Our way of assessing food's caloric values are also imprecise. We act like all carbs and protein are 4kcal/g and all fat is 9kcal/g, but there is clearly some level of variation, some of it due to food and some due to individual. And of course we don't know for most ingredients how much of each macro and how much water they _actually_ have, we just use mostly-ancient reference values.
All of that said, when we accurately track the amount of food people are eating, their weight does pretty predictably move with the calories in almost all circumstances. A lot of folks think they had other experiences, but people are really, really bad at accurately tracking their food intake. Shockingly bad, even when they're clearly trying.
Similarly, when we measure people's oxygen usage, it tracks fairly predictably with weight changes, suggesting that we don't see outsized changes in 'metabolism' defeating folks.
That still doesn't answer the question of why this is all happening.
humans (or other animals, because this problem is not unique to humans) gain weight because they consume more calories than they burn
is like saying that
planes crash because the force of gravity became stronger than the lift generated by the wings.
An obvious physical truism, but it gets you nowhere on the field of disaster. And if you do not dig further into the problem (pilot error? machine malfunction? controlled flight into terrain?), you won't be able to prevent future disasters.
For starters, short of outright starvation (0 is certainly 0), we do not even know how many calories we eat, and we might never be able to find out. The values written on the packaging are measured by burning said food in calorimeters, but our bodies aren't calorimeters and there is a huge systemic error, perhaps 30 per cent. Even chewing the food longer can increase the total calorie intake from the same meal.
Personally, I had reasonable and sustainable results with intermittent fasting. Blood pressure normalized, waistline diminished, though not to the point of having a sixpack. But I didn't have the same sustainable results with generic calorie restriction and 5 meals a day. I was miserable, cold and felt hungry all the time. That is not life.
None of those bad effects seem to be present on IF.
This is only true in the short term - days,weeks. What is observed in the long term is that people, even the overweight and obese, reach stable weights without changing their lifestyle. So, if I were to start eating a surplus of 1000Cal/day compared to my current diet, and without changing my lifestyle in any other way, i would gain weight quickly until reaching some other significantly higher weight level, and then plateau there until I change other aspects of my lifestyle.
This may be due in part to simple energy calculations (I need more energy to move around a higher mass), but is likely also affected by other metabolic factors as well (e.g. I would also develop stronger muscles to hold my bigger weight, and stronger muscles directly need more calories to be maintained).
It's also extremely important, when discussing practical weight loss, to remember that appetite is also directly controlled by your body chemistry, and may vary wildly between people, probably explaining a huge amount of the observed weight differences.
The real problem is that eating less is HARD. I have the utmost sympathy for people who struggle to eat less. I think it's great that we have many strategies to eat less, I hope that we develop more strategies and more effective strategies, and I wish everyone luck in their search.
I think it's actively counterproductive to say that "eat fewer calories" isn't the goal, though. Calories should be a first stop for measuring the efficacy of your strategies. Getting rid of your primary measuring stick is madness. If "CICO Sucks" claimants came armed with better measuring sticks, sure, they would have a point, but they generally don't, meaning their actual proposal is to discard the yardstick, which is madness. How do you hope to find an effective strategy if you can't measure the efficacy of your strategy?
Good: "De-rate exercise calories by 50% due to compensation."
Ok: "Count your calories."
Bad: ...
Really Bad: "CICO sucks, nobody knows anything, so buy my book and try my fad diet!"
To me, all of this is basically fine. If someone finds an effective way to trick themselves into eating fewer calories, that's still a win.
I'm referring here to people who are themselves losing weight, not the hucksters.
Actual nutrition -- getting the right micronutrients and such -- is the most questionable part of my interpretation, but it can still feel true to someone, they can still feel like their body just isn't getting what it's telling them it needs to feel right.
I agree that _many_ people can be delusional about their caloric intake (and their activity), but my suspicion is that calories-in/calories-out is messier than the simple thermodynamic argument.
Here's a great example: my husband has been focusing on weight loss for the past few months because he feels best at a certain weight. He had been using "zero-calorie" cooking spray, reasoning that "regular oil" had more calories. I warned him that it was advertising and that it's just regular oil that is 1/n (just checked and n=753) serving size to allow them to say it was 0 calories per serving. He didn't believe it.
He plateaued with his weight loss and couldn't figure out how a 2500, 2500, 3500 diet was no longer giving him the expected results. Until he cut out the "zero-calorie" cooking spray.
No one sprays that cooking spray for only 250ms.
For what it's worth...
Part of my original comment is based on the fact that I have been _carefully_ monitoring my food intake AND activity for the past 18 months.
I will tell you over that period, I wake up and weigh myself. Each morning, my scale says that I weigh between 166.6 and 168.0--without fail.
I measure my food with a scale, but I will _also_ tell you that my caloric intake varies between 1800 and 2600 calories per day.
My activity varies as well (I won't go into details).
But my weight is PINNED to 167 pounds. Day after day after day.
To me, this information just screams that my body is modulating its caloric intake based on what I eat and how active I am.
Now, I know, this is "anecdata." But I can't be the only person who has observed this.
I do not have diabetes, my a1c is perfect, my resting heart rate is typically in the low 60s, the highest my blood pressure has ever been tested was 127/89 and the lowest has been 87/65 (pre-hypotensive).
I guess what I am trying to say is that human metabolism is not standardized and does not fit into a single conceptual block. I would have to actively exercise for a 30 minutes a day or more to equal out the calories burned by someone with a normal metabolism who sat on their ass all day.
First, exercise. You cannot outrun your fork. Exercise is essential to your health, your longevity, your quality of life, and your weight. No one can lead a good life without regular, healthful exercise. Everyone should find some activity that they enjoy doing so that they are motivated to do it regularly. That said, hours of exercise calories can be eaten easily and mindlessly in moments. Bodies are evolved to survive in the wild and are very efficient. A handful of cookies can power you to walk for miles.
So, second, diet. Different kinds of foods affect you in different ways. Food composition is important to your metabolism on both a molecular and cellular level. Molecularly, you need specific nutrients for health. But, additionally, food affects you based on its cellular form. So, eating whole broccoli is more taxing for your body to digest. The whole plant fibers act as food for commensal bacteria. Sugars packaged in intact cell walls are absorbed more slowly, and produce smaller hormonal responses in the body.
The biggest problem everywhere are so-called highly-palatable foods. Candy, sweetbreads, soda, smoothies, white flour products, pop-tarts. These food-like substances come in what is effectively a partially digested state. Your body integrates their calories almost instantly. They feed festering bacteria rather than beneficial bacteria. Everywhere these foods are introduced, obesity is the result.
Current nutritional research is woefully inadequate. The best studies, controlled environment studies, are heinously expensive and impossible over the course of years. Furthermore, the provision of funds for nutritional research is primarily done by biased, interested parties, so much of it is colored by funding sources.
I invite you to examine the evidence presented by those such as Dr Greger: https://nutritionfacts.org/
And I encourage you to look into this yourself.
This is an honest question. I've never understood this.
There's a lot of other factors to consider... exercise and type of exercise, macronutrient breakdown, how large the surplus is, etc.
edit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786199/ have a look at this, it shows that hypercaloric diets will produce weight gain, and macronutrients have an effect on composition.
Again, lot of other factors at play here, have a look at the linked paper.
Also, regardless of what the body's primary storage mechanism is, it's just obviously true that adult mammals experience changes in the amount of protein stored on their bodies on the same timescales as weight gain and loss occurs. Anyone who has ever started or stopped an exercise regime has experienced this.
The study is evidence that macronutrient composition has an effect on how much fat you gain, and I gave some reasoning for why this is the case. If you're not convinced then I suggest you do some more digging, I don't have time to find the all relevant papers for you.
> it's just obviously true that adult mammals experience changes in the amount of protein stored on their bodies on the same timescales as weight gain and loss occurs.
The body has both catabolic and anabolic processes running concurrently all the time, you'll see increase in one kind of tissue when overall one of these processes is more active than the other. caloric intake and macronutrient breakdown obviously affect these processes, as does exercise.
Essentially, I think people misjudge how much of an effect metabolism plays compared to other factors, misreporting or miscalculating caloric intake, self deception, etc.
Body composition is another thing entirely and involves going a layer deeper to macronutrient breakdowns and exercise variants.
But you're still onto something else that varies with exercise, changes in diet, etc. It's called NEAT, which the article briefly mentions. It's why increasing your cardio won't linearly increase your fat loss. See a basic overview here: https://builtwithscience.com/non-exercise-activity-thermogen...
Metabolism isn’t really a black box. Millions of years of evolution have made us quite good at absorbing nutrients from food and using them conservatively.
Our bodies won’t ignore ingested calories or burn excess calories for no good reason. If the body can absorb the nutrients, it will. If the body doesn’t have to burn calories to continue existing, it won’t.
Evolutionarily, it wouldn’t make sense for our systems to evolve features that discard ingested calories or burn calories without good reason. Food wasn’t plentiful for the vast majority of our evolution.
What actually happens is the person’s behavior changes: Many people adopt exercise programs but then eat more calories. Or they reduce caloric input but then spend more time resting. Or they cook smaller meals but eat more snacks and treats (which often go unreported in self-reported caloric intake studies)
But there isn’t a condition where everything stays the same but the body suddenly decides it needs fewer calories to accomplish the same goals. That would imply the body has various degrees of inefficiency that can change over time, which isn’t really true.
Carbs break down to sugars which trigger the release of insulin. However, cells can become insulin resistant to varying degrees, causing their muscles and organs to reject the free-floating sugars in the bloodstream.
When that happens, your body fat gets to preferentially consume as much of the sugars as possible and then the kidneys filter out the excess. When this happens you end up with an undernourished body that doesn't process all of the calories in the food and that gains body fat preferentially to anything else.
That body fat then becomes a hormone regulator, affecting mood and energy levels even further.
There's so much that goes on in the body that isn't explained by calories in > calories out that, if not properly understood, can massively increase the difficulty of losing body-fat weight, (the body puts on fat over feeding its organs, the body doesn't get the nutrition it consumes to the cells that need it, the person is tired and eats too much to compensate, the list goes on I'm sure.)
Recognizing that not becoming overweight in the first place is the ideal solution, but failing that ideal solution the follow up isn't as simple as "don't eat so much" is a better approach to take. Medical science has not cracked the code yet, but I'm willing to bet that someday soon we will find a solution that breaks this cycle, and when we do obesity and overeating will drastically reduce so that only the people with mental or emotional overeating issues will remain in the obese category.
Metabolic syndrome is a severe exception, though. It’s not something that happens to average people eating normal amounts of calories.
There are always exceptions in disease states, but those exceptions are invoked far too frequently in conversations about typical people on normal (not chronically hyper caloric or extremely sugar heavy) diets.
Despite that, I've lost almost 100lbs from dieting (intermittent fasting, ECA stack, even Keto for a while) over the last several years but I'm still trapped by the condition as the less I weigh the worse the syndrome gets. Increased hunger, depression, lethargy, exhaustion, body temperature decreasing (painfully cold hands even in the middle of summer), insomnia, irritability, all of these issues hit me at the same time and get worse the lower my weight goes.
I don't have diabetes, blood sugar and a1c are normal, no hypertension (actually hypotensive), generally decent health otherwise. Diabetes and excess fat isn't the disease, it's the visible symptom of a larger issue caused by the American diet and lifestyle. Sure, it's my fault (and my parent's fault) that I became obese as a child but now the typical solutions for the issue simply do not work, and people who refuse to see that there is more going on than simply "fat pigs won't stop eating" do literally less than nothing to help solve or identify the core issues.
The food control / prevention of overeating solution works to prevent people from ending up like this, but rarely works to solve the issue once it has taken root, not to mention that the body typically doesn't lose fat cells once they have been created so even if you get to a normal weight you basically have a human fat cell parasite hungrily clawing at every morsel of food you eat more than what you immediately need permanently attached to your body unless you undergo surgeries to physically excise it from your body. (This is one of the reasons why most contestants on the Biggest Loser end up regaining their weight within a short amount of time, for instance. It's far easier to refill empty fat cells than it is for fat cells to be built by the body.)
This is why obesity is a crisis. Not just because of diabetes, but because the tools that we have to fight obesity once it arrives are insufficient for the job.
I don't understand the argument. I agree with you that the human body seems to have several mechanisms (in terms of behavior changes) for reducing food consumption and/or up-regulating calorie expenditure to avoid gaining excess weight. And presumably there were excellent evolutionary reasons for humans to evolve these mechanisms, even though food was often in short supply! (As someone who has spent time trying to do physical activity while overweight, I can attest to this.)
But then you say that it wouldn't make sense for humans to evolve other physical mechanisms (such as changing digestion efficiency, fat storage efficiency) to accomplish those same well-motivated goals. Why not? I'm genuinely curious.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119133230.h...
If you want to lose weight, calories out must be > calories in.
This is obviously true.
No one is going to break thermodynamic laws. But it fails to appreciate the gigantic black box that is our metabolism. I have often felt that there may be compensatory changes made to the metabolic activity (of some people) in response to changes in exercise, changes in diet, etc. You might "swallow" 2000 calories, but that doesn't mean your body will necessarily extract all 2000 calories under all circumstances.
Although this study is far from perfect, I think it lends support to the notion that counting calories consumed and expended is often overly simplistic.