For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.
This assumes a whole bunch of things. First, do you actually absorb all of the calories through your gut? Does your body maintain the same base rate of expenditure (BMR) in both the short and long term of restriction?
When you look at people who did The Biggest Loser they did the exact thing you are talking about. They had a significant caloric deficit through eating restricting and massive amounts of exercise. In the short term they did lose weight but it also ruined their BMR. Years later they had mostly put the weight back on and had a lower BMR than at the start. It damaged them.
If you lose weight through caloric deficit you may not notice any change but your body will stop prioritising things like your hair and skin, muscle growth, and bone maintenance. All of those are low priority for an organism in caloric deficit. Instead your body will focus on the most important thing, getting more food. You become food obsessed, thinking about it all day, and you will eat almost anything you can access. You also end up with a lower body temperature, less immune activity, and lower drive for exercise and sex. It is an absolute nightmare.
The end result is that calories in calories out assumes a perfect and simple system. It does not take into account things like proton uncoupling in brown fat, differing levels of absorption through digestion, body temperature, hair growth, cell turnover, and tonnes of other things. It can appear to work for a short time but long term it breaks down and deviates more and more from the data.
You do not absorb all the calories. Those, therefore, are part of neither calories in nor out. I make no assumption here. BMR is a closely related topic but doesn’t change the calories in / calories out impact, which is what I am getting at and what most the remainder of your post says.
Nearly all of what you say here is correct and I wouldn’t dispute it. Except the last paragraph. It is, I’m sorry, categorically false. Calories in and out, in fact, simplifies nothing and does take things like brown fat and body maintenance prioritization into account; those simply change those two variables. I’m not saying the systems are simple. I’m saying the amount of carbon atoms absorbed into your body via energy stored in food and drink as one of a few macronutrients less the carbon atoms breathed out via respiration is a fairly accurate account of weight change. Everything else you’re saying is not in dispute. It isn’t easy and it isn’t simply, but calories in / out is not inaccurate, if still reductive.
I disagree, but I think we agree on a lot here.
Colorimetry measures calories in food by burning the food and measuring the amount of heat generated. This is different to what happens in cells for a huge number of reasons, so it isn’t really reasonable to think of it as a good starting point for nutrition. If you take a substrate, say for example a fat, and you use it to make a hormone it is not being burned for energy and thus breaks the calorie in calorie out model. That is a simple way it fails.
I am not saying the disconnect is 100%, I am saying it is not 100% accurate and depending on how disregulated your system is it may be more or less accurate. Someone who is super healthy and of a low body fat percentage with a reasonable amount of muscle mass would probably end up fairly close to CICO for the first few weeks of a dietary change. This is not really in dispute.
The dispute comes from the rest of the population. We have more deranged systems which are less in line with CICO due to metabolic issues like insulin resistance, gut damage, gluten issues like celiac disease, and so on. The more deranged the body the more CICO loses its predictive value and becomes a bludgeon.
When I went to the doctor about my weight they told me to eat less and move more. My insulin resistance was not measured and the dietary recommendations led to more muscle loss and body fat gain. I had tonnes of issues with acne, dandruff, terrible body odor, mild scurvy, and overall ill health. Adding more food that I could actually digest and switching from my broken glucose metabolism to a ketogenic metabolism allowed me to repair damage, absorb vitamins more effectively, and fix all sorts of seemingly minor but overall stressful issues. My caloric intake was higher but I lost excess weight first by dropping glycogen and associated water but then by dropping fat while also gaining muscle. I felt like moving, I wanted to move, so I moved, but it wasn’t willpower driving that like on CICO, it was hormones driving the change in output.
The calories being low led to conserving energy and being depressed and inactive. Adding good calories I could actually use led to more activity along with better mood and brain function. CICO is not a good model for making changes, it is just accounting. If you want to say “this many carbons came in, this many left” that is fine, but there is no why in that and no guidance on what to do from there. If you try changing how many calories go in or go out you shouldn’t be surprised when the self regulating system regulates itself and changes something else, such as making you burn less energy or eat more food.
I can tell we agree on a lot here too. I’m simply saying calories in and out isn’t wrong, it just isn’t the full story. And you’re right to be suspicious of anybody that says it is. It can be a good jumping off point. Like “eat less”. “Great, how do I actually reliably eat less, doc?” The answer there is the nuanced point you are making, about changing how the body responds.
And like you said, the “move more” thing goes out the window if you aren’t able to get your energy out of storage well. One just feels sluggish.
I lost about 30 kg, and that was primarily by just tracking what I ate. Even just knowing is helpful for accountability.
Yeah, it is like saying “Recessions are caused by GDP reducing for at least two consecutive quarters”. I mean, yes, that does describe what a recession is, but it says little about what the cause of a recession is. In the same way, having less fat in storage is the way you lose body fat, but the mechanisms of actually making that happen are way more complex and trying to reduce it to eat less move more is unhelpful.
It is inaccurate, food manufacturers are allowed about 20% error margin when measuring calories. Calories have nothing to do with what our bodies do with the material we eat, since everything is a chemical process and we aren’t closed systems. When we mobilize fat we create ketone bodies which are exhaled in our breathing, how do you propose to measure ‘caloric expenditure’ then? It is far too reductive.
Calories on a label are not the calories in the metabolic equation, so I don’t see how that is relevant here. Calories in are calories absorbed by the body, which is some subset of those taken in. Some come right back out the other side; we don’t count those. To say calories have nothing to do with it is bonkers to me. It is precisely the chemical process to which you refer. When we expend energy / heat / calories, we get that from food and drink. Yes, more immediate from one of the three major energy distribution mechanisms, but it all comes from what we put in. Then the carbon atoms stripped off of saccharides are bonded to oxygen and exhaled as CO2.
And all this to say, one cannot gain weight while eating fewer calories than being expended, reductive or not.
The calories on the label are what is used to make decisions when it comes to using CICO to decide what to eat, which is why it’s relevant. I see now where you are coming from though, because I’m speaking from a pragmatic stand point, but yours is a theoretical one.
We do however appear to be in agreement, too. Due to these chemical processes CICO is highly reductive and pretty pointless for losing body fat, because what our bodies do in response say to 100 kcal of sucrose and 100 kcal of protein is entirely different, and result in entirely different biological outcomes.
Yeah it definitely isn’t the whole story. And protein is a great example. It takes about 15% of the calories in proteins just to break down the protein, so you sort of get that as a discount. But that can be said as calories out immediately goes up by that 15%. :)
To add further nuance to what you’ve said, (I know you know this already, so this is for other readers) when we ingest sucrose it is converted into glucose and fructose, which causes our blood glucose to rise steeply, which then results in a commensurate steep rise in insulin secretion. Elevated insulin causes many cells in the body to uptake glucose and chronically elevating insulin from a constant intake of carbohydrates means that the adipose tissue have no choice but to keep converting glucose to fat.
Sufficient ingestion of protein too will cause an increase in blood glucose levels, but nowhere near as steep nor as high. The biological effects are entirely different. And for anyone curious, it’s possible to visualise this by wearing a continuous glucose monitor. It’ll provide a lot of insight into an aspect of how eating different foods can affect your body differently.
How dare you call out people for their bias. Lol