I would still suggest that "calories in, calories out" is still solid weight loss advice. There are two major confounding issues that might make it appear incorrect. The first is that out is variable, and the second is that some parts of the system are noisy. The solution to both is to try to measure accurately and frequently. The best things one can do to achieve this are daily weigh-ins at approximately the same time and trying to account for the bulk of one's caloric and macronutrient intake.

Is it, though? To me, part of what qualifies advice as solid is that it has to help people who take it achieve the desired outcome. My understanding is that there's a staggering lack of evidence that that is the case. And not for lack of people looking for it.

Which leaves me thinking that this is an idea whose memetic fitness far exceeds its practical value.

The elephant in the room here is the article itself. The basic premise here is that internal bodily processes can increase your energy expenditure by as much as several thousand calories over the course of the day, even when you're being physically sedentary. And if it can autonomically increase the burn rate, surely it can also autonomically decrease it.

I've certainly noticed that I have a more difficult time thinking clearly on days when I'm not eating as much as usual. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar thing happens if I take a long bike ride without eating any extra food. Though this isn't something I've paid attention to in the past, so I suppose I don't really know. But still, if the body increases calorie expenditure during periods of higher brain activity, then it is certainly just as capable of reducing brain activity in response to a reduction in readily available energy.

I certainly can't speak for you, but it has worked quite well for me as I described it, for both gaining and losing weight as needed. I sympathize with people who do a poor job of measuring, either through inconsistency or incorrect calculation, but we don't blame the game of chess for people who play it poorly or suggest that they are evidence that it does not provide value to those who do, do we?

I can't speak for you, either. But I'm not talking about individuals' stories here. That's one of those, "the plural of anecdotes is not data," situations. When it comes down to empirical data, it seems to be a bit like the situation with acupuncture: it works just well enough to ensure that there's always someone who will show up and say, "It worked for me!" when the subject of its poor performance in clinical trials comes up, but not well enough to demonstrate practical efficacy under scientific scrutiny.

Perhaps that really is because basically nobody is assiduous enough about their calorie counting to make it work. But, even if we take that as true for the sake of argument, insofar as the point I'm making is, "This advice has a terrible track record of helping people lose weight," it doesn't work as a counter-argument. Quite the opposite. It works as a supporting argument, by showing one possible reason for why it has such a terrible track record.

I also don't think that it has legs as an idea for how best to reduce the obesity rate. If it were really that easy, then you would expect the population's average BMI to be much higher back when people didn't have the means to effectively calorie count, and it would steadily go down as the means to calorie count more accurately become more widely available. Instead we see that the opposite is true.

Absolutely. I was weighting before and after sleep every day, and results had fluctuations up to .5 kg, but after two weeks the trend was easily visible.

Just as a general comment: weight alone is a shit measurement for overall health. You really want to know your body fat percentage, at a minimum.

I'm curious if you have a simple, accurate way to measure body fat percentage at home. If you do, would you please share it with the rest of the world? It's probably worth quite a bit.

This study says that women feel hunger more strongly than men due to physical differences in the brain. True or not, the idea that some people just feel more hunger for the same amount of calorie deficit could explain a lot.

Also, "calories in, calories out" is the second thought-terminating cliche[1] I've encountered today!

[0] https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=110876 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

One self-regulating thing really does exist. If you are already overweight, the body can self-regulate itself, by extracting fewer calories from processing from eaten food. You can take in food for 3000kcal, but the already overweight body can take in just 2700.

This has only one effect: when a person decides to lose weight, it'll make it harder for him, because eating slightly less than will have no effect at all, and the body is already used to eating a lot, so reduction in incoming food brings immediate discomfort.

But the opposite direction is rock solid: if you don't eat enough to compensate your passive calorie burn, you will not gain weight ever.

Anyway, this method helped me to go from 96 kg to 83 kg in 10 weeks, taking on average 1750..1900 kcal per day. For me it turned out pretty easy. First two weeks were the hardest, and I took in up to 2000 kcal, gradually bringing it lower.