As someone who has lost 20 pounds since the new year, I can say with near 100% confidence that it would not have happened for me without obsessive calorie tracking. Can't recommend MyFitnessPal enough.
Certain foods generate more heat while being digested (like protein) than others (like sugar and white flour).
Consuming 100 calories of protein results in fewer calories digested than consuming 100 calories of sugar.
It’s exhausting. It’s monotonous. It’s inaccurate. It’s impossible to do unless you’re eating at chain restaurant all the time.
And we are not robots where ONLY calories matter.
In the short term people can willpower themselves to do almost anything.
In the long term WHAT we eat has a bigger affect than HOW MUCH we eat.
Different foods affect our hormones differently.
You can’t eat 1,200 calories of sugar a day and expect to feel satiated from your diet, you will feel starving all the time.
You can eat 1,200 calories of protein/veggies/healthy fat and feel satiated from your diet.
Hormones drive our long-term hunger levels, and foods affect our hormone levels.
People before the 1950s were almost all lean and they had no calorie counts.
People have all the calorie counts they can stand today and most people are overweight in the West.
The difference is people eat WAY more junk food now than they did before the 1950s, it wasn’t even available back then.
I've lost over 15KG/35 pounds since the start of the year doing nothing but CICO - it's not incorrect to say that Calories is the king when it comes to how to lose the weight.
For everything else you are saying, it's not wrong either - anybody who starts CICO pretty quickly discovers that "Yes I can eat anything, but my god I will be hungry at 7pm if I used all my Calories on KFC and Donuts" - but don't keep saying simply that "Counting calories is not going to work".
Edit to add: and my wife and I have done this all with cooking home made meals at least 5-6 nights a week. It only takes a minute to enter a recipe in a calculator app.
To be clear the population of people on HN is a self-selecting, techie group of ppl. Most people cannot do CICO long term. And even if you can you’ll realize it doesn’t work the leaner you get, quality becomes increasingly important at that point.
All mammals, including humans, have the ability to naturally regulate their energy balance when they eat the foods they evolved to eat.
If your goal is to lose weight tracking calories is by far the most important factor in achieving that goal.
You can’t just say eat meat and veggies and expect people to lose weight without enforcing a caloric restriction.
The fact that’s is more easily achieved by saying that you can eat 3 chicken breasts a potatoe and a bucket of kale a day than 5 large cookies, isn’t exactly ground breaking nor does it have anything to do with what humans evolved to eat because we’ve been eating processed sugar for far longer than we were eating meat.
In fact scratch my first comment that started this I would rather see a menue that is at or over your daily caloric requirement which magically makes you lose weight.
Also, where’s the evidence for people consuming processed sugar longer than meat?
Never seen that claimed before.