But you can eat the calories you spend in just a few minutes. If you have a pile of Mars bars, that will supply enough energy to compensate an hour on the treadmill.

Might not be the typical thing an athlete eats, but it certainly keeps the weight on a lot of people.

My buddy on the rowing team would regularly eat 12 eggs + bacon + sausage & toast for breakfast after rowing. They were eating to excess to try to keep on weight and couldn't actually do it.

But that goes to the other part of the fallacy, because even if you eat a pile of 10 Mars bars, a large amount of that will just get excreted. Meanwhile you'll start to feel physically sick and probably your body will then reject food for a while. CICO does more harm than good in IMHO because you're talking about a complex system.

IMO CICO is right but not useful. It's like saying that if you just read math books and did the exercises, you'd get a math degree easily.

That's true of course, but the problem for most people is sticking to the plan, not whether that plan would actually work.

We see athletes sticking to their plans but they are pretty special in terms of what they can get themselves to do.

It is an exception though. Very few people exercise to this level. Similarly you can eat as much as you can if you nicking across Antarctic, but this is not exactly a typical activity.

It still makes the premise that you can't defeat a bad diet bullshit.