Refuting CICO platitudes

#61

Yeah, I had this experience the other day in a (usually quite lovely) group. A poster put up a pic of her breakfast - some kind of commercial cereal in milk, fruit on top, big glass of OJ on the side - and commented with horror that her doctor had said that this was not a particularly good meal for weight loss!! How could that be?? A few enlightened folks gently agreed with her doctor’s observation and tried to explain to the OP the basics about carbs and insulin … and then the dietician brigade arrived and they were Not. Happy. At. All. that someone else was stomping over their precious territory. Oi vey. The mods had to turn off the comments pretty quickly after that. :roll_eyes:

(Jack Bennett) #62

Uh oh, somebody dared to disparage hearthealthywholegrains? Can’t have that!

Also, I find it really strange that dieticians are still on the pro-juice train. Doesn’t literally everybody say now that they are essentially sugar water? They are almost identical to soda except that they happen to have come from a fruit instead of a stalk of sugar cane. With no fiber, juice digests very rapidly and spikes blood glucose. Even from the CICO point of view, they are essentially empty calories with no satiety.

(Megan) #63

I recently watched a food doco where wholegrains were talked about as really unhealthy to eat b/c they block the absorbsion of a lot of nutrients, or something. The person being interviewed said the talk about them being good for us is nothing but a marketing ploy.

(Doug) #64

I don’t think that’s actually CICO. That’s just looking at ‘calories’ in - food processors aren’t pronouncing on ‘calories out,’ are they?

For some people, calories really are fungible - don’t most of us know somebody who seems to be able to eat anything, as much as they want, without weight gain? In some areas of our planet it’s common to eat an extraordinarily high-carbohydrate diet, and it’s not like everybody there gets metabolically messed-up, fat, etc.

On not eating too much - well, even for those of us like me for whom calories (among the different macronutrients) really are not equal in effect, due to insulin resistance, the root cause is that I ate too much. If, as I believe the case is, it’s because I ate too much carbohydrate, then so be it.

A ‘large egg’ (from chickens) has 70 or 80 calories. 200 grams or 7 ounces of Coca-Cola has 70 or 80 calories. If somebody actually believes that these are going to be the same for all people, everywhere, then that’s pretty silly.

I see some different contexts at work. To start with, CICO isn’t saying that all calories are necessarily equal. It’s saying, “Here’s what’s going in and what’s going out.”

And for many people, they are substantially equal. Most of the world’s people are not fat. Some eat an extremely high-carbohydrate diet and do fine.

And of course in the context of metabolic damage, insulin resistance, etc., calories may be decidedly unequal in effect. By and large I think that’s true for most people on this forum. But CICO isn’t saying the calories are one thing or another.

Ha! :smile: At least usually true. And here, as always, CICO applies and is operating. Another 10 cookies is going to change the ‘calories in,’ after all.

If only people would realize this. :+1:

#65

I couldn’t keep up with all the interesting threads here in these days…

Both are important but I experienced almost all the time that what I eat very seriously influence how much I eat… Timing is the other big factor but I can say carby things I could eat in insane amounts without changing in my appetite or satiation and some very good food is just impossible for me to overeat, at least in one sitting…
But we know this. So many people overeat like crazy on certain (possibly all unless the super low-cal items) carbs, probably most of us have those items. Carbs (on keto too if I go too high with the non-animal ones) change me in weird ways and it affects my energy intake quite much. Or did, I actually have a theory that it doesn’t work like that anymore, it’s amazing how extreme low-carb times affect my occasional carby days… I would need to stay on higher-carb to lose this and have satiation problems again.

And we know that many people who lose fat on keto actually eat significantly less, automatically. This is a simple case, I am aware there are more interesting ones and no wonder, the human body is quite complex.

Healthywholegrains are SACRED. Once I very, very seriously upset a poor vegan when I told them that I don’t eat grains at all (he had problems with my animal eating too and I was almost a vegetarian back then, meat only a few times a year…). The actual topic was vegetarian paleo so I don’t even understood what is their problem but they just appeared there with their infinite wisdom about grains. (I love the proper, nice, maybe even open-minded vegans but I really dislike some other types… I didn’t talk to that vegan, I commented about the paleo trial of a vegetarian person. So I wasn’t a bit confused about the attack on my woe. Oh well. I learned that grains are something really Basic, Vital and Essential for some groups and it’s a huge sin if others don’t consume them regularly. Or at all.)

I personally have nothing against whole grains until the one in question handles them well. And someone doesn’t start to talk about why they are absolutely sacred and good while not whole grains are from the Devil. I even have some knowledge about the differences (it matters a lot in some circumstances) but still, it’s not THAT much. IMO.

I always consider “as much as they want” a very important thing here. Many super thin people eat as much as they want so they don’t get my others get obese. And they want very little, no wonder they don’t even have a healthy weight.
I don’t know how the average person’s CO changes if they eat way more, just that a very big percentage of the population can get off with very much extra food without weight gain. I think I am like that - or I gain so super slowly that I can’t see it in just a few months. Or I did, I don’t overeat very seriously all the time since I left high-carb and my body surely changed since then.
I believe (except some weird health conditions) that everyone have some limit where they do gain but it may be very hard to eat that much and they just don’t do it. But maybe I am wrong, most people still should be like that.
Many, many people seem to gain if they just eat a bit more than their normal maintenance calories. My SO is like that, poor thing. Less exercise or more food, he immediately starts gaining and it just continues… The opposite if he exercises more or eats less. He could be the mascot of simple CICO. And as I said, I am the other one. I add several kcal and nothing. But when I seriously overate all the time for a year, I did gain 1 kg. I never was slim, maybe some slim persons truly can eat twice their normal energy need without gaining, I can imagine that… But in many cases one just can’t eat enough to gain when they have this “raised CI? raise the CO accordingly” type of body. It was hard work for me to gain as well - but carbs made me hungry and wanting so I had a very serious drive to eat really much while I wasn’t vain at all, my joy was more important and I felt quite healthy. My country encouraged big feasts too, almost everyone ate HCHF as well… I had no idea there is any other way for very long!

So, some people easily gain while others not so much. It’s wonderful to have a pretty big wriggle room (and it worked on HCHF, maybe I am super lucky or is it normal? I don’t know). I would be totally doomed without it. Still, wasteful eating isn’t something I want to continue but I am working on it and it seems to work now.

#66

The body’s tendency to adapt its metabolism to what we eat seems near impossible to fight for many of us. I think it happens even on a ketogenic diet. I’ve noticed many (like me) lose weight only to gain it back a year or so later (while staying in ketosis and not changing their diet).

I lost about 10 of the 15 pounds I wanted to lose by the first 8 months, stayed there for about a month, but then slowly gained all but a couple of pounds back by the next year. I am coming on 3 years being in ketosis. I think I am healthier, and – yes – I think I have more lean body mass, but my post-menopausal, female body just does not want to weigh less!

#67

refutations of the CICO hypothesis. The Vermont Prison Study. An n=20 in Canada some years back (I can’t find it right now) where 10 200 pound women and 10 120 pound women were locked in an empty hospital, and their food was identical, the leftovers weighed and analyzed. At the end of 3 weeks, the average calorie consumption was the same over the two groups, they’d availed themselves of exercise equipment the same number of minutes, and the 200 pound women were still 200 pounds, and the 120 pound women were still 120 pounds. If there was any validity at all to CICO, the 200 pound women, “acting like thin women” would have shed five or six pounds. They didn’t. Every observational study of people at restaurants, college dorms, show that fat and thin people eat much the same quantity and calories.

My N=-1 is that I can maintain a pretty high weight --230 pound-- at 1450 calories per day on whole foods, moderate carb eating. If I drop the carbs to 20, I can eat 1650 calories and shed an average of six pounds per month. So MORE calories = weight loss for me, if the macros are right. My fasting blood sugar has never been over 100 in my life.

Sure, doctors have always told me I’m lying and am non-compliant, or too stupid to use a measuring cup or kitchen scale, but they’re idiots who have less education than I and haven’t even read my chart (where a hint of the 'why" is right there in my medical history.) I don’t see doctors any longer unless it’s for a break, sprain, or mysterious blood gushing from where it shouldn’t.

Of course starvation makes most people thinner. Part of what they lose is heart muscle tissue, so if you have the money and the food available, you shouldn’t self-starve.

CICO is wrong for those of us who fatten easily. Period.

(Doug) #68

No, because there’s no data there on the subjects resting energy expenditure, etc. It’s no big trick to stay the same weight for 3 weeks, whether you’re 200 lbs or 120 lbs. Let’s nail down the “calories out” part - then and only then can we identify what’s going on. But we should be able to guess. :wink:

Let’s say that’s true. Then, is there a reason that some people weigh 200, and some weigh 120? Probably so. And the same things going on would easily account for maintaining the same weight over 3 weeks, for both groups.

No problem; very plausible. A likely explanation is that lower carbs leads to lower insulin and greater accessing of stored fat. Isn’t that the very premise behind ketogenic diets for fat loss (especially in cases of insulin-resistant subjects)? Rather than the body being locked in fat storage mode due to high insulin, the body actually goes in the opposite direction. This increases ‘calories out’ - on a net basis, all the external calories eaten are being used up, and some are also being taken from fat stores. “Calories out” has been increased. As always, CICO shows the way - what happens if CI < CO? Weight loss happens. Ketogenic diets (and any diets that result in weight loss) work because of CICO, not in some magical circumventing of the physical laws of the universe.

That’s really not true. The Russians studied people who had literally starved to death, and the average amount of heart muscle lost was only 3%. Huge numbers of people fast for 3 weeks, or 40 days, etc. - even quite a few months among really obese subjects. In the famous case of Angus Barbieri, he fasted for more than a year, went from 456 lbs to 180, and was just fine.

(KM) #69

How about this as a platitude-busting platitude: If CICO were really the end of the story, with a daily deficit of 500 calories most of us could fit our body mass in a shoebox by year 7.

(Doug) #70

CI < CO = weight loss.
CI = CO = stay the same.
CI > CO = weight gain.

Nobody is saying it’s “the end of the story.” Especially on a forum like this, hormonal effects are known.

However, let’s say one maintains that 500 calorie deficit. Is not body mass going to continue to decline?

(KM) #71
  1. The op is how to refute CICO to ordinary people. YES, people say it’s the end of the story. That’s the whole point of why we’re having this discussion, to brainstorm SIMPLE ways to argue our point with the general public.

It’s taking the premise that a calorie deficit of 500 a day results in a loss of 50 pounds in a year. If so, seven years of skipping Cokes would result in 350 pounds lost.

  1. Again, the point is that people take CO as a fixed number. Predicated on that idea, yes your body mass would actually continue to decrease until you were invisible, given a 500 calorie deficit. This is a very simple Logical way of making it obvious that CO is not a fixed number, as no one has been reduced to ashes by a 500 calorie deficit and even people who refuse to examine science would have to agree with that.
(Doug) #72

‘Platitudes’ are often in the moral realm, but here we are… :slightly_smiling_face:

There is no “refuting CICO” (to anybody). It operates, it applies; the physical laws of our universe are just that way.

In reality, it is the end of the story, as far as it goes, because it’s just a statement of quantities, it’s part of an equation. There are the two variables, and then there’s what happens.

Realizing that there is the “bottom line” with respect to the energy balance is not the same thing as saying that “It doesn’t matter what you eat.” Of course it matters what we eat.

Aren’t you denying your own premise there? I.e., that 500 calorie deficit isn’t going to be maintained.

In practice, lots of people start dieting to try and lose weight, almost always fat, specifically. If they just “cut calories” then often they end up reducing their metabolism (the body trying to hold on to energy) and/or they just get tired or sick of it, feel deprived etc. So what happens? They don’t keep up a caloric deficit. Or they end up with a caloric surplus, and then - wonder of wonders - they gain weight. No magic here; this is just CICO in action, and nobody should be surprised.

Well, people do a lot of silly things. :smile:

People have indeed starved to death. What’s the mystery? And of course CO is not necessarily fixed.

CI and CO are variables. It makes no sense to say that CO is fixed. It makes no sense to say that ‘calories don’t matter.’

#73

Is anyone denying the physical laws of our universe? What I see are people misapplying very specific laws to inappropriate systems. The most common in the whole CICO "argument being reference to “the laws of thermodynamics”. In this case the inference is that CICO follows the first law: total energy in a closed system is neither lost nor gained — it is only transformed. Or stated another way: the energy gained (or lost) by a system is equal to the energy lost (or gained) by its surroundings.

Except that the human body isn’t a closed system. It is an open system.

It seems to me that CICO brings out the same sort of fervour and lack of understanding that one can see in veganism.

Personally I bow to the knowledge that people such as Prof Bikman possess, someone who is an actual metabolic scientist of international renown, not just some guy on the internet. He says and I’m quoting from memory here, that of course calories matter but anyone who tries to strictly apply a CICO model to human metabolism is a moron.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #74

No, because it’s a moving target. As the metabolism slows, the person has to eat even less to keep maintaining the deficit, and at some point the body rebels, hunger becomes intolerable, and the person eats and regains not only any weight lost, but more. Not to mention that, as Kevin Hall showed, too extreme a regimen runs the risk of permanently damaging the metabolism.

Furthermore, some of the lost weight will have been muscle, because on a standard diet the excess glucose still causes insulin to inhibit lipolysis in the fat cells, keeping fatty acids trapped there. It’s not as though randomly cutting calories automatically tells the body where to take the weight from. And since skeletal muscle is a large part of what uses energy in the body (after the brain), reducing skeletal muscle in effect reduces the “calorie sink,” as it were, thus making it more difficult to maintain any further caloric deficit the person might try to maintain.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #75

Doug, I think you are thinking too much like a physicist and not enough like a nutrition researcher. “Calories in, calories out” as a mantra, was formulated over a century ago (when that was all scientists knew how to measure) and is used in such a way as to avoid dealing with the nuances of how the human body actually uses its food intake. As Phinney likes to say, “We are not what we eat, we are what our body does with what we eat.”

The point of “calories in, calories out,” and “eat less, move more”* is that it is not supposed to make any difference what foods we eat, just cutting calories is enough to lose weight. But that’s not the whole story. What prevents the body from cutting muscle along with fat? It’s still weight, after all (which is why using “weight” as a euphemism for “fat” is bad for clarity of thought). But most of us here can testify that this is not a useful long-term strategy, because our bodies don’t respond in the way predicted. On the other hand, what is the problem with a diet that allowed me to shed a significant amount of fat—not muscle—without having to count calories or increase my physical activity, just by eating differently?

*Not to mention “a calorie is a calorie.”

(Doug) #76

Yes - anything that asserts that “calories don’t matter,” for the human body, for example.

The First Law applies to open systems too. The human body is an open system, and both mass and energy transfers take place. The First Law notes that some things are true for a closed system, but in no way does it rule out the application of thermodynamic laws to open systems.

I agree, but I’m guessing not in the way you are proceeding. :smile: What I see are people generalizing from the particular, to a horrendous extent, and pretending that CICO means more than it does. For example, people get ‘religion’ about keto, and the next thing you know they’re denying science and essentially asserting that some ‘magic’ is at work, i.e. “calories don’t matter,” or “calories are irrelevant.”

The truth is that calories are not the end-all of the discussion; of course they’re not. But in no way does that argue against CICO nor the physical realities at work.

Well, you’re wrong about what Bikman says. I’ve never seen him argue against physical reality. He most definitely deals with the different macronutrients, but CICO is not pronouncing on those.

(Robin) #77

I think you two should go next level and bring out the light sabers.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #78

Now there’s where we disagree. CICO has been used against me personally, because of my problems shedding fat on a high-carb diet. I stopped worrying about the caloric content of my diet after listening to a number of lectures by Peter Attia and Stephen Phinney. What I did was to change what I ate, not how much I ate. And that’s when the fat loss started.

At some point my appetite did drop (whereas on a high-carb diet I would regularly stuff my stomach to the literal bursting-point and still want more), but not by much as CICO (as used in the standard dietary advice) would predict, because my metabolism increased along with consumption dropping somewhat. To me, I was still eating all that I wanted; I wasn’t “cutting calories” at all. And then after the main decrease in poundage, there were a further twelve months of recomposition, in which I got thinner but my weight remained stable and my food intake remained unchanged, so obviously I was gaining muscle while shedding fat. That is not supposed to happen, in the mindset that habitually uses CICO to justify its advice.

How did my body know to keep shedding fat and to gain only muscle (and presumably bone density)? By keeping my food intake the same, I should have seen no change, if CICO, “eat less, move more,” and “a calorie is a calorie” were the whole story. And it never, ever happened that I shed fat and gained muscle on a high-carb diet.

To crib from Wikipedia, “In general, the conservation law states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.”

The article further states: “For processes that include transfer of matter, a further statement is needed. When two initially isolated systems are combined into a new system, then the total internal energy of the new system, Usystem, will be equal to the sum of the internal energies of the two initial systems, U1 and U2.” So yes indeed, the system of the universe + the human body neither loses nor gains total energy, but that energy need not remain constant in one subsystem or the other.

This is why a steam locomotive needs more fuel than one might think, because heat is being radiated into the atmosphere. It’s also why we don’t gain weight when we wrap up real tight to prevent our body heat from escaping. Even though such retained heat counts as “energy in” as far as the bodily system is concerned, waste heat cannot be resorbed into the body and made to turn into body weight. It’s these kinds of thoughts that allow me to say that CICO “doesn’t work.” It may not be rigourously scientific, but it reflects lived experience. Context is all.

(Doug) #79

Paul, well - hey, it’s the “Show me the Science” folder, no? :slightly_smiling_face:

Good quote from Phinney. Whatever nuances are at work with our bodies, in the end CICO is still going to be there, no? It’s the end-product of all those nuances.

Once again, there are several things there. I agree with how you characterize the popular take on it. Sometimes, it’s true - that is indeed enough to lose weight. That’s not saying it’s true for everybody. If the context is a given person, or insulin-resistant people as a group, etc., then it’s definitely not going to always be true, and often it’s going to be false.

Certainly not the whole story, but “calories in, calories out” isn’t in defiance of that. Whatever happens with body composition, there’s still a number in and out.

Also agree that using weight and fat totally interchangeable isn’t right., I would say that in practice it usually does not matter - when somebody says, “I want to lose weight,” then they’re almost always talking about fat.

Especially in the ‘Show me the Science’ zone, we should make sure that our statements are strictly correct. Not just correct under some unstated assumptions, or because “It applies to me,” or because “I like this idea…”

“In the way predicted” - CICO is not in opposition to that. It sounds to me like you’re talking about where the ‘calories out’ declines, or things otherwise end up where CI is not less that CO. Yet again - there is no mystery here.

And - Dude - of course there’s nothing wrong with your diet nor the good results you’ve gotten. :+1::smile:

Oh come on, how can you argue with that? :wink:

The truth is that you’re not giving enough information there to raise the specter of the statement being untrue. I grant you that with respect to some bodily processes it’s not always going to be true, i.e. there definitely is more to the story than that.

(Doug) #80

No, we don’t disagree. CICO doesn’t preclude considering the different macronutrients. Bikman obviously does that (considers them), but in no way does that mean that the physical reality of the energy and mass quantities aren’t as they are. The amounts of the different macronutrients can change CICO; if anything that is what we should be focusing on, no? We eat stuff, then there’s usage, storage, and waste. That’s it, right?

‘CICO was used against you’ - wasn’t this just somebody saying something? We know there is more to the story than just ‘calories in’ - I think we can all agree on that. But at the very least, before we in any way say that “CICO is wrong,” we’d have to consider the ‘calories out,’ as well.

Okay, great. The scientific reality doesn’t require that we feel a certain way, or that we want or don’t want to count anything.

It sounds like you’re not talking about CICO, but rather just “cut calories.”

You’re pretending that CICO is something other than what it is. Yes, context is very important. Qualifying our statements properly is very important. Let’s make our statements strictly true.

An enormous amount of things are subjective. Where is there ‘objective, external truth’? Not too many places. Mathematics and physics are among the few.