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.
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.