Nothing about the body is simple.
- There is a virus that studies suggest (show correlation) increase weight gain [1]
- There is a study that shows water in != water out (unfortunately my googlefu is failing me though).
- Empirical: I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein.
But even if the virus does “cause” obesity, is it causing obesity by slowing down the host’s metabolism (decreasing the calories out) or increasing appetite (increasing calories in)?
There are so many separate ways for calories to go "out", too.
So it gets used in this unfair double-standard way, where managing weight is "just CICO", as if it's a handful of inputs into a one-line equation, but if someone argues against that, saying it's more complex, then the natural response is "well actually CICO includes every single complication you've mentioned, so you're wrong to object".
To use your same metaphor, there are people going around speaking as if height and total hours of training are the only things that matter for basketball skill.
Ultimately you set a caloric target with a carefully constructed diet and watch the long term weight slope over months. That's the science of it. Even high fat ad lib diets ultimately resulted in caloric input restriction, stronger than other diets they tried. (see Cambridge study)
Agreed, but I'd characterize all that as focusing on the "Calories In" part. That's complicated enough itself, and avoids implying that the entire situation is some trivial function.
There are at least two categories of issues that make calories in not so simple: eating disorders and malabsorption disorders.
For the record I disagree with this - I think CICO is a helpful way to think about weight loss, because it implies that if you aren't losing weight on a calorie controlled diet, you simply haven't cut enough. (Though serious problems might be indicative of some medical condition, in which case you should consult a doctor to see if it can be alleviated to make CICO easier.)
If I were to fall for some of the new-age mumble jumble about weight being some innate genetic trait like iris color, I'd think myself helpless. If I were such a person, being informed of CICO would doubtlessly improve my life.
Yes, this is exactly my point. I'm simply giving a measured defense of what berdon has been saying further up this thread: CO is not a known constant and may vary based on certain medical conditions. Because of this, CICO can sometimes (I think berdon would say frequently) be unhelpful advice to someone trying to lose weight, because they struggle with cutting CI far enough to lose weight, which may be due to a person's health and biological makeup.
By focusing on obscure edge-cases, all we're really doing is to make it easier for people in the common case to rationalize away their situation. That's very common. There are more voluntary overeaters who claim they have an involuntary obesity-inducing disorder than there are people who actually have such disorders. I've got a whole family full of them. A big bowl of ice cream after every meal is a choice, not a genetic condition.
My point is the body is very complex and any attempt to simplify it is doing a disservice to anyone listening to you.
I was overweight for 20 years and lost the weight by calorie reduction. It works - clearly. But in a forum reserved for educational discussion I'm not OK glossing over the complexity of the body because it's true in the general case. That'd be as sinful as saying quantum physics is wrong because newtonian is generally the deciding set of rules.
We know exactly one applicable test: thyroid hormone levels. This one is worth checking.
Eat less everything but more fresh vegetables, especially greens, exercise more. How much depends on how fat you are - not necessarily just overweight, body composition and fat percentage is more important and still reliably measurable.
"Toffee" kind of fat is a thing, where a thin looking and not very heavy person is actually fat inside, just lost muscle so weight stayed similar.
On the other hand, nobody wants people with big muscle mass to always cut diet to levels expected of show body builders.
I think the word you’re looking for is “anecdotal”.
No one here knows anything about your TDEE so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that you could lose weight on 3500 calories/day. If your TDEE is >3500, then yeah, weight loss. Especially since the thermic effect of food is quite high for protein, and that people suck at accurately recording or even measuring their actual intake.
...
Actually...empirical works as well. I think anecdotal is just the latest trend.
Empirical
based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. "they provided considerable empirical evidence to support their argument"
My gut says you did this for too short of a period of time for the results to be meaningful, or else that you’ve left out something meaningful, or that you simply didn’t accurately measure your caloric intake. If you were losing weight on 3500 calories/day, then your TDEE was north of 3500. If you dropped to 900 calories, you’d be in a 2600 calorie/day deficit without even accounting for whatever deficit you were in initially. I don’t care if that was all HFCS, you’d be losing over 5 pounds a week. That’s major weight loss and I don’t believe you saw the same weight loss at 3500 calories and 900 calories for an extended period of time. It simply doesn’t work from a physical standpoint.
“Empirical” to me implies a level of data that you don’t get from a singular anecdote.
Cool? It seems you're mostly interested in your own opinions - both with regards to my empirical evidence and your connotation of the word. I'm not interested in either.
Also, your analysis of my losing weight on 3500 calories requiring my TDEE to be >3500 is drastically marred by your clear assumption that a calorie = a calorie. You're incapable of accepting anything that doesn't fall into line with that assumption. Strong bias.
If you told me that one time your car got 120 mpg because you switched to premium fuel, I’d likewise not believe you. I’m much more likely to think your gauge is faulty or you misread your actual results.
As much as you might want your personal anecdote to be compelling, it just isn’t. I’m not going to give your anecdote the same weight that I give the broad scientific consensus.
Yes, you can collect the excrement and analyze the output. But that analysis doesn't tell you much. You don't know how efficient the black body is so you don't know how much of the waste could have been utilized or not. Not only that, you don't know if the body's efficiency is static or dynamic based on inputs and outputs.
The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.
"I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein"
And if you're not trying to refute CICO, you better make damn clear that even though you're ingesting 3500 calories, you're essentially just crapping out most of it because our bodies can't process that much protein at once.
I've tracked calories for >10 years and macros for >5 years. And, at the time I spoke about, I was taking in protein continuously and meticulously tracking ingestion rate and time and estimating digested and excreted protein levels. But, even still, obviously I was shitting out most of it.
I actually do believe and advocate for CICO for most people. But I reject notions that anything related to the body is black, white, or simple and hold strongly to them as convictions. I tried to provide examples to those points with the last as an example that the C in CICO is a sneaky misnomer and better served as being an E. It's just that in the general case for most people E averages into C.
I do agree with you on the apology - it's the internet, no one expects an apology and if you do you're insane. Furthermore, I wasn't offended and was only pointing out the rhetorical tactic being employed.
CI is based what people eat, but how much and how often people eat (if you don't expect perfect and infinite willpower) is based on how hungry they are, and that is hormonally controlled, based on complex feedback loop that includes insulin levels (so what you eat and how often) and activity levels.
CO includes many things you have no conscious control over, like heating (ever stopped being cold after a meal?), muscle repair and buildup, brain, etc. Only small fraction of that is exercise.
People saying "it's just CICO" are as disgusting as millionaires saying "just stop being poor, it's easy, you have to make more than you use" while knowing nothing (and not caring) about student loans, healthcare costs for non-insured people, housing crisis or anti-labor practices that suppress wages.
This is a wholesale abdication of responsibility and an embrace of victimhood.
Yes, there are elements of calories out that aren’t fully in your control. However these place a lower bound on calories out. You can absolutely increase your exercise and activity level.
On the other side, you are very much in control of your calories in. You can choose to eat a better diet (e.g. whole foods) that makes it easier to maintain a caloric deficit. You can choose to stop eating before full satiety. You can even go so far as to fast, cutting your calories in to 0. Obviously hunger matters but this idea that you can’t control your eating at all because you’re hungry is ridiculous.
You are very much in control of these factors. Yes, there are broad issues contributing to obesity but individuals are not relieved of their responsibility just because society also has problems.
Exercise is important for health. Exercise does not help people control weight, and it may make people heavier.
The fact that people insist they're scientific while ignoring the evidence is particularly frustrating.
Of course if you use exercise to help create a calorie deficit you will lose weight. However, every single study shows that most people won’t lose weight by exercising. They overestimate how much they burn and underestimate how much they lose eat. Exercise also tends to make you hungrier and it makes it harder to not eat more. Also, hardly anyone has the discipline to work out consistently over a long period of time or the fitness level to work out long enough and have enough to use exercise as a weight loss tool.
Which is why you should get one of the approximate fat percentage meters. (Clamp better than electric but less convenient.) And maybe run a DEXA or volumetric body composition scan sometimes.
Another good easy measure is the belt size, for obese people. Smaller is better. Or waist/hip ratio. Requires a tape measure, that's it.
If you exercise and weight stays the same but belt size goes down, you're on the right track.
Maintain your caloric intake level “at maintenance” and add 5 miles of running per day and you’ll lose weight.
That's not what the evidence says.
If you restrict your sample to the select few that do keep off the weight, some do it with diet alone. Some do it with diet and exercise. Some very few do it with exercise alone. Any of these strategies can work. But in general, none of them do.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/
Scientifically it is possible, but that’s not backed up by how humans actually behave.
> Overall, the changes in weight in response to ET without caloric restriction are highly heterogeneous and individual differences can span weight gain to clinically significant weight loss.
> Supervised ET studies which have demonstrated clinically significant weight loss with aerobic ET (without caloric restriction) have far exceeded the minimum levels of physical activity according to public health definitions. Ross et al. observed an 8% weight loss in obese men after 12 weeks of aerobic ET with no alterations in dietary habits(daily exercise sessions of 700 kcals). In a different study, Ross et al. observed an 6.8% weight loss in premenopausal women (BMI>27) following 14 weeks of aerobic ET with an energy expenditure of 500 kcals per session. In the Midwest Exercise Trial, Donnelly et al. (n=131) observed a 5.3% weight loss in men after 16 weeks of aerobic ET at approximately 2,000 kcals per week. In contrast, the women in the exercise group did not have a significant change in weight (0.7 kg) following the intervention, but the exercise program prevented the weight gain observed in the control group (2.9 kg.) Thus, clinically significant weight loss is possible with aerobic ET without caloric restriction, but it requires a high ET volume. For the general population, these ET volumes may not be practical or sustainable.
In general, weight loss intervention doesn’t work well. Most people fail to lose significant weight, to adhere for an extended time, or to keep the weight off for years. This is the case no matter how the weight loss is achieved. Even gastric bypass patients often manage to gain back enough weight to get back to the obese mark. That doesn’t mean weight loss is impossible, but it is definitely hard. Exercise is absolutely a way to lose weight, but you have to be serious about it and do considerably more than the minimum recommendation, or you have to restrict calories, or preferably both. And you have to somehow maintain long term if you don’t want to immediately gain it back.
After I stopped working out but didn’t cut back what I was eating enough, I gained 40 pounds over the next three years - and that’s a lot when you’re short.
The last two years, I’ve adjusted my calories in (brought them down) and my calories out - about 3000-4000 a week and I’m back down to about 5 pounds above my fitness heyday weight.
But, I would never tell anyone else the best way to lose weight is via exercise. Studies show that hardly ever works because people overestimate how much they burn exercising and underestimate how much they eat. Also in my experience, people statistically never get to the point where they exercise long enough, hard enough or consistently enough to lose weight. I would always tell people to focus on their diet and tell them to talk to a dietitian if they wanted to lose weight.
And even if it were the case that I had no agency, it would still be the case that my weight loss was due to a CICO imbalance. CICO is a matter of physics, not ethics or morality.
I assume you're referring to the "energy in" vs "energy out" meme in weight-loss.
The body is not a closed system. While you _do_ have to balance your chemical equations for glucose catabolysis (or whatever), weight loss is far from a "simple physics" problem.
It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.
Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here.
Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves".
We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").
"It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.)
Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.
In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight.
It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight.
Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
Because they are gluttons and lack self-control. Why coddle them?
Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem.
Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.
Simplifying it to calories in calories out is a generalism of a generalism.
Also this is still calories in, calories out.
Address the core issue first before arguing about minutiae. The emphasis on relatively low impact factors is especially unhelpful and unhealthy because people latch onto all these discussions as justification for why they can’t lose weight. Sure, an obese person might have a low metabolism[1], but if they eat 3500 daily calories and live an entirely sedentary lifestyle, those are probably the major causes.
[1] But they don’t. Study after study have shown that obese individuals have high metabolism because metabolism is tightly correlated with total body mass.
Constantly talking about genetic predispositions, obscure metabolism suppressing viruses or gut flora does about jack shit to help people lose weight.
Your body doesn't care how the calories go out. If they're gone, they're gone. If you eat 3000, but crap out 2000, your body doesn't say "Yeah, well, that's not how you usually get rid of calories, so get fat."
Just because our methods of recording aren't perfect doesn't mean that the core idea is wrong.
Like I said, calculating both ends of the equation is tricky.
Which is weight loss and/or belt size loss.
And watch for side effects which may require dietary adjustments. (not necessarily caloric)
Variable you cannot control is relatively worthless. Focus on what you can control.
Reduced metabolism when dieting is a thing, and it's also correlated to weight loss. Less weight, less base metabolic rate. Down to a point which is irrelevant.
If your metabolism goes down, so do the calories out. That's one of many reasons that counting the calories out is extremely difficult.
By extension, it excludes reasoning about weight loss in terms of conservation of mass/energy.
[1] Emphatically not judging anyone posting here; that's not my goal. I'm simply bluntly stating what has become painfully clear after having this discussion multiple times.
In a sense, the body isn’t “simple” because so many things can affect your total energy burn. But all of that really doesn’t matter much. If you continually decrease your caloric intake, eventually it will fall below your calorie burn and you will lose weight. Conversely if you continually increase your caloric intake, you will eventually gain weight (assuming you aren’t literally shitting out undigested food).
I didn’t win the height genetic lottery or the higher than average metabolism genetic lottery, but I did win the mesomorph one. I naturally look muscular whether I lift or not and I pack on muscle quickly. That isn’t due to any moral strength.
I’ve seen other people my same height and weight with large stomachs and no tone and with a completely different waist to hip ratio.
You can look whatever and still be fat inside where it matters...
If my mother wants to cut weight, I'm telling her this. If an athlete has to make weight for a fight, this is a stupid way of thinking. At the end of the day, calories in calories out is an objectively good rule of thumb. It's not the be all end all rule though.
Medical conditions don’t cause mass to appear from nowhere that goes against the laws of physics. Yes medical conditions can cause your metabolism to slow down - decreasing calories out.
Yes, that's true, but too many people believe that hormones have a whole number multiplier effect when in fact they probably just nudge TDEE by, what, (off the cuff here) ten percent plus or minus? Maybe less?
Is that enough to significantly reduce a person's margin of error when they're doing CICO, particularly as they get closer to their ideal weight?
Absolutely.
Does that mean they'll get fat eating less than a thousand calories a day because hormones?
Almost certainly not.
Yes sure calories in calories out. But metabolism has so many variables. It can be revved up and burn a lot of calories. It can become quiescent when you are in starvation mode. What causes it to start using the fat reserves is definitely more than a univariate analysis. If there is a catalyst that starts breaking down fats faster it won’t matter that you are eating more.
Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope!
Yes, it’s a well known fact that if you eat too few calories, that your metabolism slows down - and you burn less calories. That doesn’t make anything that the original poster said scientifically valid.
I saw all sorts of crazy crap that people believed would help them lose weight and tone when I was a part time fitness instructor like excercises that would help them spot reduce (no such thing) to people who tried to come into my classes wearing those plastic bags because they thought it would help them lose weight. They reported me to management plenty of times for not allowing them to come to my class like that and I would budge.
The problem with this line of thinking is the "just".
Sure, physics says it's calories in and out, and we all agree that mostly makes sense.
But -- how do you measure how many calories are going out? Sleep is known to have an impact on weight. How does one translate their sleep quality or sleep issues into a better "out" measure? How do you know how many calories are going out during all of the other things you do during the day? What about the thousands of assorted complex processes going on in your body that you aren't really aware of?
For the "in"... ok, so you studiously track everything you eat. What's the efficiency that your body absorbs all of the calories from the food you ate? How many of those calories pass through and aren't actually consumed? Is eating 1000 calories of lettuce really the same thing as eating 1000 calories of pork?
If fixing this for people was just about "the equation", weight loss would be a lot easier to solve.
"Calories in, calories out" is one of those things that sounds great, but is not nearly as practical for people to actually implement as people like to imagine.
https://www.topfitnessmag.com/lifestyle/sleep-important-weig...
This is just like all of the studies showing diet soda causes weight gain.Diet soda doesn’t actually cause weight gain. Diet soda gives people the license to overeat and it may cause some people to crave real sugar more. I’m sure we’ve all seen people order a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a large fry and a Diet Coke.
I never really understood why this was always a catch-all trump card. So you can't gain/lose weight as easily as others. In my mind that just means you need to work harder rather than shrug your shoulders and say "nothing to be done". Specifically its people doing this that never look into their diet or are willing to change any of their habits.
Slightly related but Carol Dweck's growth mindset for education is literally this, but the difference is in people who believe they can't get in better shape and people that can.
> people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives
I also take issue with this statement. Many fitness motivation images on the Internet talk about rejecting temptation to work towards your goals. As I was thinking about this comment, I was reminded of Ben Stiller's pizza scene in the movie Dodgeball [1]. Jokes aside, the scene is a hyperbole to how even fit people are susceptible to temptation and take actions to not giving in. Not to Stiller's degree, but I can distinctly remember times where I just stare at the ice cream aisle with grocery shopping. It is my own mental discipline to not buy it. Quitting World of Warcraft to get in better shape is also a part of my past. Shifting to an active lifestyle is hard, it has a difficult initial start, but persevering through it has helped me become the healthier person I am. I also recall Jesse Shand's transformation [2], where I believe one of the phases of his weight loss was simply reducing the number of fast food meals he'd consume in a single sitting (instead of 8, only eat 7, etc).
I will assume that formerly obese people have higher cravings. No doubt a former heroin addict has cravings. I will accept that it is harder for these individuals. But again, that does not mean you shrug your shoulders and say "that's the way it is".
I’ve known people to be naturally skinny or even tone but not “fit”.
Or not. Figuring out how and if those adjustments are made and how to control them is the next step after you say "calories in = calories out", which is only a first and smallest step in figuring it out.
You're drastically overestimating the difference in people's metabolism.
> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly.
This is about appetite. Skinny people have a smaller appetite than overweight people.
Show me a "skinny" person who can eat 4,000 calories a day and I'll show you a fat person.
Would love to see a source that backs up your claim.
This surprises me. I find that being hungry dulls my edge and makes me noticeably less clever. It's easy for me to forget to eat if I'm doing something mindless, but when I'm actively problem solving I find that I become more aware of my hunger (and other forms of general discomfort.)
[0] Probably because his tone was accusational, though anyone who thinks chess grandmasters are any less willing to use performance drugs than any other high-end athlete is kidding themselves.
Also amphetamines don't "make you so focused that you forget to eat." Amphetamines directly inhibit appetite.
Perhaps the effects of discomfort on concentration are malleable, not inherit traits of the individual. Maybe, with the right kind of expectations and mindset, I could make the sensation of hunger work for me instead of against me.
For me at least I feel its more like I'm dealing with unmedicated ADHD and need to slow my brain with tiredness and then jolt it just enough with some Diet Dr Pepper to get the sharpness back.
If you're hungry from missing your regular meal, your blood sugar may drop and you feel lethargic.
If you're hungry from fasting, your liver may start producing ketones which our brains seem to like.
I never been big on puzzle games though, I prefer games like doom or quake. Fast games that focus on reaction time and spatial awareness, rather than problem solving. If I were playing something slow and complex (chess, minesweeper, etc), I expect I'd probably be more aware of my hunger.
> Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. > you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".
The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.
As Dr. Jason Fung meticulously explains in his book Obesity Code, there seems to be a weight set point. He then argues that the root cause of obesity, and the body's set weight point, is insulin resistance.
The books hails your grandma's advice: "Cut back sugars and starchy foods. No snacking."
This is from the last part (The Solution):
1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars. 2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. 3. Moderate your protein intake. 4. Increase your consumption of natural fats. 5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.
The author also stresses the importance of fasting.
Everything the book asserts seems to be pretty well backed by science, go check for yourself.
Source: Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Read it, it's not only a brilliant weight loss book, but also a wonderful book about how the wrong incentives for companies have led to the obesity epidemic in the US.
I'm not saying it's impossible to keep losing weight by calorie restriction beyond 6 months, I'm saying that _sans further calorie restriction_ you don't lose weight.
> Yes, it gets harder to continuously lose weight
This is your body adjusting its basal metabolic rate and you having to implement further calorie restriction to achieve the same benefit.
To weigh 200 pounds, you need to consume a different number of calories.
If you weigh 300 and start eating the 200 pound amount, you will lose weight. Slower over time as the difference between your weight and your consumption becomes less.
Once you reach 200 pounds, you won't continue to lose weight.
There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different.
A book is not a source. Providing a book and then cavalierly saying people should read it because it's backed by science is pretty rude.
There is an existence proof that this isn’t true - watch “My 600lb Life”.
How does the existence of a TV show that put subjects under calorie restriction prove that this doesn't work?
P.S. from skimming the wikipedia page I'd expect that the participants were subject to further calorie restriction beyond the first one
Also on the same show, when they were put under medical supervision where they had to consume only 1200 calories a day they would drop around 30-50 pounds. There was one guy who would lose 20 pounds in a week (he weighed over 800 pounds) when his mom couldn't sneak food to him.
The lower insulin resistance, the better the effect of diet, usually.
If you watch the show, most of them overeat as a coping mechanism and part of the treatment is psychological help.
I agree that not eating is what caused weight loss more than anything else. But, I have found that solid waste is not where I lost weight, but through urine. And I mean weight loss as in fat, not water.
The data is multiple points of weight recorded every day (4 times a day) over a month, with a follow up a few years continued observance based on the results. Also, daily exercise and daily diet were documented as well (during the month of testing).
Granted, I did not measure "fat" with calipers or other methods, but I measured my waist (though I did not document this, my failure), where I lost my fat from. Sure, not perfect. But it's enough to prove _something_ was happening. I went from 202 down to 185 lbs. And my pants didn't fit properly half way through, and were baggy by the end.
I think it's fair that "explained phenomena" here, with one meal a day, 2 miles (up to 3 by the end) of running (8 minute miles avg. by the end) and slimming waist, limbs and neck was evidence of 15+ lbs of fat loss, not dehydration.
Science doesn't have to be perfect to demonstrate worth or value in a concept.
This goes more to show what everyone knows based on accepted science.
I think 100% of the weight loss is from use of calories, and limiting the intake of calories.
What I meant to state more clearly is that I think the waste or _something_ related to the removal of the fat (after being used) happens during sleep.
The quickest way to gain two pounds is drinking 32oz of water.
Except it's not. The body is not a closed system. The law of conservation of mass & energy just means you have to balance your chemical equations. It doesn't necessarily mean eating more will make you fat. (Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't ... it's just not necessarily the case.)
Appeal to intuition: you can eat 10k calories of straight lard, and you will crap most of it out. You can do other things to "burn off" that excess energy, too, like build muscle, raise your body temperature, etc.
To be clear: I don't know to what extent (if any) the body does any of the above things. My point is that the "calories in vs calories out" meme is so inaccurate that it borders on dead-wrong.
What’s not absorbed by your digestive system is not considered “in” which why cellulose for example is not counted as calories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system
However, you also absorb and excrete more than just energy calcium for example.
There's a scientific term for what it is. It is called bro-science
I sweat like a pig anytime I work out. I use to teach two hour fitness classes and even now after the end of a workout, I’ve “lost 5 pounds” but that’s pure water weight. I’m burning around 1000-1200 calories during that time. If I rehydrate and drink lots of water afterwards, I’ll “gain” 3 pounds.
If you are “losing weight” by being hungry or by limiting when you eat, you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.
The same was cited in the article. The chess players are forgetting to eat.