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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

> especially given the monumental failure of the "calories in calories out" model.

Can you explain this in more detail? CICO seems like it might oversimplify things but it always seemed like a really sane basis for helping shape your diet. If you need to lose weight, you should plan meals to create a calorie deficit. But yes, I would not be surprised to learn that fasting on day X and consuming double your normal calories on day X+1 are not equivalent.

The description of CICO as a "monumental failure" sounds like there's substantial evidence to the contrary -- can you share more info?

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This article makes a case against a calorie-centric approach to dieting. It boils down to something like Michael Pollan's "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." A guy (who has since become an expert in public health) wasn't able to control his weight using standard calorie-counting techniques and had a lot of success changing his diet to "high quality" (as opposed to "highly processed") food. The article isn't super clear on specifics of what that means but it sounds like there might be something to it. Also worth noting that he began exercising in between this switch.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie

Eh. the articles argument appears to be that even though nutritionists, physicists, and dieters all agree that eating fewer calories than you expend causes weight loss, it isn't easy for a variety of factors. No shit. The thing is, it is the simplest expression of what needs to happen, and there is no getting around it.

I was once well north of the weight of the subject in the article and have since shed about half of it and kept it off for years. I've been through all the games your brain and body play to try and get you to eat more, and all the fad diets out there sound to me exactly like those games. It's nice to believe you don't have to suffer to reach your goals, but it isn't true and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

There's also good evidence that people don't maintain that weight loss over time despite maintaining their lower calorie consumption. Because base metabolic rate is something that the body can adjust, just like if you had less money to pay for heat, you could just put less heat into the house.

The role of hormones (especially insulin) in regulating fat storage and whether stored fat is available to the body as energy is better understood now, and much has been documented about how high insulin combined with low calories over time results in a lowering of the metabolic rate (resulting in stalling weight loss and then weight gain) rather than sustainable weight loss.

Also "it's nice to believe you don't have to suffer to reach your goals" is a silly and moralistic thing to say. But it typifies the american "scientific understanding" of weight loss. Fat is immoral, suffering is virtue, therefore in order to lose your immoral fat you must suffer.

Just look at all the massive success of those in the IF and keto community in living joyful lives, not deprived, losing fat etc. etc. And then look at all the people for whom calorie counting has completely failed. The information is out there (shruggie)

>There's also good evidence that people don't maintain that weight loss over time despite maintaining their lower calorie consumption. Because base metabolic rate is something that the body can adjust, just like if you had less money to pay for heat, you could just put less heat into the house.

Well, it's not just some fixed calorie amount they need to take for an eternity. It's the amount that corresponds to their current weight and muscle mass. As those change over time (and their base metabolic rate changes), they should change their calorie target too.

>Also "it's nice to believe you don't have to suffer to reach your goals" is a silly and moralistic thing to say. But it typifies the american "scientific understanding" of weight loss. Fat is immoral, suffering is virtue, therefore in order to lose your immoral fat you must suffer.

Actually the 'silver bullet' is more typical of the american "understanding" of weight loss.

There's no silver bullet. No pain, no (weight) loss.

LOL ok, so "eat a diet and time your eating in a way that promotes healthy hormone balance and use of fat as energy" is a silver bullet but "use our magic equations based on state of the art info from 1958 to calculate your daily food needs and all your food and exercise as numbers and if your equation balances you'll lose weight" isn't. Sure.

You don't need any magic equations. It's really much more simple than that: if you're not losing weight, eat fewer calories until you are.

In fact, just weight yourself each day, and unless you weight less than the day before, eat very little. Repeat, and you'll shed weight (the so-called "graph/grid paper diet").

https://kottke.org/09/07/the-steve-ward-diet

>"eat a diet and time your eating in a way that promotes healthy hormone balance and use of fat as energy" is a silver bullet

If it promises you to lose weight without limiting your calorie intake (e.g. have your weight loss cake and eat it too), then yes.

>but "use our magic equations based on state of the art info from 1958 to calculate your daily food needs and all your food and exercise as numbers and if your equation balances you'll lose weight" isn't

The laws of thermodynamics don't change because we don't have good formulas to calculate the exact amount of calories a person has a basic metabolic rate just based on their weight and height...

Calories still matter, and you should still limit your intake -- whether you do it approximately by "state of the art info from 1958" or with modern medical tests and expensive equipment. Or you know, just with eating less that you normally do, even without counting calories (if you ate 1 steak per day, and you change it to 1/2 a steak, you're eating half as much calories, even if you don't know how many exactly). Skipping BS deserts will cut even more...

No great science required, millions of people have lost way by just eating less...

Some people don't want to lose "weight", but "fat" (often specifically "subcutaneous fat", often from some specific body area).

If you're already very fit and lean, but have some stubborn fat around the "love handle" area or elsewhere, "eat less" doesn't cut it any more. Sure you can reduce that area, but not completely, and while the rest of you turns into an ugly skeleton.

>Some people don't want to lose "weight", but "fat" (often specifically "subcutaneous fat", often from some specific body area).

The latter people are then delluded, surgery aside, you can't lose targeted fat from a specific body area. You lose fat across your body AND from that area, or you don't lose fat.

At best, you can trait that area and build some muscle next to the fat.

> Just look at all the massive success of those in the IF and keto community in living joyful lives

I'm not convinced most of those evangelists have actually lost and kept off significant amounts of weight, and nearly everything they say reads like a sales pitch so I'm not inclined to trust it.

> Also "it's nice to believe you don't have to suffer to reach your goals" is a silly and moralistic thing to say. But it typifies the american "scientific understanding" of weight loss.

Saying you can achieve your goals with less effort if you BUY NOW is even more american. Even if no one is asking you to actually pay money for a program, they're still shilling an idea.

Somehow, among weight loss subreddits, /r/keto (and more specialized cousins) and /r/fasting stand out with a lot more success by average people who aren’t trying to sell anything.

Keto and fasting are fighting an up-hill battle: the only thing you can sell is guidance, and that is freely available. The keto bar/additive industry is minuscule.

Yeah, it's one of the regular "personal anecdote + some few random expert quotes" sensationalist article that comes several times per year pointing to this or that direction.

People self-report they did "all the right things" and when checked found out they undercounted, cheated, etc all the time.

In fact, the article says "He kept to low-fat, low-calorie food for three years. It simply didn’t work. At one point he lost about 10kg but his weight rebounded, though he still restricted his calories."

Keeping a diet like low-carb or low-fat etc (and other fads), is difficult, so many rebounce.

But the true lifestyle change of a balanced diet is difficult anyway too, and most can't do that either.

(And you do need a balanced diet, whether you follow the calories/in out or not).

This doesn't invalidate the calories in/out, just their ability to apply it (and it's not necessarily their fault, they can have all kinds of impediments causing them to overeat, eg. situational depression).

On the other hand, if you know 100% your calories, you can diet even with the most surprising foods:

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...

Right. It seems like the issue is that "calorie in/out" means different things to different people. For some people it refers to the simple fact that humans are subject to the laws of thermodynamics. For people trying to lose weight, it refers to diets which are structured around counting your calories.

It's hard to doubt that lowering your calories consumed will cause weight loss. However, it's not obvious that the physical mechanism behind weight loss in itself provides enough structure for people to use as a practical tool for weight loss.

It's like if someone is trying to pitch a faster baseball and their coach introduces them to the "conservation of momentum" strategy for throwing faster. The idea being that if you want to move the ball faster, you have to move your arm faster too. Well, duh, but it's not obvious whether this will help anybody. It might be the case that practical strategies for pitching faster never make reference to the principle of conservation of momentum. That doesn't mean that conservation of momentum doesn't ultimately explain why every different strategy works, but it doesn't make "conservation of momentum" a strategy all by itself.

"Eat high quality foods" may very well be a better strategy for losing weight than counting your calories. It might be easier and more healthy than calorie counting for most people. That doesn't mean that "calorie in/out" doesn't on some level explain why this strategy works (although, there might be good reason to doubt this in some cases, new research suggests that the interaction between gut bacteria and food are an important factor in how people respond to different diets). But the fact that "calorie in/out" explains weight loss doesn't mean that it needs to be the central concept in everybody's dieting decisions.

CICO is only true in a useless sense. Do you know how much energy you are putting in? Paper (cellulose) is carbohydrates, but not used by the body; gasoline is more energy dense than fat (at 12kcal/gr) and still unusable by the body....

So, it obviously isn’t just “carbs time 4k/cal”. Ok, let’s assume we can tell which carbs are useful and which aren’t. It takes energy to extract that energy. How much? IIRC there is over 50% variation between people (and even same person at different time) of the amount of energy actually extracted - yet almost everyone uses 100year old Atwater factors as if they were a fundamental physical constant.

Glucose storage is supply based. But gluconeogenesis (conversion of protein to glycogen) is demand based, so you must be at a deficit for the 4kcal/gr protein measure to be used.

How about body temp? A person at 35.6C uses a few tens or hundred calories less per day than a standard 36.7C person. Yes, these exist. Did you take this into the CO equation?

Did you consider the liter of ice cold water you drank? Takes 37kcal to warm it up to body temp.

CICO as usually practiced has 20-30 margin of error, which makes it much less useful than people assume. Unsurprisingly, it does work for e.g. 70% of the people, who assume the rest are not properly counting.

I used to be firmly in the CICO camp, with the whole 1st law of thermodynamics as a sane argument. But I've recently changed my views on this. If you think about it, the human body doesn't have a 'calorie sensor'. All it has are nutrient sensors, and cells metabolize nutrients depending on the current metabolic environment, which includes proteins and hormones for example.

This is a good place to start: https://idmprogram.com/how-do-we-gain-weight-calories-part-1...

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