4 ms·

>People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's decid

by nvy 3y ago

>People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's deciding to hold on to and what it's deciding to burn or expel. If calories-in/calories-out didn't work, then it would be impossible to starve to death. Where people get confused is that the number of calories changes as your metabolism speeds up or slows down. If you are ingesting fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose some combination of fat and muscle. There is no possible way for this to be false.

SamBam 3y ago
It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Further, you could be burning more calories without doing more exercise or otherwise doing anything "useful" with the energy -- i.e. having a higher basal metabolic rate. These calories can be burned doing all sorts of things that the person has no control over: you could have a higher core body temperature, you could be spending more energy on cellular repair and other cellular processes, you could be synthesizing more hormones, you could be spending more energy metabolizing foods, etc etc. These latter causes are obviously on the "energy out" side of the equation, but they do not relate to things under our control. Further, they can change with age, stress, and (relevant to TFA) sleep. So a body that has been coasting by eating 2200 calories per day and never gaining a pound could suddenly change and start putting on weight, even though the person's diet and activities haven't changed. The point is that two people could eat the exact same calories, and do the exact same exercise, and one of them go up in weight and the other go down. The "calories in vs calories out" idea usually simplistically makes people think this couldn't be true, because "calories out" is simplistically taken as "exercise." The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Is the flip-side really debated that much tho? I feel like when people talk about CICO they're primarily talking about reducing CI to lower than your CO. No? The complexity in CICO of course is measuring your CO. Ie you could estimate your CO, reduce your CI to what you believe your CO is - and still not lose weight. But does that undermine CICO? Because as the other commenters mentioned, it's "impossible" for you to burn more than you take in without losing mass, so our issue in this example is incorrectly asserting the output (assuming of course we're not also underestimating the input). Note my questions here are generally questions. I am not an expert here, so please correct me if i'm wrong. > The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them. Fwiw, i don't dispute that some people have the wrong ideas with CICO. Perhaps frequently even. But i thought it still stood as a foundational truth nonetheless; that you have to "simply" burn more than you take in. If you gain weight (ignoring water weight for simplicity), then you have ate more then you burned, always. My takeaway with CICO is that the hardest question seems to be correctly figuring out how much you're burning. Which i feel like usually, especially for overweight people, it's much less than they think. You can't outrun a bad diet, as they say. Rarely do people actually want to exercise enough to truly compensate for the thing they want to eat. Hence why i like CICO, as to me it signals the only effective action is in restricting your CI, since increasing CO is so difficult.

by nvy 3y ago

SamBam 3y ago

It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Further, you could be burning more calories without doing more exercise or otherwise doing anything "useful" with the energy -- i.e. having a higher basal metabolic rate. These calories can be burned doing all sorts of things that the person has no control over: you could have a higher core body temperature, you could be spending more energy on cellular repair and other cellular processes, you could be synthesizing more hormones, you could be spending more energy metabolizing foods, etc etc. These latter causes are obviously on the "energy out" side of the equation, but they do not relate to things under our control. Further, they can change with age, stress, and (relevant to TFA) sleep. So a body that has been coasting by eating 2200 calories per day and never gaining a pound could suddenly change and start putting on weight, even though the person's diet and activities haven't changed. The point is that two people could eat the exact same calories, and do the exact same exercise, and one of them go up in weight and the other go down. The "calories in vs calories out" idea usually simplistically makes people think this couldn't be true, because "calories out" is simplistically taken as "exercise." The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.

unshavedyak 3y ago
> It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Is the flip-side really debated that much tho? I feel like when people talk about CICO they're primarily talking about reducing CI to lower than your CO. No? The complexity in CICO of course is measuring your CO. Ie you could estimate your CO, reduce your CI to what you believe your CO is - and still not lose weight. But does that undermine CICO? Because as the other commenters mentioned, it's "impossible" for you to burn more than you take in without losing mass, so our issue in this example is incorrectly asserting the output (assuming of course we're not also underestimating the input). Note my questions here are generally questions. I am not an expert here, so please correct me if i'm wrong. > The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them. Fwiw, i don't dispute that some people have the wrong ideas with CICO. Perhaps frequently even. But i thought it still stood as a foundational truth nonetheless; that you have to "simply" burn more than you take in. If you gain weight (ignoring water weight for simplicity), then you have ate more then you burned, always. My takeaway with CICO is that the hardest question seems to be correctly figuring out how much you're burning. Which i feel like usually, especially for overweight people, it's much less than they think. You can't outrun a bad diet, as they say. Rarely do people actually want to exercise enough to truly compensate for the thing they want to eat. Hence why i like CICO, as to me it signals the only effective action is in restricting your CI, since increasing CO is so difficult.