Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.
I challenge people to go out there and start launching chunks of matter on escape trajectories from Earth. Yes it is hard, yes it takes a lot of energy, but you will start reducing the force of gravitational attraction acting on you. These are real results, not just a temporary change.
After all, anyone can say anything, and even point to lottery winners, but I want to learn from the best what it takes to actually win the lottery. I myself am not a success coach but the other day, someone very successful told me that anyone can succeed at a startup. All they have to do is get their billionaire parents to give them a small loan of 10 million dollars, and let them iterate through and fail a few times. The key is to go back to the family trough and then you can get bailed out multiple times. If your parents are not billionaires then there are ways to fix it. This can work for anyone. He showed that such an approach actually pays off because in the end you make back everything you lost AND you can now afford an amazing car and TV!
His friend said he was “reducing a hard problem to a much harder problem”. But what does his friend know, he is poor by comparison and seems bitter
simple != {easy, convenient, etc}
Perhaps CRISPR can help?
genetics matter but not as much as you think they do
But you didn't need to go hungry. Folks lose weight by caloric restriction and fill up on a lot of fruits and (non-starchy) vegetables. Some folks have luck with legumes and beans and filling foods. Some folks snack and don't have meals.
And the experience of hunger changes, too! Sometimes, in the same person and definitely between folks.
Examples: I used to smoke. Nicotine is an excellent appetite suppressant, and honestly made it easier to lose weight.
High stress can make me lose most of my appetite or do the opposite.
I menstruate. A few days each month, I have indescribable hunger. It is hormone driven, and unlike other hungers I've experienced. Suddenly, I feel like I've skipped meals. It consumes me. I can't do anything about it, but if I eat a little, I can go back to paying attention to other things.
Not me personally, but there are a number of drugs that increase your appetite, too.
Again, the point really is that hunger isn't as simple as "you'll be slightly hungry most of the time".
What we call "hunger" is just habit of eating food regularly. You can untrain yourself, just like with any other habit.
I wonder if it's worthwhile to find some compelling distraction-- the equivalent of "I'm grudgingly coming to the table and slamming the least amount of food possible so I can get back to my task" sort of thing. If I'm at my desk away from food sources, I'm not consuming calories.
Does this assume the body expends a constant amount of energy, or do you actually work out until the deficit level is achieved?
Because for most people trying to lose weight, the struggle is not only to reduce calories in, but in preventing the body from being more thrifty with those calories...
Metabolism/energy levels/etc are Calories Out. If your metabolism is low, your Calories Out is lower.
Look at BMR, such as https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/bmr
Very simple. CICO.
e: there are relatively rare medical conditions, such as water retention, that can affect weight loss. A better term might be "body fat percentage". But the end result is that if you want to lose body fat, consistently intake less calories than your body uses for energy.
Read the linked article, they're making a pun.
This would imply 98% of people are overweight which, even in America, is far from the truth.
e: overweight Americans are about 32.5% of the population. Obese is another 36.5%.
It is that simple: people simply are looking for an excuses why they aren't willing to do it.
I'm going to again plugin this guy https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-lose-fat-with-science-based-t... because his lectures are amazing and he breaks down the actual scientific consensus on these topics rather well. He is neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has made contributions to the brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration and repair fields.
It takes a lot of effort, but you don't have to feel hungry, and the results will beat exercise by orders of magnitude in terms of pure weight loss!
Though, in fairness to me, his scales would have also shown 0kg if he stepped "on" them!
trying to reconcile this with the conventional advice that weight loss is 90% about eating right
edit: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/breathing-exercises-for...
If you have a relatively constant outflow of breath, measurably but not drastically affected by exercise, the CICO conception could still account for the net difference in body mass.
the breath thing is how the metabolic waste products leave the body (when your fat gets broken down eventually the mass of it leaves your body as co2).
also, the amount of hours you spend not working out dramatically trumps the amount of hours you spend not working out so working out itself doesnt change your mean..
You're implying that "calories in" are all absorbed equally. We poop. Literally. Calories go out that are never absorbed. Every body does this differently. Is that physics too?
Also: some people get calories from certain foods that other people don't get calories from. Is that physics?
Can you lose weight from a calorie restriction diet? Of course! But don't claim that it's the only answer. It's not. The human body deserves more respect than that.
You're really drifting away from reality here. You're going to die well before you lose even close to 100% of your body weight. Yikes!
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-the-calorie-is-b...
This led to me eating treat bags of sweets for lunch. Cycles of months putting on weight and then the following months doing a 500 deficit per day to lose it. Radical hunger spikes l, nights awake in bed because I was so hungry and dreams of eating marshmallows. Lack of nutrients.
By the end of it I’d lost a lot of hair (I put a lot of this down to the inflammation caused by insulin resistance), my sweat smelled sweet, my temperature was totally out of whack, and maintaining my weight was a constant struggle.
However, since fasting and eliminating sugar from my diet I’ve maintained my weight with way less effort. By focusing on low GI food, nutrient dense food, Ive reduced my hunger pangs, my sweat smells normal, my hairs started to grow back, my sleep has improved, I recover faster from exercise, etc.
So yeah, CICO works. But it’s not optimal. The worst thing about my new diet is just how expensive and time consuming it is compared to just reading the calories on a packet and buying the cheapest thing that fits my daily budget. But it’s worth it.
Health and weight loss shouldn’t be conflated. I would venture to guess that your new diet of fasting and nutrient dense foods is still giving you a caloric deficit to lose weight. You’ve just swapped counting calories for alternatives that serve as a proxy for reducing caloric intake.
Ex.
- intermittent fasting makes it easier to create a deficit because you're reducing the amount of time you can shove calories into your intake port
- carnivore diet works because you're cutting out all the carbohydrates in your diet and protein/fat tend to be more satiating, resulting in fewer calories overall
- Low GI foods reduce the amount of caloric-dense food options and reduce ghrelin, making you less likely to binge
They just use a different heuristic to ultimately reduce calories.
IMO this is one of the causes of yo-yo dieting. A proxy works well for a while and people lose weight. But then it stops being a good proxy for creating a caloric deficit and they plateau. Leading them to drop it, gain the weight back, and then jump onto the next fad that will serve as a rough proxy for caloric deficit again.
Yes, thermodynamics is always correct but usually not the appropriate level of analysis at which to address human problems.
A simple restatement of CICO arguments in terms of car fuel is enough to see how utterly trivial they are:
"My uncle got stranded on the highway"
"How so?"
"Ran out of gas"
"Well, he must have had less energy in the tank then he needed to get to his destination. Simple CICO"
Notice how the response is completely correct yet utterly useless. We haven't learned anything about why the uncle ran out of fuel. Was it a leak? CICO is true. Did he forget to fill up? CICO is true. Was he out of money and desperately hoping for the best? CICO is true. Thermodynamics is always true!
Notice how all of the different real reasons need a completely different solution. If you responded with "you just need to have enough fuel available to the engine to make it to the destination" as your "solution" people would think you are autistic.
If, when presented with the real solution, you said "well, see because he gave his uncle money for gas, now the fuel balance is postive" people would ask if you had a stroke.
Why is it that this level of "argumentation" is somehow okay for intelligent people when it comes to weight loss but would get you laughed out of the room on literally any other topic? Try it: poverty? money-in-money-out! Housing? Houses-built-Houses-used! Job problems? Literally just get fired once less then you get hired!
People get distracted by other claims. “It’s seed oils!” No, it’s because seed oils are used in ultra-processed food that have a ton of calories. “Its the hormonal effect of carbohydrates!” No, it’s because carb-rich foods are extremely easy to overeat. “It’s because we evolved to only eat plants!” No, it’s because animal products are calorie dense by comparison. If you eat less calories than you metabolize you will lose weight, yet people get fixated on all kinds of heuristics of that point.
Eating kosher is a rough heuristic for avoiding food poisoning. It doesnt make germ theory useless, it distracts from a more rooted understanding.
I do agree that making the behavioral changes to lose weight is much more complicated. But we have to first agree on the cause. The reason why people constantly hammer on it is because so many people don’t accept that idea. To extend one of your examples, it would be like trying to convince someone how to get out of debt, but they refuse to believe their debt problem has anything to do with their spending habits and instead constantly point to things like the predatory nature of credit cards. Those can all be proximate causes, but at the end of the day they are in debt because they spend more than they earn and they’ll never fix the issue if they refuse to acknowledge that simple fact. The govt can pay off their loans and they’ll still be in debt if they don’t shore up their ledger.
If you mean "overeating" then that's also not the reason. It's like saying that being sad is the root cause of depression.
If your analysis of obesity doesn't factor in hormons then it's not going to get you any working solutions. Which is exactly what we observe in the public health sphere since the 1970ies.
> Debt
Nobody is contesting that. What you say is true but it's also just a very obvious and unhelpful restatement of the problem.
I play soccer, badly. When better players give me feedback there is two kinds. One boils down to simply a restatement of the goals of the game: pass better, don't miss the goal, get the ball. I hope you agree that if you really think about it such exhortation are silly. What I actually need is advice that tells me HOW to achieve this. It's the same for debt, weight loss etc.
Not to forget that Ketoers and Low Carbers starting with Attkins where and are viciously attacked by the CICO mainstream. When people here say stuff like "well get your deficit anyway you want" than this shows the influence that losing to LC for the last two decades had on the CICO faction. It wasn't like this when I started my keto journey. Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.
Nobody is debating that there are systematic effects. I mentioned ghrelin before, I'm obviously not ignoring the effect of hormones. But that effect is to rebalance CICO. In some ways it's behavioral, like when ghrelin impacts you satiety. In other ways, it's a thermodynamic effect like how eating protein takes more energy to metabolize than the same number of calories of simple carbohydrates. But it all still boils down to the balance of calories in to calories out.
I still maintain that's what keto is doing for you. It's giving you an easier set of heuristics to balance CICO. But at the end of the day, it's still CICO and the same principle applies to a variety of dietary choices. So keto isn't some holy grail body hack; it's just a simplified model for reducing the complexity of human metabolism to rules that ultimately reduce calories.
>Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.
Yes, fat has the highest energy density but it's not the density that matters unless you factor in mass of fat consumed. You can still have less calories while eating fat.
If you can show that someone can have a long-term weight loss eating more calories than they burn (outside of hormone therapy) with something like a keto diet, that would be a reasonable counterpoint.
It seems to me what you're saying is "Yes, CICO is correct but hard to implement. Keto is a way to implement it." I can partially agree, but it doesn't make an understanding of CICO unhelpful. Keto can help rebalance CICO. However, it can also be used to increase caloric intake by drinking cups of olive oil. It's still keto, but it won't lead to weight loss because it's undermined the more fundamental principle. That makes the context of CICO important.
Put differently, can you lose weight by running against CICO principles and following keto? I'd say no. Can you lose weight running against keto principles and following CICO? I'd say yes. They aren't mutually exclusive, but that makes CICO a more fundamentally important principle.
It feels like we are discussing two different aspects. I'm talking about the overall strategy of rebalancing CICO. You're talking about the tactical methods to do so. The latter doesn't negate the former.
A naïve person might see CICO and immediately conclude that the most direct way to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more -- which can work except that the body reacts to this change by making you more hungry and conserving more energy. Now you get into the realm where systematic effects dominate: how do you reduce hunger? how do you coax the body to burn more fuel? At this stage, what you eat, how you eat it, and when you eat it becomes much more important than strictly controlling the calories -- because while it's possible to do so, it's also impractical to do so consciously in many cases.
At this point, any practical solution still needs to comply with the laws of physics (i.e. CICO), but that's kind of like insisting that a person needs to understand the laws of quantum mechanics to play basketball.
I think this, like the idea that your metabolism slows as you age, has been shown to be antiquated myths.
You burn less calories as you lose weight because you have less body mass to support. Your body doesnt flip a switch to “conserve” calories, all else being equal. This is why understanding the fundamental principles is key.
Your basketball analogy is a bad analogy. Yes, everything must adhere to the laws of physics. The difference is I’m saying there’s a ton of ways to adhere to CICO, you just need to find what works within the behavioral framework of the individual.
For some keto works great. For others, it’s not sustainable because they can’t have a simple piece of cake at a birthday party. But flexible dieting may work if they accurately count calories. For others, counting calories is too tedious and they can’t do so accurately. But they may be able to eat a vegan whole food diet. All the approaches that work have the same goal: rebalance the CICO model.
A better basketball analogy is having a zone defense vs man-on-man. Different tactics but the same goal to score more points than the other team. You don’t need to understand quantum mechanics, you just have to know how to count. If you can’t count, your approach needs to weight the game outcome in your favor. But it doesn’t make counting irrelevant to basketball any more than it makes CICO irrelevant to weight loss.
I get if you say CICO isn’t helpful for you because it is too tedious, or too much uncertainty given your food choices to implement accurately. But that doesn’t mean it’s unhelpful for everyone, especially when it’s the fundamental principle that governs weight loss with literally every approach. It just means you haven’t found a way to implement it effectively. Other people who can estimate CICO accurately find it works just fine.
'It's CICO! Just lose the weight.' Done. No thought needed, and they get to feel superior.
General knowledge around proper nutrition in western countries is abysmal. In the UK for example I was pretty much convinced by government guidelines that potatoes are unhealthy. That couldn't be further from the truth!
> I didn't see any say "Just lose the weight." There's a difference between acknowledging a fundamental principle and treating it as if that fundamental principle is easy to implement.
It's right at the top:
> elil17 1 day ago
> I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out
Reading it as generously as possible, they’re tongue-in-cheek admitting CICO isn’t easy just like obtaining orbital velocity isn’t easy.
I can lose weight on the tapeworm diet. It’s doesn’t mean it’s healthy. They’re two different (but sometimes related) goals, so they are easily conflated.
The only real thing that will be shrinking under CICO is your bank account as it's drained dry by the subsidies for crust flingers.
Under CICU your weight will go down as energy is expended to increase the rotational speed of the earth. This will not only leave the crust intact but would also allow us to see multiple sunsets/sunrises in a single "day".
I think a lot of people didn't notice the "Crust of the earth"-part in "Crust of the earth Out".
I gotta admit, I was a bit confused why there was a "calories in, calories out" argument in response to TFA and how it could connect to orbital mechanics.
I consider myself trolled along with most of my sibling commentors!
Over time though I got used to it and started enjoying it, now that I live again in Europe I actually miss Asian deserts
Did you read the article? It didn't seem like click-bait to me.
> Calories In, Crust of the earth Out
Fad diets and "body mass" are, excuse my harsh language, B.S. Yes they can contribute to weight loss but they are going to let you lose 10 or 15 pounds tops. Reducing the weight of the Earth, on the other hand, can get you to lose essentially any amount of weight.
I'm sorry, I went further down the thread, but it never got better than this.
CICO certainly isnt false.
More likely, you are miscounting calories - a common mistake that people trying to lose weight make. For example, you'd be surprised how many calories are in that packet of creamy sauce that came with your fast food!
CICO is hard to stick to, because we are biologically wired to enjoy high calorie diets. As a result, lots of people have come up with justifications as to why it wasn't their fault that they failed to adhere to it.
The reality is that weight loss is simple. It's very difficult, especially if you're not willing to completely overhaul your diet and relationship with food as an American.
After all, shooting any significant amount of the planet's crust into space is definitely hungry work...
I've settled on
- Very lightweight breakfast (~100 cal)
- Light lunch (~700 cal)
- Heavy dinner (~1400 cal)
- Hard liquor only (tall single vodka/soda is my goto)
You'll notice that's over 2000~ a day. I also walk a lot, use an exercise bike instead of the couch when watching TV, and bicycle everywhere I can. On lazy days, I adjust downwards.
One thing I've done that's helped a lot is eating a low carb diet - I did keto, found it was incredible effective in losing weight, but kinda brutal. Instead, a low carb (non-ketosis) diet allows for some carbs but significantly reduces "empty calories".
Wait, which one is it? Simple or very difficult. Lol. I think you meant the calorie math is simple.
Simplicity has to do with the effort needed to understand something, difficulty has to do with the effort needed to perform an action. It's not unusual that something that requires little effort to understand requires a great deal of effort to execute.
You're certainly not going to get very far at ejecting the earth's crust by burning food...
So one could be more accurate and say Available CaloriesICO I guess
Unless you are an athlete or have some condition the simple CICO rule is accurate enough to be useful. Eat less, move more, and weight will be lost (or at least gains will slow).
None of this says anything about each person’s own life challenges that alter how difficult it is to do that.
Alcohol is more caloric than Coca-Cola, but drinking two liters of alcohol per day won't make you obese.
It really is the simplest weight loss method possible, it will work for everyone living on the planet at once, and the article presents it (and its difficulties) quite clearly - not sure why you'd go off topic by talking about biology and psychology.
The body is complex, self-regulating system with hystersis and set points. You should go learn about "metabolic syndrome".
And everyone's body reacts differently, so there's no one solution.
Absolutely disagree. F = G(m1)(m2)/(r^2). It's that simple, it's physics. Reduce m1 and your F goes down, same for everybody on the planet.
For example, if my BMR is 3600cal, and I don't eat for a day, why am I not 1lb lighter?
Or if I fast for 5 days, why am I 13lbs lighter and not 5lbs lighter?
Why is it easier for obese people to lose weight initially, but then harder to lose that last 10lbs? Which is also true for non-obese people.
Discussing fat loss is really short sighted when ejecting a little bit of mass could help the entire population lose some weight forever.
It's like people just want to get outraged over nothing.
Even though it's a lot of fun, it's honestly a bit eye opening to see how little some people engage with the substance of the comments they are replying to...
but I've seen so much garbage about CICO that I took the response seriously..
It's also true that you'd get far more, and quicker, weight loss by increasing your distance from the earth instead of reducing the earth's mass, but that seems a little selfish...
BMR is a thing. Gut bacteria are a thing. How your body conserves energy is a thing. How your body tries to find efficiencies while doing the same thing is a thing. Insulin is a thing.
The only way the CICO model has any value is through it’s most trivial “physics based” interpretation at which point it’s not useful in any way. It’s like saying “Developing software is simple. It’s Code in, Executable out”. Its not wrong, but it’s also a completely pointless statement, which only serves to trivialize a complex issue and end discussion on it.
You could write that comment on every software development related article on HN and dismiss the article as clickbait on that basis, which would obviously be ridiculous, even if your statement wouldn’t be wrong.
Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.