Can we please stop repeating the “You have to eat at a deficit to lose weight on KETO” lie?


(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #560

I’m not suggesting there’s any malice, but in my experience, it isn’t just new folks who raise the issue. And the trouble is that this doesn’t require a magical explanation, nor does it require a mutually exclusive CICO vs LCHF battle.

The problem with CICO is not so much that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s an insufficient explanation. Nobody seriously disputes that losing fat means expending more energy than you take in. Nor do they dispute that gaining weight means eating more energy than you expend.

But Taubes has said many times that this is about as satisfying an explanation as saying that Bill Gates is rich because he spends less money than he generates. That is, it’s a totally unsatisfactory explanation.

CICO is the same, and we all know how this “explanation” has been manipulated by the processed “food” industry to claim that a calorie is a calorie, and all you have to do is eat a “balanced diet,” and a calorie from Coca Cola is the same as a calorie from broccoli. This is bullshit and we all know it.

The carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis is at least a partial explanation for why, to use Taubes’s metaphor, Bill Gates is rich. Meaning, beyond the facile explanation, what caused Bill Gates’s wealth? What causes a person to remain hungry after eating and to “overeat?”

What bothers me about this debate is that it’s so unnecessary. You do have to eat at a deficit to lose fat. While it might feel magical to us, there’s any number of things that might be happening when you eat a low carb diet: your insulin levels drop so you’re less hungry, you eat less, and your body fat reserves are unlocked and you start burning your own body fat.

(Perhaps also there’s an increase in your basal metabolic rate when you’re on a low carb diet, but from what I’ve seen of the experimental evidence, this effect appears to be relatively minor.)

This has been explained time and again by folks like Westman and Phinney. Phinney’s company, Virta Health, has this helpful graphic on its website, and if only we’d point people in its direction, I think a lot of misunderstandings on this forum could be averted:

In those initial phases when you’re burning loads of body fat, it does feel incredible – we’ve all felt it. You’re whooshing down in weight and it feels so easy. It feels magical. But no magical explanation is required, and we should go with the simplest explanation, using Ockham’s Razor, rather than talk about more convoluted explanations for how this process works.


(bulkbiker) #561

You appear to contradict yourself a few times in those paragraphs… replacing the word “calorie” with “energy” doesn’t impact the argument.


#562

I felt no problem with this. I think calorie here is eaten calorie while energy is more complex…
That’s why simple CICO doesn’t work for everyone but proper CICO do. We can’t make energy from nothing but our body reacts differently to different food with the same caloric content. We aren’t calorie burning machines, we don’t necessarily get the calculated, measured amount of energy from our food.

I mostly agree with Gabe but I heard too many stories about people eating very much and losing on keto so something near magical seem to happen to the lucky ones :smiley: Not to me but it’s fine, I wouldn’t want spend unnecessarily much money and time and effort on food anyway.


(bulkbiker) #563

If just one example of that is true (and I believe that there are thousands if not more) then the CICO theory is disproven, period.


(Polly) #564

Your finest black swan argument. :swan:


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #565

If you haven’t yet, watch this video. I think you’ll find it both informative and entertaining.

In my opinion - I think supported by Yeo’s comments about it - CICO isn’t wrong because ‘Energy Balance Theory’ is wrong per se. As Yeo describes matters so well (and entertainingly), we humans are not bomb calorimeters. We extract and utilize available food energy in varying degrees of efficiency. For example, you and I - or anyone else - could eat exactly the same helping of food and derive different amounts of energy and expend/store that energy very differently. CICO ignores this fact, presuming that energy extraction and utilization are the same regardless of individual variation and extraction/utlization can both be determined with extreme accuracy. And all this can be measured usefully by ‘counting calories’. It’s not and it can’t be.

CICO is wrong because the flow through of energy is virtually impossible to measure with sufficient accuracy to work well. Counting calories in and out doesn’t help much. To work at all, CICO requires restricting calories to the point of chronic hunger. The chronic hunger in turn causes a cascade of physiological and psychological responses and consequences that work against losing the fat and maintaining the loss.

After years of losing and regaining, most folks give up on CICO and get off the roller coaster. When they discover they can actually burn fat, lose weight and not feel hungry all the time - even when they are in fact consuming less overall caloric energy - it does seem miraculous! The graphic you posted from Virta illustrates this well. Folks eat less overall - but still to satiety - and utilize body fat to make up the difference. And do not feel hungry doing it. When you’ve done CICO for 20 years and weigh more now than you did 20 years ago - this seems like magic.

The real ‘magic’ we all know it’s just cutting out the carbs. Consuming carbs is the problem and not consuming them is the solution. Ketogenic eating enables our metabolism to return to it’s normal state of energy utilization and health.


(Doug) #566

Logic, Science and Rationalism show the way. As long as the Out goes up enough to be more than the In, then weight loss will occur, no magic required.


#567

Nope, CICO always works, even here. Their CO is obviously bigger than their CI if they lose fat. It doesn’t matter if they eat very much, there is no other way and I see no problem.
We can’t tell our CI and CO… We may have an educated guess but that’s it. If we function properly and don’t eat way too much so our body can handle it, we can guess our CI to some extent (though if I eat fatty meat, I never have a good idea about the fat content. it’s not like it’s written on it) but not our CO. And the latter is the one that can do some surprising things. Mine surely did, that’s why I basically always stall despite eating very different amount of calories in different times (there are limits, of course but my maintenance calorie range is surprisingly big. many people have a tiny range).


#568

That’s a stupid, simplified CICO then… :smiley: Some people still can use that effectively as their body works that way (and tiny changes don’t matter anyway as we never can accurately track even the bomb calorimeter energy content of our food as our food isn’t the food that someone used to get the numbers we use. it may be quite different) but others clearly not. Oversimplified things for humans in general are usually wrong, no wonder.

The proper CICO always works, we just don’t have access to CI and especially CO :smiley: Tracking still can help some - and not or not always others. I usually very clearly see that I definitely won’t lose fat eating that much and that’s informative. If I bring down the calories in the food I eat significantly, my own CI will go down as well and it’s the right direction for me.


(bulkbiker) #569

The quote was from you…

You disagree with yourself now?


#570

Nope, I don’t… I won’t read back to try to figure out what you mean but simplified CICO doesn’t work, the real, complex CICO do and people are different.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #571

@Shinita The Gulag Archipelago proved CICO works. For EVERYONE. That was simplified CICO! There are other examples of the same…


(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #572

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but no organism that’s ever lived has burnt fat whilst consuming more energy than their body expended. Not possible, never happened, never will.


(bulkbiker) #573

So you are claiming that various overfeeding experiments that have not led to weight gain and even had some weight loss were falsified or what…?


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #574

Folks, let’s not rehash this tired old argument for—what is this, the 83rd time? Or is it the 84th? I’ve lost count.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #575

I can think of a situation where what and how much of it you eat does not matter. Hyperthyroidism.

My dad was afflicted with hyperthyroidism in his mid-late 20s and early 30s. After WWII he was a healthy young man. Within 5 years he was an emaciated husk. No matter what or how much he ate, he continued to lose weight. Even ethanol couldn’t add enough incoming energy to balance what his thyroid was blowing away. I’ve seen photos of my dad so emaciated his eyeballs were bulging out his head.

He was a highly trained and experienced Air Force pilot, so the Air Force tried to protect its investment by nuking his thyroid. Apparently, that was the ‘standard treatment’ of the day. It worked, too! From then until almost the end of his life, he gained weight no matter what or how little of it he ate. The last couple of years before he died he reduced carbs significantly - not keto, just much lower carbs - and for the first time in his life since the mid-1950s he actually lost weight.

My dad was an extreme example of something that may be more common than we realize. I’m not claiming the laws of thermodynamics did not apply to him. For what must have been for him a miserable decade of life, he could not eat enough to keep up with the energy expenditure imposed by a runaway thyroid. Then, for most of the rest of his life, he could not consume little enough energy to prevent it being stored as fat. Even all the years that ‘excess’ energy balance was small to minuscule, it never stopped.

So ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’ didn’t matter much to my dad, either when he was hyperthyroid or when he was nonthyroid. His thyroid - and ultimately his lack of a thyroid - controlled his energy balance. It was only when he dropped carb consumption in his last couple of years that some semblance of metabolic normality started to take shape.

I suspect that I inherited my dad’s over active thyroid - before it went hyper - and it has helped me survive a lifetime of SAD without serious metabolic issues. And I’m very grateful for it. I suspect there may be a lot more folks like me out there. But I suspect there are likely a lot more folks out there with an under active thyroid who have a hell of a time keeping energy input lower than output no matter how much they ‘eat less and move more’ trying to.

Just my 2¢.


(Polly) #576

I think Mark makes a very valid point.

It has been clearly demonstrated that you can overeat enormously and not gain weight so long as you don’t eat carbohydrates which I have always interpreted as meaning that metabolic factors outweigh caloric factors every time. For those who prefer to watch rather than read, Sam Feltham talks about his 5,000 Calories per day experiment in this short video.


#577

Just to be clear, are you suggesting provided a single macro, being carbohydrate, is absent from your diet, it is physically impossible to overeat to gain adipose tissue?

Another way to look at it, what if an obese person embarked on a hypercaloric KD. What would happen to that person’s fat mass? Or my own current condition, I’m strict KD, weight training, cardio, very active. Pretty decent condition but, from previous experience, 25lbs off from good abdominal definition. How should I lose 25lbs? I can’t cut carbs more than about 20g, activity levels already high. It’s a rhetorical question of course. I obviously need to reduce my energy consumption. And I speak from experience, as I have done this many times, even on zero carb. Without restrictions, you can only get so lean.


(Polly) #578

An interesting question.

Here is an hypothesis:

If an obese subject cuts out or cuts back carbohydrate (ie 0g to 20g per day range) and eats ad libitum of protein and fat from animal sources will they find that their appetite declines such that they gradually shed excess adipose tissue? I think it is probable that this will be the case.

Some people have problems with a malfunctioning hypothalamus and have lost the ability to feel sated. For the rest of us I don’t believe that we are able to overeat fatty meat.

Aren’t we all familiar with the “that’s it, I’m done” sensation when eating a good rib-eye steak. Those who don’t follow this way of eating will always find room for a pudding (you may call it dessert).

Of course, I only really know what it is like to be me and have some sense of what it is like to be any of the members here who talk about how it works for them.

I have heard that some people gain weight when embarking on a zero carb animal based diet. But if they persist it seems to normalise within the first year. There is no suggestion that these weight gains are adipose tissue.

There is a suggestion that industrial seed oils contribute to the laying down of excess adipose tissue even without the action of carbohydrates.


#579

I think you have digressed. The question is whether hypercaloric KD diets can cause the formation of adipose tissue.