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The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" -- the debate has been "will just telling people to consume less c

The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" -- the debate has been "will just telling people to consume less calories, patting yourself on the back and calling it a day make them lose weight." The latter was settled in a 2023 cohort study that showed doing is completely ineffective. [1] There's been tons of data on this. The scientific consensus has been pretty clear for a hundred years, but nobody wanted to listen. Probably in part because there was no good solution before. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10407685/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10407685/

Aurornis 2y ago
> The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" If you missed the whole "calories in, calories out" debate, consider yourself lucky. The comment above isn't helpful, but there really was a period of time where the topic du jour among health influencers was debating that calories didn't explain weight gain or loss. It played into the popular idea that blame for the obesity epidemic rested squarely on the food industry and "chemicals" in our food. At one point, I had a podcast-obsessed coworker who tried to tell us all that even when he ate 1000 calories per day he couldn't lose weight. He had a long list of influencers and podcasters who supported this claim. The CICO debate was especially popular among influencers pushing their own diet. Debating CICO was a convenient gateway to selling people your special diet that supposedly avoids the "bad" calories and replaces them with "good" calories, making you lose weight.
- arcticbull 2y ago
  Ah, gotcha. For what it's worth CICO sucks because (1) nobody can stick to it, ever (2) humans are awful at estimating their calories in, studies show only 1/5 of people can properly estimate the calorie content of their food [1] and (3) your metabolism slows down in response to, specifically, caloric restriction diets and your hunger rises which makes it difficult to estimate your calories out without indirect calorimetry. Yes, CICO works in a lab, and for some weird people. It's a matter of thermodynamics. However you are a far more complex system than a coal powered furnace. And yes certain types of food will be more or less satiating and may influence the amount of total calories you consume. It's really really hard to overeat if you just eat lean protein, for instance. CICO is, in practice, a tool that is roughly impossible for most people to leverage to lose a meaningful amount of weight and keep it off. Which brings us back to the difference between maintaining a persistent caloric deficit -- and instructing people to do so. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719184/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719184/
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    Why are people trying to estimate calories blindly? You have to look them up in some sort of system and log it in a food journal for the tracking to be any good at all.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - bena 2y ago
    It works for everyone. Full stop. Even if your metabolism slows down in response to caloric restriction, it does not move the needle to any appreciable degree. Because it takes energy to do. It just does, you cannot fool physics. However, measuring calories is incredibly difficult. Both in and out. Also, if you put 5000 calories worth of food inside of you, but then immediately vomit out 4500 of those calories, you've only really consumed 500 calories. You can overwhelm the system. If you can restrict yourself to consuming at a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. That's difficult however. Because if you pick a target calorie amount, you will see less progress as you lose weight. Because of math. 1500 is half of 3000, but only a quarter of 2000. People get fixated on 2000, as if we operate based on 2000 calories a day. But if you were previously consuming 3000 calories a day, your weight requires 3000 calories a day. So when you drop to 1500, you are going to lose about a pound every two days for a while. When you get to about 2500 maintenance calories/day, you're going to slow down to a about pound every three days. This is not your metabolism "adjusting". You weigh less, it takes fewer calories to maintain that weight. And you will be hungry. It will suck. And you have to be meticulous in your record keeping. There are no "free" calories. And we're not even getting into the mental component of all of this. What's been termed as "food noise". And it's one of the things that people on Ozempic and the like notice the most, they stop thinking about food. And food addiction is one of the absolute worst addictions to have. Hands down. With just about every other addiction, abstinence is an option. Alcohol, gambling, heroin, cocaine, meth, etc, none of that is necessary to live. We need food. We need to eat. You cannot avoid food. You have to actually develop discipline. Teetotalers do not have discipline. They avoid the issue altogether. So CICO works, but it's incredibly difficult to do for lots of reasons that are not related to the biology or physics of it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  I'm still sympathetic to those arguments. Humans have, for at least the last several million years, been taught in the evolutionary sense to never let a calorie go uneaten. Too many famines. "Just don't do that thing that every gene in your body screams at you to do, and feel miserable for it" isn't really good advice, and isn't all that insightful. One can't even necessarily make judgements about how many calories they themselves can eat based on what they see other people around them eating. "That other person stays skinny, and I'm eating about the same amount as them" is not an on-the-surface unreasonable assumption... but it doesn't work, even if you could eliminate human misperceptions. >At one point, I had a podcast-obsessed coworker who tried to tell us all that even when he ate 1000 calories per day he couldn't lose weight. He had a long list of influencers and podcasters who supported this claim. The week after Thanksgiving, I had a heart attack (age 50). I was in the CICU for nearly a week before they let me go home. On the day I was released, they sent a nutritionist in to tell me that I shouldn't try to eat one meal a day, that I really needed to be eating 3 meals a day, and to eat bread at least for two of those (or other carbs). Don't eat butter, eat margarine though. Yadda yadda. This was what, 8 weeks ago? Not 1962 in any event. Do you know what 1000 calories looks like spread across 3 meals? Or how long you have to run on a treadmill to make up 300 calories if you bump that up to 1300? Or that, even sitting in an office chair every day, I can't lose weight (of any significance) at caloric intake much above that? I'm willing to concede that any problems I'm having here are in my own head, that I can't change my behavior or habits or whatever (to literally save my own life), but this isn't the sort of problem that can be handled by any but the most godlike of willpowers (which I do not have, if that doesn't go without saying). Right now, I probably need to be eating just one meal every other day, as I'm not really gaining any weight back but I'm not losing much either. My meal, such as it is, is a salad that fits in a small bowl (less than 2 cups of lettuce and uncooked vegetables). None of this is helped by knowing that people who are so-called medical professionals are giving me is absolute horseshit. The truth of the matter is that we are adapted to eat only once every few days, and for even that meal to be meager and less than appetizing. But we live in a world that has mastered abundance and flavor, and uses marketing science to constantly try to get us to to buy all that. When you tell people "just eat less", really you're just doing the r/fatpeoplehate but in a covert way where you don't have to feel like an asshole. We (all of us, sympathizers, haters, acceptance activists) turn this into a morality tale, and can't think about this rationally. For anyone that cares, I wear 33" jeans, but I probably need to drop another 20-25lbs realistically. PS Just giggled thinking about what it would mean to the US economy if suddenly every adult over the age of 28 started eating one small meal every 2-3 days... even our stock market is arrayed against us.
ragnese 2y ago
> The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" Maybe the debate amongst actual doctors and researchers. But, the debate amongst dummies on the internet (social media) CERTAINLY had people arguing that it was somehow about more than the number of calories in and out.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  We should probably stop treating debates among "dummies on the internet" as anything other than noise that muddies up the conversation. Edit: to be clear, this also applies to comment sections on HN :-)
  - ragnese 2y ago
    Quite true!
- loeg 2y ago
  Internet dummies, and you occasionally get crank doctors espousing these points of view too. Most doctors are smart, but, you know, there are a lot of doctors.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  So the debate of the flatness of earth is also not settled based on your measurements of internet sentiment?
  - ragnese 2y ago
    I mean, it's certainly settled for me. At the same time, I think it would dishonest to insinuate that there are NOT people claiming the Earth is flat on the internet (Honestly, I don't believe that flat-earthers actually believe that--I think they're all trolling). So, I don't know. I guess I just wanted to chime in to note that I have seen people repeat this crap about calories.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I dont think anyone has agued that the follow through is the hard part. The whole debate seems like people violently agreeing with each other aside from some fringe idiots that dont believe in thermodynamics.
- tonymet 2y ago
  who do you mean by "anyone". it sounds that you mean "nutritionists". There are plenty of laypeople who have supernatural beliefs about calories.
tonymet 2y ago
there are plenty of obese people who claim that no amount of calorie reduction works. Ozempic has put that to rest. The truth is they were overeating the entire time.
- paulpauper 2y ago
  Some people have such bad metabolism that they have to east tiny amounts of food to not gain weight ,way lower than predicted by calculators and controlling for weight. Ozempic makes this easier. Yeah, you're right that overeating is the problem, but this threshold is low for those with crap genetics.
  - tonymet 2y ago
    yeah that's not true. every study has shown over reporting activity and under reporting calories
    - vidarh 2y ago
      I believe that, but also a lot of online calculators give insane numbers in part because they don't guide people to the right activity level. E.g. if you work an office job, you're almost guaranteed to be sedentary, but people often think they're still "active" because they go to the gym every day. They're not. If you account for that, a lot of the calculators make more sense, and a lot of people would be shocked at how little they should be eating.
loeg 2y ago
No, there are definitely lots of people that straight up claim that CICO is a myth, some magic force makes some calories turn into fat or not turn into fat. Totally aside from the "'eat less' is hard advice to take" crowd (which is true). That former group has been proven incorrect.

Aurornis 2y ago

> The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" If you missed the whole "calories in, calories out" debate, consider yourself lucky. The comment above isn't helpful, but there really was a period of time where the topic du jour among health influencers was debating that calories didn't explain weight gain or loss. It played into the popular idea that blame for the obesity epidemic rested squarely on the food industry and "chemicals" in our food. At one point, I had a podcast-obsessed coworker who tried to tell us all that even when he ate 1000 calories per day he couldn't lose weight. He had a long list of influencers and podcasters who supported this claim. The CICO debate was especially popular among influencers pushing their own diet. Debating CICO was a convenient gateway to selling people your special diet that supposedly avoids the "bad" calories and replaces them with "good" calories, making you lose weight.

arcticbull 2y ago
Ah, gotcha. For what it's worth CICO sucks because (1) nobody can stick to it, ever (2) humans are awful at estimating their calories in, studies show only 1/5 of people can properly estimate the calorie content of their food [1] and (3) your metabolism slows down in response to, specifically, caloric restriction diets and your hunger rises which makes it difficult to estimate your calories out without indirect calorimetry. Yes, CICO works in a lab, and for some weird people. It's a matter of thermodynamics. However you are a far more complex system than a coal powered furnace. And yes certain types of food will be more or less satiating and may influence the amount of total calories you consume. It's really really hard to overeat if you just eat lean protein, for instance. CICO is, in practice, a tool that is roughly impossible for most people to leverage to lose a meaningful amount of weight and keep it off. Which brings us back to the difference between maintaining a persistent caloric deficit -- and instructing people to do so. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719184/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3719184/
- nemomarx 2y ago
  Why are people trying to estimate calories blindly? You have to look them up in some sort of system and log it in a food journal for the tracking to be any good at all.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bena 2y ago
  It works for everyone. Full stop. Even if your metabolism slows down in response to caloric restriction, it does not move the needle to any appreciable degree. Because it takes energy to do. It just does, you cannot fool physics. However, measuring calories is incredibly difficult. Both in and out. Also, if you put 5000 calories worth of food inside of you, but then immediately vomit out 4500 of those calories, you've only really consumed 500 calories. You can overwhelm the system. If you can restrict yourself to consuming at a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. That's difficult however. Because if you pick a target calorie amount, you will see less progress as you lose weight. Because of math. 1500 is half of 3000, but only a quarter of 2000. People get fixated on 2000, as if we operate based on 2000 calories a day. But if you were previously consuming 3000 calories a day, your weight requires 3000 calories a day. So when you drop to 1500, you are going to lose about a pound every two days for a while. When you get to about 2500 maintenance calories/day, you're going to slow down to a about pound every three days. This is not your metabolism "adjusting". You weigh less, it takes fewer calories to maintain that weight. And you will be hungry. It will suck. And you have to be meticulous in your record keeping. There are no "free" calories. And we're not even getting into the mental component of all of this. What's been termed as "food noise". And it's one of the things that people on Ozempic and the like notice the most, they stop thinking about food. And food addiction is one of the absolute worst addictions to have. Hands down. With just about every other addiction, abstinence is an option. Alcohol, gambling, heroin, cocaine, meth, etc, none of that is necessary to live. We need food. We need to eat. You cannot avoid food. You have to actually develop discipline. Teetotalers do not have discipline. They avoid the issue altogether. So CICO works, but it's incredibly difficult to do for lots of reasons that are not related to the biology or physics of it.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
I'm still sympathetic to those arguments. Humans have, for at least the last several million years, been taught in the evolutionary sense to never let a calorie go uneaten. Too many famines. "Just don't do that thing that every gene in your body screams at you to do, and feel miserable for it" isn't really good advice, and isn't all that insightful. One can't even necessarily make judgements about how many calories they themselves can eat based on what they see other people around them eating. "That other person stays skinny, and I'm eating about the same amount as them" is not an on-the-surface unreasonable assumption... but it doesn't work, even if you could eliminate human misperceptions. >At one point, I had a podcast-obsessed coworker who tried to tell us all that even when he ate 1000 calories per day he couldn't lose weight. He had a long list of influencers and podcasters who supported this claim. The week after Thanksgiving, I had a heart attack (age 50). I was in the CICU for nearly a week before they let me go home. On the day I was released, they sent a nutritionist in to tell me that I shouldn't try to eat one meal a day, that I really needed to be eating 3 meals a day, and to eat bread at least for two of those (or other carbs). Don't eat butter, eat margarine though. Yadda yadda. This was what, 8 weeks ago? Not 1962 in any event. Do you know what 1000 calories looks like spread across 3 meals? Or how long you have to run on a treadmill to make up 300 calories if you bump that up to 1300? Or that, even sitting in an office chair every day, I can't lose weight (of any significance) at caloric intake much above that? I'm willing to concede that any problems I'm having here are in my own head, that I can't change my behavior or habits or whatever (to literally save my own life), but this isn't the sort of problem that can be handled by any but the most godlike of willpowers (which I do not have, if that doesn't go without saying). Right now, I probably need to be eating just one meal every other day, as I'm not really gaining any weight back but I'm not losing much either. My meal, such as it is, is a salad that fits in a small bowl (less than 2 cups of lettuce and uncooked vegetables). None of this is helped by knowing that people who are so-called medical professionals are giving me is absolute horseshit. The truth of the matter is that we are adapted to eat only once every few days, and for even that meal to be meager and less than appetizing. But we live in a world that has mastered abundance and flavor, and uses marketing science to constantly try to get us to to buy all that. When you tell people "just eat less", really you're just doing the r/fatpeoplehate but in a covert way where you don't have to feel like an asshole. We (all of us, sympathizers, haters, acceptance activists) turn this into a morality tale, and can't think about this rationally. For anyone that cares, I wear 33" jeans, but I probably need to drop another 20-25lbs realistically. PS Just giggled thinking about what it would mean to the US economy if suddenly every adult over the age of 28 started eating one small meal every 2-3 days... even our stock market is arrayed against us.

ragnese 2y ago

> The debate has never been "will consuming less calories than you expend make you lose weight" Maybe the debate amongst actual doctors and researchers. But, the debate amongst dummies on the internet (social media) CERTAINLY had people arguing that it was somehow about more than the number of calories in and out.

segasaturn 2y ago
We should probably stop treating debates among "dummies on the internet" as anything other than noise that muddies up the conversation. Edit: to be clear, this also applies to comment sections on HN :-)
- ragnese 2y ago
  Quite true!
loeg 2y ago
Internet dummies, and you occasionally get crank doctors espousing these points of view too. Most doctors are smart, but, you know, there are a lot of doctors.
notTooFarGone 2y ago
So the debate of the flatness of earth is also not settled based on your measurements of internet sentiment?
- ragnese 2y ago
  I mean, it's certainly settled for me. At the same time, I think it would dishonest to insinuate that there are NOT people claiming the Earth is flat on the internet (Honestly, I don't believe that flat-earthers actually believe that--I think they're all trolling). So, I don't know. I guess I just wanted to chime in to note that I have seen people repeat this crap about calories.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

I dont think anyone has agued that the follow through is the hard part. The whole debate seems like people violently agreeing with each other aside from some fringe idiots that dont believe in thermodynamics.

tonymet 2y ago
who do you mean by "anyone". it sounds that you mean "nutritionists". There are plenty of laypeople who have supernatural beliefs about calories.

tonymet 2y ago

there are plenty of obese people who claim that no amount of calorie reduction works. Ozempic has put that to rest. The truth is they were overeating the entire time.

paulpauper 2y ago
Some people have such bad metabolism that they have to east tiny amounts of food to not gain weight ,way lower than predicted by calculators and controlling for weight. Ozempic makes this easier. Yeah, you're right that overeating is the problem, but this threshold is low for those with crap genetics.
- tonymet 2y ago
  yeah that's not true. every study has shown over reporting activity and under reporting calories
  - vidarh 2y ago
    I believe that, but also a lot of online calculators give insane numbers in part because they don't guide people to the right activity level. E.g. if you work an office job, you're almost guaranteed to be sedentary, but people often think they're still "active" because they go to the gym every day. They're not. If you account for that, a lot of the calculators make more sense, and a lot of people would be shocked at how little they should be eating.

loeg 2y ago

No, there are definitely lots of people that straight up claim that CICO is a myth, some magic force makes some calories turn into fat or not turn into fat. Totally aside from the "'eat less' is hard advice to take" crowd (which is true). That former group has been proven incorrect.