Fast Answer to the CICO Contingent

(TJ Borden) #41

So if you’re not tracking all the time to know exactly where you are in regards to calories, how do you know when to stop eating?

(Alec) #42

Oh not this one again. I call your internet definition bollox and raise you my internet definition bollox:

‘Satiety is a state of being completely full, but the related adjective satiated is much more commonly used to describe someone who has eaten enough.”

Call me?

(karen) #43

“Satisfied” and “sated” are considered a synonym for satiated, in general terms. I would call this the Enough Point. “Satiated” is considered the equivalent of “saturated” in biochemistry, in other words the solution cannot hold one more molecule of substance x in suspension. I’d be more likely to use the former when talking about food, although who knows, maybe the body of a hunter-gatherer yelled out “eat every bit you can stuff in”!

(Karl) #44

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re making the assertion that “Keto” is better than “MFP-brand CICO” for everyone, assuming all things are equal. That to me doesn’t really make any more sense than the closed-system first law of thermodynamics in the way people try to apply it to human metabolism.

See, to me, saying that the first law applies exactly-as-stated falls flat - in the same way that Gary Taubes explains how someone got rich (they spent less than they made in the form of income). Technically correct from the 30,000ft view, but it’s far more nuanced than that. If you take the hard-nosed approach like that, then you’ll have EVERYONE believing that it’s really easy to be both rich and thin :slight_smile:

Sadly, there’s no quick answer to this argument - except to say that the only somewhat consistently controllable variable is how much you eat.

For some, MFP-style CICO is fine and sustainable and doable for a liftetime. For me, it’s pure misery. And you’ll find plenty of other levels of sustainability (or lack thereof) between them. But the reasons for that sustainability or lack thereof are wide and varied (exercise, insulin resistance, food sensitivities, hormonal issues, what have you).

(Doug) #45

On one hand, I think that the true “CICO contingent” won’t be swayed by talk of magic. :wink:

On the other, for we people here it likely boils down to philosophy, and I don’t think it much matters. Some things will not be easily explained, or perhaps not explained at all. If things are going in the desired direction - if we’re not gaining weight when we don’t want to, if we’re getting more insulin sensitive, if we’re gaining lean mass and/or losing fat, if our metabolisms are not slowing - then all is well, regardless of what we may ascribe things to.

I fully agree that our consciousnesses and practices won’t always add things up as we think they should.

Hey, my own ‘magic’ story is only gaining 5 lbs. per year, for 30 years, when there were vast numbers of weeks where I should have gained 5 lbs.

(Alec) #46

Good luck with that. I hope it works for you. I know it didn’t for me.

(TJ Borden) #47

Now that book would sell. :grin:

(Alec) #48

I have found it very hard to be either! :shushing_face:

(TJ Borden) #49

So Gandalf might not be the best mascot for Keto?

(karen) #50

I think maybe we’ve had this discussion before. :grin:

If you take the total weight of a glass box with a human in it and leave him in there until he starves to death (let’s say you occasionally trade out equal weight of CO2 and oxygen so he doesn’t suffocate), the weight of the box won’t change one iota. The weight of the human will change a lot. If you add a certain weight of food to the box, the weight of the box will change by the amount of food you add, only. Again, the weight of the human is variable, the weight of the box is not. Will the weight of the human be different depending on the content of the food you add?

(Alec) #51

If I was being held captive in a box, I would graze on carbs as much as possible to elongate my life by increasing bodyfat.

(Karl) #52

Don’t recall having this discussion, but it’s possible :slight_smile: I think the topic is fascinating for sure.

As to that experiment, the big variable is metabolism, right? I mean - when you metabolize food into whatever your body wants to do with it, I would assume a part of that food would be used to synthesize whatever it required for its own purposes, some of it would go to waste, a certain level of fat might be burned off and breathed out, etc. So I have to assume that the weight of the human could be widely variable - at least that’s my knee-jerk answer.

(karen) #53

Yes, precisely. My big question … let’s now torture a pair of identical twins.
If you put, say, 2000 calories of carbohydrate into the box of one twin, and 2000 calories of fat into the box of the other, would there be a difference in weight of body fat in these two people after time? In each box, what would the incoming calories be converted into and how much of that weight would stay in the body. If CICO is actually true, the two people should have exactly the same percentage of body fat, or if we assume there is no difference in the energy used to metabolize these calories they should have the exact same body weight. Would they??

(TJ Borden) #54

I know a set of twins and one is a vegan… let me see if I can get them into boxes

(Karl) #55

Let’s say you got the answer definitively for that set of twins. The experiment makes me ask myself “Am I asking the right question?” Because I think you could get a completely new set of twins and get a potentially different outcome. I mean, isn’t this basically what Ancel Keys kind of did? He found a swath of people who had heart attacks with high fat diets, but then kind of ignored the populations that didn’t despite the fact they too had high-fat diets?

I think I see your point, but I still feel the glass-box test is too narrow to definitively say low-carb is unequivocally better than low-fat (or any other diet for that matter) for all people.

(karen) #56

Ok. :blush:

I’ll agree, I’m looking for continuity and mice would make a better if less entertaining glass box experiment. And you’re right, I doubt every twin or every mouse would point to the same answer. Mice probably can’t even point. Nothing works for everyone. But I would love to see if there was some observable link between type of calorie ingested and weight / body fat percentage, if the majority of subjects swayed the conclusion one way or the other.

– What I take away from the Ancel Keys study is that he was a horrible scientist, from a technical standpoint. The point of scientific method is to disprove your hypothesis, come up with a different explanation, try to disprove that and so on until you have something you can’t disprove, then let your peers have a crack at it. He basically disproved his hypothesis and then cheated until it looked like he hadn’t. So what he basically proved wasn’t that high fat is ok for some people and not others, he proved that there is no observable correlation - and then buried the data.

(Jay AM) #57

This might help a bit with your glass box. Minus dead people.

(Jay AM) #58

That’d be one to explain to the police later.

(Karl) #59

…and there’s the problem, obviously. And I totally agree - that would be a fascinating test. I doubt it would ever get funded. I think you’d see more money thrown at the testers just to BURY it. :slight_smile:

Also, when I say that your test makes me wonder if I’m asking the right question - it’s because I’m not sure it really matters if one wins over the other. Not when the BIGGER question in my mind is whether a human is happy doing it.

Case in point, my wife can do the calorie-counting thing all day long, eat mostly carbs, and be completely content doing it. I go batshit crazy. Let’s say my wife and I switched diets for the duration of this test: She adopts my High-fat-low-carb ways, and I adopt her mostly-carb ways. Now we’re both miserable for the science of it, and let’s say it turns out her way makes me lose more weight… It’s still not sustainable if i’m miserable :slight_smile: In the end, the test would only give “academic” data. It’s not valueless data, but it would become valueless to me if I couldn’t apply the academic data to actual life without being a miserable bastard :slight_smile:

(TJ Borden) #60

It does make me think of that old joke of how you prove dog is man’s best friend:

Put your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car. Open it up after a half hour and see which one is happy to see you.