Fast Answer to the CICO Contingent

(Karl) #21

In a way, it does all boil down to how much you eat for the purposes of maintaining weight (or losing/gaining for that matter).

As much as people want to argue over it, if a person stops eating, they will get thin, languish and eventually die. So how much food you take in clearly has a controllable effect.

If you come from a place of being extremely overweight (like me and many others), I know exactly how I got there. Food matters - it absolutely HAS to, and it’s the most controllable variable you have with weight control. Whether you want to obscure it with calorie measurements, hormonal response, whatever - at the end of the day, if your goal is to lose, gain or maintain, it will all eventually hinge on how much you take in.

Whenever I hear arguments for or against “CICO”, I usually have to stop those people i’m arguing with and first clarify what they consider “CICO” to be. To some, it means the actual act of calorie counting, while not taking macronutrients into account (level playing field, a calorie is a calorie, yadda yadda). To others, when they say “It’s all CICO anyway”, they USUALLY mean “Hey, I don’t care how you eat, it’s still possible to eat too much.”

I get kind of annoyed at the lack of sanity on this topic. I get REALLY annoyed when “Keto” gets branded as this “eat as much bacon as you want, and still lose weight” fad. Yet to this day, I still have an acquaintance or two who have no problem looking me straight in the face and tell me that they fasted for 5 days straight and gained 2 pounds without drinking crazy fluids.

I mean, does anyone believe that?

(charlie3) #22

My best answer is the way I look today, in clothes that fit, with or without regard to how I looked 25 pounds ago. The problems with explaining are that, for me, keto is part of a package that needs to include physical activity and exercise and learning time restricted eathing and some fasting. When I try to summarize all that it sounds too over the top, too intimidating, even though it’s not if you take it a step at a time. So far what I see is people weighing the prospect of giving up their drug of choice, bad food, or being healthy. Guess what most of them decide.

(Randy) #23

Something simple is not likely to work (in any subject) when someone is “dug in” on their position.

(karen) #24

I guess what I mean by “the CICO” argument is “a calorie is a calorie”; taking the premise of conservation of energy (the total energy of an isolated system remains constant, ergo energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed from one form to another), and from that extrapolating that whatever the form of the energy you put into your body, your body will use up the same amount of energy and leave you with the same surplus or deficit. It’s basically a model for the person who thinks of the body as a simple machine and digestion as the simple process of “burning food”.

At this point I’m going with “you can’t GAIN more than you put into the system, but how much you keep inside you depends on what your body does afterward.”

(karen) #25

If it’s not something simple, Mom will reply with a sage nod of her head … and then offer me some toast without butter because butter is fattening.

Or put it this way … if your ten year old asked you how come you lose more weight / gain less weight eating 1500 calories of butter than 1500 calories of donuts, what would you tell him? It’s not about confrontation but about gentle simplicity, or at least that’s how I start out before I tell them to go Fung off.

(Karl) #26

Well, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s all about the law of averages. If you look at all of the different diets out there, most of the ones that have measured amounts of food tend to kind of work. Look at the most popular CICO tool of our era - MyFitnessPal. If you punch in the values it asks for, and then input religiously what you eat, and stay within the calorie boundaries it issues for you - guess what - most people lose weight.

I’m not suggesting that everyone suddenly stop what they’re doing and start using MFP - but for the average human being out there, if you follow its advice to the letter and are completely honest with yourself over it - you can certainly lose weight that way. I know it’s true - I’ve done it.

And I gained that weight all back too, because holy CRAP is MFP dieting a miserable way to live. But people do it, and some have no issues with it.

I think the bigger problem is that everyone wants to be right about their way of controlling their weight. Some people want to apply the first law of thermodynamics and consider our bodies these “closed” systems. Other people see better results with a ketogenic diet because of insulin resistance or what not. But it doesn’t make either one invalid.

When you factor in the success people might have with “their way”, they tend to think it’s the “best” or even “only” way. Like @KHAN says, if you’ve been doing something successfully for ages, you tend to get “dug in” on your position. I think if you’re looking for the answer to “how do I convince CICO believers they are wrong?” then I think you might possibly be asking the wrong question.

(TJ Borden) #27

You’re exactly correct. There may be people within keto that choose to embrace their own interpretation of CICO, but the “secular” definition is calories are equal. 1200 calories of spinich or 1200 calories of donuts. It’s all energy and to lose weight, you simply have to take less in than you’re expending.

As @Alecmcq pointed out, there is a HUGE misunderstanding that we can accurately measure or control our output. Sure exercise can up the output a little, but most of our calorie expenditure is controlled by hormones.

(karen) #28

I’m not saying that MFP or any other calorie counting diet won’t result in weight loss, though. I’m saying it won’t result in The Same Amount of weight loss as a diet of the same calorie count of different macros, and trying to simply explain why, because that idea is counter intuitive to most people.

(Jay AM) #29

This killed me laughing.

(LeeAnn Brooks) #30

So maybe try this approach -
There’s different types of energy sources, gasoline, diesel, solar, coal, wind…
Some are more efficient than others and some burn cleaner than others.
In this analogy, fat burns more efficient than carbs, meaning you don’t need as much of it to get as far. So perhaps you say the example is not why you gain less weight eating 1500 calories of butter vs 1500 calories of donuts, but that you only need 1000 calories of butter to have as much energy as 1500 calories of donuts.

(bulkbiker) #31

Go away and try to eat 1500 calories of butter without being sick… whereas 1500 cals of doughnuts would leave you wanting more surely?

(karen) #32

:slightly_smiling_face: Yup, but again, assuming satiety with fewer calories doesn’t address the ‘mystery’ of the idea that “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, it supports the idea that a calorie IS a calorie and you’re eating fewer of them, ergo the weight loss.

(karen) #33

Nice twist. Thanks for another angle.

(LeeAnn Brooks) #34

The whole problem with CICO is the inflexibility of it. It doesn’t account for hormones, stress, and even how you wave away the importance of satiety. That’s why it’s flawed. In a perfect system, it would be a simple CICO formula, but that’s simply not possible.
You HAVE to take these other things into consideration. And satiety of high fats IS part of it.
Another big reason CICO fails is that when you up your CO through exercise, you increase your appetite, making it harder to keep CI in a deficit.
The point of saying CICO doesn’t work isn’t because you can’t lose weight that way. It’s that it isn’t sustainable.
But it’s also a mistake thinking Keto is a free for all. The premise is that your body tells you what it needs once you’ve gotten off carbs which increase hunger. If you listen to your body, you shouldn’t be over eating. If you are eating LCHF and your are hungry, it’s because your body needs food.

(TJ Borden) #35

I haven’t tried the butter. I used to do the donuts all the time :rofl:. I’d stop at Krispy Kreme to get donuts for the office. I’d get three dozen and eat one dozen on the way to the office and take the other two into the break room.

Then I’d have a couple more donuts from the break room too…

(Doug) #36

I think it’s overdone on that score, owing to people’s desire for “magic.” A calorie is a calorie, but it matters whether we burn them or store them, and the “In” part is balanced not just by burning but also by storage and excretion.

#37

Satiety. Dictionary says: “the quality or state of being fed or gratified to or beyond capacity”. Otherwise, what you’re suggesting is I actively limit what I eat (which is what I do). I have a simpler definition of Keto – “minimal carbs, adequate protein, fat as needed”. From that perspective, I set my daily macros based on my overall goals:

  • < 1200 calories (because I want to lose weight)
  • < 20 net grams of carbohydrates (because I want to control hunger and blood sugars)
  • > 120 grams of proteins (because my body needs them)

I don’t even address fat macros directly, but it’s limited indirectly by the calorie limit. But they really only get addressed when I’m actually tracking my intake. I only do that every once in a while, as a tune-up.

I often go a bit over on those carb and calorie goals. But they are aggressive, so it’s not a big concern.

I started Keto at 650 pounds so I also know that method very well. If I’ve ever had a sensation of feeling full, it was many decades ago. I even had my stomach stapled in 2000, and it barely slowed me down.

What Keto does for me is allow me to control my urge to binge.

(karen) #38

Shhh shhh, no stress. :relaxed:

I totally agree that satiety is essential to successful keto. I adore the concept of my body being in stasis and telling me what it wants. It’s just not a viable argument in a debate about whether a calorie is a calorie or not. To have a ‘pure’ experiment you have to input the same number of calories into the system and somehow keep as many controllable variables like exercise and temperature the same as possible and see if there is a difference in body weight / fat percentage over time. (No this isn’t a practical real world n=1 experiment, just the only way to scientifically draw a conclusion about whether a calorie is a calorie or not. If anyone every got the diet right for mice the result might make a very convincing argument one way or the other.)

@OldDoug , I agree that some degree of this is wishful calorie magic thinking, but I’m more convinced than I used to be that some of it isn’t.

(Alec) #39

This. Oh, fuckit, I did it again! :joy::joy: LeeAnn, will you please start talking bollox, so I can disagree with you a bit?

(TJ Borden) #40

So your argument would be that “satiety” has too broad of a definition? So let’s say for the sake of keto that we’re talking about “to” and NOT “beyond”