring having to explain it over and over that it still works despite all of this. To put it another way: there are two operative definitions of “works” for a diet: 1. Will it work if you do it exactly as directed? 2. Is a typical dieter likely to have success by attempting this diet? CICO fails miserably at 2. It passes with flying colors at 1. Its best not to conflate the two definitions in the middle of an argument because you end up talking right past one another.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  This is something I've said repeatedly in other places and this is a certain segment of people who can't understand it. CICO is, especially at the population level, terrible dieting advice. We have decades of experience and oodles of research showing that, as advice it does not work. However, it is, as you point out, basically tautologically true/correct. For CICO to _not_ be correct would essentially be breaking physics and generating mass/energy from nothing. Yes, your body can change it's energy expenditure in response to dieting, but this is accounted for in the CO part of CICO. If you consume fewer calories than your body expends (in all the myriad of ways that your body can/does expend calories), then you _must_ lose weight. The fact that CICO is true does not make it good advice but the fact that it's bad advice doesn't make it false.
  - lliamander 3y ago
    I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working. E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods. CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape. But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.