To women in particular, who are under great stress to ‘look like what men want’ but not to achieve in life on their own. And whose hormones are not male hormones. Men are not women. Proof, let’s kick each other as hard as we can in the crotch and see who comes out just fine.
I am not an internal combustion engine.
I am also damaged from years upon years of very low calorie diets. If I could go back and murder the doctor who put me on one, I absolutely would. Kinda hard to stay carnivore in prison, but … it would still be worth it.
No argument that there is societal BS at work, that women are held to unequal standards, often, that it’s not really an overall playing field, that food processors and marketers often make misleading claims if not outright false ones, that the money-motivated medical/food production complex often does not truly have our best interests at heart, etc.
The individual doesn’t exist in a vacuum - we can’t avoid exposure or even influence to the ‘bad’ things. It’s up to us to find out what really is true, and what works for us.
Yes all of them did if they did it long enough… Well maybe not ashes, per se, there are other burial methods…
If someone ate N calories calculated from something and they stopped losing, they stopped having a deficit too. We can’t make energy from nothing or pure air and light.
And if one thinks CO is constant, well I can’t say anything to that ignorance… It’s hard enough to have a proper discussion with smarter, open-minded people…
I remember reading a tongue in cheek piece in which Bill Bryson used Stephen J. Gould’s interpretation of law of conservation to explain why Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption justified his over-indulgence in Thanksgiving pecan pie. Physics, a wonderful thing. +:volcano:=0
No, that quote was near verbatim. As I said, he states that calories do matter but that CICO does not hold true. Is he denying that energy has to be accounted for? No. He is saying that measuring what goes in (CI) does not have a straight relation to what energy is stored or used by the body (CO).
Yes and it explicitly covers that open systems can exchange matter with the surroundings.
This is a ketogenic forum so lets follow that path. In ketosis ketones may be “wasted” through breath and/or otherwise be excreted by the body. A unit of ketones has roughly the same caloric energy as the same unit of glucose. Those wasted calories of ketones (Bikman says can be typically 2-300 calories a day) are simply lost from the open system of the body.
There are multiple studies which show a progressive reduction in basal metabolic rate with calorie deficit over time.
Type 1 diabetics know that they can eat anything to excess and not put on weight if they (dangerously) under dose with insulin.
So, we have one form of CICO for a SAD diet and another for a ketogenic diet and another for calorie restriction and another for type 1 diabetics. And so on to the point where CICO becomes meaningless as a predictor of anything metabolism related. Broad brush yes, detail no.
Eat less, move more must be one of the most stupid pieces of advice offered (again Bikman talks at length on this) but one which CICO adherents repeatedly offer as “science”.
I agree kind of everything whatever @OldDoug wrote.
It’s so odd to me that people don’t understand very well written, to me obvious things.
CICO just… Exists. It’s our reality. It’s very complex as our body is complex.
Our appetite has nothing to do with its validity at all. We even can lose fat (or not) while starving and suffering and while being super satiated all day. They are very different things.
WHAT we eat may be very important regarding satiation (most of us aren’t like my SO who eats N calories and almost no matter what, they will satiate him for 8 somewhat active hours. carbs with carbs work awesome for him) but in the end, it’s CICO just the same. We can’t avoid it. But fine, don’t believe us. For our fat-loss it doesn’t matter a thing if we believe things. It doesn’t matter if we track macros. Only the complicated end result CI and CO numbers. NOT the eaten calories. NOT the calculated by brainless calculators “TDEE” guesstimation. No, two mysterious number we may or may not have some vague idea about it.
Some people still can use some “I should eat N calories” info with success but yep, not everyone and this alone helps about nothing despite I must be such a person. Yeah, I pretty much know I would slim down easily while eating 1600 kcal almost every day (carbs don’t seem to matter for my body but it would be low-carb anyway as I need my protein and some fat and not much room for carbs), and? It doesn’t make it any more possible.
I need a method. It’s the main thing anyway, finding our sweet spot woe. Whatever CI and CO does. There are a bunch of complex things in our body and most of us never will know about most of it. It’s fine, I don’t need to know, only my body need to know what to do, how to work. I just need to figure out a good method and I pretty much did, now I try to figure out how to realize it (and tweak if I am wrong and it’s still not as good as I thought ;)).
We can’t simplify things in general. Some people can, they skip a meal and voila, smooth quick fat-loss until becoming slim. But people are so very different and no method works for all. Keto doesn’t make us slim in general. It happens to some and not to others. Eating “little”, whatever it means and especially eating less (less than what?) doesn’t make one slim down. Some do, others don’t. Eating more fat makes one lose fat, others gain fat, my body doesn’t care and stays the same. We just can’t say THIS will work. Well eating at a deficit works unless one breaks down but it doesn’t really help as it easily may be impossible, easily may trigger something unhealthy and we don’t know how much food that means to begin with. And it’s impossible for people like me too. No, we should focus on health and the right method and not just “eating less”. Unless we like simplicity and we can do it and it brings success. Many people are like that. I may use all my tricks and do my best and it STILL isn’t enough. Keto never was nearly enough. IF is basic, of course I overeat like crazy on it without trying. We just all need to find a way and some people finds it with the simplest, stupidest, not working for most people CICO interpretation and some need way more effort, huge woe changes and who knows what else.
But everyone should get a good woe. It doesn’t matter if they can stay slim and satiated eating sugary cake, we should aim to have a healthy woe.
And then they complain that the scale isn’t dropping, even though their clothes are getting looser, lol!
Well, there’s the scientifically rigourous statement and there’s the implied meaning of the statement, as used by authorities to advise us (basically they mean that if we can’t lose “weight” on a high-carb diet, it’s because we are lazy and slothful). Clearly, a large part of the discussion in this thread is people arguing at cross purposes. Some of us are arguing against the stated dietary advice from the government and other authoritative bodies, and other people are saying, “But science!”
It doesn’t matter if someone understands how things work from a scientific point of view, if the statement as it stands is being used incorrectly by other people who think they are advising us how to stop being sick and fat, and by commercial interests trying to preserve their market share by telling us it’s okay to eat their edible food-like substances, because “a calorie is a calorie.”
It’s the constellation of incorrect advice that needs to be fought. If “all that we need to do” is to eat less and move more, why didn’t I lose weight on my high-carb diet, when I ate less and moved more? And why did I lose weight effortlessly on my ketogenic diet by not eating less and by not moving more (and why did I lose fat only, while gaining some lean mass)? So it’s clear that CICO when used as standard dietary advice doesn’t work, even if it is, strictly speaking, in accordance with scientific principles.
And it’s part of CO.
When we say “CICO always works”, we must include every complex things of the human body, this too. Or else we are very wrong. I doubt I lose much energy this way as eating more carbs and less calories always worked better (well, it was one time only but still) and eating the same amount of calories did the same on and off keto but we know stories, it happens. (My body throws away several hundreds of kcals if I overeat and I don’t even know what it does with it as I never feel more energetic or warm. I feel usual. I just don’t gain even if I seriously overeat for months. And CICO stands as always, obviously my CI and CO is about the same. Eating much more with the same activity doesn’t equal weigh-gain, why would it? The body has ways to lose or use up more energy, that’s fine. Or less energy than before for the same thing. Making energy from nothing, it can’t do that.)
It’s confusing that people think about different things when talking about CICO.
I don’t consider it so important that everyone know all these things, CO is a complex thing reduced to an amount of energy and it’s a mystery either way I only can “calculate” it from my fat-loss and energy intake and it involves the belief that I use up what I eat, my data is right - and it may just change a lot the next day. We can’t know our CO, it’s a complex mystery.
But one may experience that it’s stable enough that there is N calories that pretty much works. They can’t tell how big fat-loss it gives as there are inaccuracies but for some people it works. For my SO skipping a not small meal works, he doesn’t even know his CI, he just eats significantly less than at his tiny maintenance range and it works effectively. But this is the simplest case, for many people it just isn’t this simple. But if one can do like this and it works for them, why not? They just shouldn’t say it works for everyone but we know even smart people tend to generalize
Actually I am describing how the human body works. The metabolism adjusts to cope with caloric intake, and thus maintaining a caloric deficit becomes increasingly difficult. And most diet studies have shown that eventually (often around the one-year mark), people give in to their hunger and start to eat again. And not only is the weigh loss erased, but people typically end up weighing more than they did at their starting point. What gluttons and sloths they turned out to be, when they could have stayed thin by simply remaining hungrier and hungrier all their lives!
Of course there is only so much metabolic adjustment that can be made. At some point, when food intake is truly inadequate, the body starts cannibalising itself, and eventually life ceases, if the lack of nutrition is enforced. I’m thinking of the concentration-camp victims of the Nazis during World War II, and of hunger strikers in prison. I can’t imagine how much self-discipline it takes to starve oneself to death, but the concentration-camp inmates were deliberately overworked and deprived of food and thus had no choice.
And this is also why, on a ketogenic diet eaten to satiety, the metabolism increases to match the caloric intake.
Again, of course, there are limits, but the limits seem to be pretty broad in both directions. So a little fasting doesn’t kill us, and some people have been documented to eat 3000-5000 calories and still shed fat. It’s clearly not just a matter of eating less and moving more, as the authorities—and a naive interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics—would have us believe.
Agreed. One might as well consider ketogenic diets and forget about the “low carbohydrate” part.
If you actually have the quote or can tell us where he says it, that would help. Meanwhile, I cannot believe he says that CICO does not hold true; it obviously does. There are multiple cases with CICO. Presumptions that ignoring CO are proper or that CI necessarily determines CO are nonsensical. Bikman’s not going to do that.
Of course what goes in doesn’t have a straight relationship to the amounts that are stored versus used. CO is a variable. There’s nothing in there that “goes against CICO.” There are multiple cases with CICO - just think about it. If we’re talking about weight, people can stay the same, gain or lose.
Okay - and same deal - intake, storage, usage, waste - that’s it.
No. There is always one CICO for a given person at a given time. Of course we can gain weight, lose or stay the same; CICO is variable, after all. Nobody is pretending that CICO predicts all the details of one’s metabolism; there obviously is not enough information given for that. CICO is a state, nothing more.
That’s a silly mishmash of half-truths, at best. “Eat less, move more” works just fine for lots of people. If you want to talk about the cases where it does not, fine, but how about stating things correctly, then?
Keto works just fine for lots of people, too. In both cases, if weight loss is desired, then configuring CICO so that CI < CO does the trick (eating ketogenically has been known to do this). Being logical and rational about things where external, objective truth applies isn’t a bad thing.
If ‘authorities’ or otherwise are wrong, then there’s no point in debating from their point of view. The argument is not that the gov’t, food processors/sellers, etc., always give perfect advice for everybody. Nobody is saying that in this thread.
I don’t see anyone claiming that “science” means, for example, that the gov’t is always right. But it darn sure means that CICO does apply.
Well, the premise was that it would be maintained. You’re talking about the directly opposite situation where it’s not maintained. Why shift the goalposts? It’s a very simple question, as with kib1 saying, “It’s taking the premise that a calorie deficit of 500 a day results in a loss of 50 pounds in a year.”
It’s not always a matter of eating less and moving more; agreed. But being rational and logical about the math and physics is not being “naive,” it’s being realistic and truthful.
It seems to me that people are talking over each other here. Doug has it down, but Doug is looking at the physics of CICO while most others are using BAD advice that confused people without understanding use to defend poor food choices by invoking CICO.
These are different things, the physics, and the way people misrepresent or misinterpret the concept of CICO. Continuallly bringing up Eat Less Move More is NOT CICO, it is bad advice from people Taking bad advice and blaming CICO is not appropriate. Saying CICO is valid but people who use those expressions are bastardizing the concept might be more appropriate.
But we talked about these too… So it’s pretty clear that Doug and me both talk about the right CICO with its complexities, not the “if you eat N kcals when N is less than the estimated TDEE, you will lose fat, no matter what”. That is a stupid simplification and clearly wrong in many cases. But works for others.
Just like some people use some oversimplified wrong CICO definition, some people are against the importance in calories for some reason and thinks keto necessarily causes people losing fat when they have much to lose. Nope, that’s a very simple wrong thing just the same.
People should look at facts, experience and imagine that not everyone’s body works the same. It’s very common that people say general statements based their own (and many other people’s) experience but it’s not the full picture. And it feels especially wrong for people like me who can’t lose fat just because eating very low-carb but “eating less” works each and every time (if less is compared to my minimum maintenance calories at that time, not just what I had previously. when I maintained since years and started to eat way less, I didn’t lose any as I still ate too much, staying in my apparently quite big maintenance range. I had no idea about my TDEE and my maintenance range at that point so it was experimenting and trying to eat as little as comfortably possible for a while. I didn’t need to worry about eating too little).
I am very interested about people’s experiences regarding fat-loss, satiation and other things related to their woe and goals and those are all over the place so I never think very closed-mindedly about these. I can accept than we work in various amazing, sometimes unbelievable ways.
My understanding of weight gain and loss deepened enormously once I understood and was able to reconcile both of these points in my mind.
Regarding the CO part, I have come to believe that the body’s ability to regulate metabolism based on available energy also applies to people in ketosis. Most people lose weight at first (probably due to CICO), but at some point, metabolism adjusts so as to not keep wasting energy from ketones. The result is a stall or gaining back weight even when following the ketogenic WOE strictly. Well, that’s what happened to me.
At some point, the body is (almost surely) going to try and conserve energy, or - as you note - it gets more efficient with ketones and burns less fat - whether from starvation-avoidance response or just because it’s gotten better with all the signalling, transport and usage of ketones. We tend to be fearfully good machines as far as efficiency, or at least it sure feels that way when we want to lose weight.
In general, we know that it tends to be harder to lose as we get leaner. If I have 100 lbs to lose, then the first 10 will usually be easier than the middle 10, and far easier than the last 10. From what I’ve seen, women have a harder time with stalls and a slowing-down of weight loss than men, on average.
When fasting, some of the same things apply. The lower one’s percentage of body fat is, the harder the average perceived effort tends to be, and a higher percentage of protein usage versus fat usage results.
As individuals, there is wide variability, and we have our own ‘curves’ (no pun intended) as far as the processes and procedures during weight loss. Some people struggle most of the way through; every kilogram or pound being a hard-fought battle. Others essentially go right down to their goal weight, or even below it, with little resistance or slowing. Most of us are somewhere between those extremes.
I remember a guy who hasn’t posted here for 4 years and 4 months.
That’s pretty lean - 6’4" 165 lbs or 1.93 meters 75 kg. I was surprised at the lack of struggle it seemed to have been for him, from the above and his other posts.
That’s the question that intrigued Gary Taubes when he was writing Good Calories, Bad Calories. Even people who are morbidly obese don’t gain weight uncontrollably. And Taubes put the arithmetic in the book: to gain 20 lbs. (about 9 kg) in ten years requires eating no more than one extra bite of food a day. So why do some people never get fat no matter what or how much they eat, while others still get fat while starving themselves? Taubes quotes a researcher who was studying a particular strain of mice bred for obesity, to the effect that, "These animals don’t get fat from overeating; they get fat if they eat at all" (emphasis mine).
Paul, thank goodness for whatever metabolism-increasing mechanisms we have. I gained an average of 5 lbs a year, for a lot of years, when there were weeks where I had the intake to justify it, were we to only think about calories in. Didn’t have any trouble staying warm…
No. It’s the physical reality of the situation.
+:volcano:=0
I only can “calculate” it from my fat-loss and energy intake and it involves the belief that I use up what I eat, my data is right - and it may just change a lot the next day. We can’t know our CO, it’s a complex mystery.
Intake, storage, usage, waste - that’s it, right?