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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be blunt. But this is as much pseudoscience as the anti vaxers. Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. There is also a big difference between losing weight based on water weight and losing real body mass.

I sweat like a pig anytime I work out. I use to teach two hour fitness classes and even now after the end of a workout, I’ve “lost 5 pounds” but that’s pure water weight. I’m burning around 1000-1200 calories during that time. If I rehydrate and drink lots of water afterwards, I’ll “gain” 3 pounds.

If you are “losing weight” by being hungry or by limiting when you eat, you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.

The same was cited in the article. The chess players are forgetting to eat.

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Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics.

Nothing about the body is simple.

- There is a virus that studies suggest (show correlation) increase weight gain [1]

- There is a study that shows water in != water out (unfortunately my googlefu is failing me though).

- Empirical: I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36

I want to expand a little bit more: The body can be simplified down into an input/output black-box - almost like a thevenin equivalent. But most people unaccount for lost energy in the output. No two bodies are alike and no two bodies share the same efficiency in breaking down food, absorption, conversion, and excretion.

Yes, you can collect the excrement and analyze the output. But that analysis doesn't tell you much. You don't know how efficient the black body is so you don't know how much of the waste could have been utilized or not. Not only that, you don't know if the body's efficiency is static or dynamic based on inputs and outputs.

You're describing difficulties with precise measurement of inputs and outputs, but I don't think the difficulty of making those measurements refutes the core idea of CICO at all.

The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.

Your strawman is implying I was trying to refute CICO. I never said that - I said people don't count all the outputs.

It was not my intention to strawman you. I apologize for misreading your intent.

Don't apologize. Regardless of his intent, he claimed

"I've lost weight eating 900 calories/day and I've lost weight eating 3500 calories/day with the same level of exercise. The difference was the 900 were carbs, the 3500 was >90% protein"

And if you're not trying to refute CICO, you better make damn clear that even though you're ingesting 3500 calories, you're essentially just crapping out most of it because our bodies can't process that much protein at once.

Wording is hard.

I've tracked calories for >10 years and macros for >5 years. And, at the time I spoke about, I was taking in protein continuously and meticulously tracking ingestion rate and time and estimating digested and excreted protein levels. But, even still, obviously I was shitting out most of it.

I actually do believe and advocate for CICO for most people. But I reject notions that anything related to the body is black, white, or simple and hold strongly to them as convictions. I tried to provide examples to those points with the last as an example that the C in CICO is a sneaky misnomer and better served as being an E. It's just that in the general case for most people E averages into C.

I do agree with you on the apology - it's the internet, no one expects an apology and if you do you're insane. Furthermore, I wasn't offended and was only pointing out the rhetorical tactic being employed.

It's super rare though that anyone in the world not on a special diet consumes this much protein. That's really hard, volumetrically, as protein is calorie sparse. Which is why it's useful for dieting, to keep volume and water in while keeping caloric content low. (With potential side benefits for satiety.)

CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO.

CI is based what people eat, but how much and how often people eat (if you don't expect perfect and infinite willpower) is based on how hungry they are, and that is hormonally controlled, based on complex feedback loop that includes insulin levels (so what you eat and how often) and activity levels.

CO includes many things you have no conscious control over, like heating (ever stopped being cold after a meal?), muscle repair and buildup, brain, etc. Only small fraction of that is exercise.

People saying "it's just CICO" are as disgusting as millionaires saying "just stop being poor, it's easy, you have to make more than you use" while knowing nothing (and not caring) about student loans, healthcare costs for non-insured people, housing crisis or anti-labor practices that suppress wages.

Wow, that's extremely judgemental. When I was on the swim team in highschool, I was fit as a fiddle. When I went to university I chose to stop swimming but also chose to continue eating the same (because I like food.) Predictably, I started to get fat. I'm certainly capable of eating less, and I am also capable of increasing my activity. Your rant denies that I have any agency in this matter, which is somewhat offensive.

And even if it were the case that I had no agency, it would still be the case that my weight loss was due to a CICO imbalance. CICO is a matter of physics, not ethics or morality.

> CICO is mostly nonsense, because you can't control neither CI no CO.

This is a wholesale abdication of responsibility and an embrace of victimhood.

Yes, there are elements of calories out that aren’t fully in your control. However these place a lower bound on calories out. You can absolutely increase your exercise and activity level.

On the other side, you are very much in control of your calories in. You can choose to eat a better diet (e.g. whole foods) that makes it easier to maintain a caloric deficit. You can choose to stop eating before full satiety. You can even go so far as to fast, cutting your calories in to 0. Obviously hunger matters but this idea that you can’t control your eating at all because you’re hungry is ridiculous.

You are very much in control of these factors. Yes, there are broad issues contributing to obesity but individuals are not relieved of their responsibility just because society also has problems.

> You can absolutely increase your exercise and activity level.

Exercise is important for health. Exercise does not help people control weight, and it may make people heavier.

The fact that people insist they're scientific while ignoring the evidence is particularly frustrating.

Exercise can absolutely contribute to weight loss. It does not guarantee weight loss because an individual can always eat more than they burn (and indeed many do). That doesn’t mean it’s not a very useful tool for weight loss in a continued caloric deficit.

Maintain your caloric intake level “at maintenance” and add 5 miles of running per day and you’ll lose weight.

> Exercise can absolutely contribute to weight loss

That's not what the evidence says.

The evidence doesn’t say it’s not possible. If we were all homo logicus exercised consistently and kept our caloric intake in equilibrium to our BMR and added exercise on top of it, it can be done. But it doesn’t work in practice for most people.

You’re clearly speaking in generalities because the evidence is absolutely there that people can lose weight by exercising. But if you’re speaking in generalities then people basically don’t lose weight at all. The studies indicate that nearly no one keeps weight off long term.

If you restrict your sample to the select few that do keep off the weight, some do it with diet alone. Some do it with diet and exercise. Some very few do it with exercise alone. Any of these strategies can work. But in general, none of them do.

That’s not what studies show. Studies show that most people can not lose weight by exercise alone:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/

Scientifically it is possible, but that’s not backed up by how humans actually behave.

Sorry, is there something specific in that article that supports your claim, because I’m skimming over it and seeing lots of stuff that supports the assertion that people do indeed lose weight from exercise, that it generally requires a relatively high amount of exercise, but that it varies a lot between individuals.

> Overall, the changes in weight in response to ET without caloric restriction are highly heterogeneous and individual differences can span weight gain to clinically significant weight loss.

> Supervised ET studies which have demonstrated clinically significant weight loss with aerobic ET (without caloric restriction) have far exceeded the minimum levels of physical activity according to public health definitions. Ross et al. observed an 8% weight loss in obese men after 12 weeks of aerobic ET with no alterations in dietary habits(daily exercise sessions of 700 kcals). In a different study, Ross et al. observed an 6.8% weight loss in premenopausal women (BMI>27) following 14 weeks of aerobic ET with an energy expenditure of 500 kcals per session. In the Midwest Exercise Trial, Donnelly et al. (n=131) observed a 5.3% weight loss in men after 16 weeks of aerobic ET at approximately 2,000 kcals per week. In contrast, the women in the exercise group did not have a significant change in weight (0.7 kg) following the intervention, but the exercise program prevented the weight gain observed in the control group (2.9 kg.) Thus, clinically significant weight loss is possible with aerobic ET without caloric restriction, but it requires a high ET volume. For the general population, these ET volumes may not be practical or sustainable.

In general, weight loss intervention doesn’t work well. Most people fail to lose significant weight, to adhere for an extended time, or to keep the weight off for years. This is the case no matter how the weight loss is achieved. Even gastric bypass patients often manage to gain back enough weight to get back to the obese mark. That doesn’t mean weight loss is impossible, but it is definitely hard. Exercise is absolutely a way to lose weight, but you have to be serious about it and do considerably more than the minimum recommendation, or you have to restrict calories, or preferably both. And you have to somehow maintain long term if you don’t want to immediately gain it back.

This is both scientifically untrue and longitudinally true.

Of course if you use exercise to help create a calorie deficit you will lose weight. However, every single study shows that most people won’t lose weight by exercising. They overestimate how much they burn and underestimate how much they lose eat. Exercise also tends to make you hungrier and it makes it harder to not eat more. Also, hardly anyone has the discipline to work out consistently over a long period of time or the fitness level to work out long enough and have enough to use exercise as a weight loss tool.

You appear to be agreeing with me?

I’m saying it’s more nuanced. Anecdotally, I spent a decade keeping weight off by exercising 10+ hours a week as a part time fitness instructor and training for runs. Even now I lose weight by exercising. But most people aren’t going to work out at the consistency and intensity that I do. It takes more discipline for me not to workout too much.

Gaining weight even when calorie controlled due to exercise is possible, but you will lose fat percentage while gaining muscle mass thus increasing base metabolic rate. Doubly good.

Which is why you should get one of the approximate fat percentage meters. (Clamp better than electric but less convenient.) And maybe run a DEXA or volumetric body composition scan sometimes.

Another good easy measure is the belt size, for obese people. Smaller is better. Or waist/hip ratio. Requires a tape measure, that's it.

If you exercise and weight stays the same but belt size goes down, you're on the right track.

Yes you can both control what you eat and how much you burn. In my heyday when between teaching fitness classes and training for runs, I was burning conservatively 5000 to 7000 calories a week, eating like a horse, and not gaining weight for over a decade.

After I stopped working out but didn’t cut back what I was eating enough, I gained 40 pounds over the next three years - and that’s a lot when you’re short.

The last two years, I’ve adjusted my calories in (brought them down) and my calories out - about 3000-4000 a week and I’m back down to about 5 pounds above my fitness heyday weight.

But, I would never tell anyone else the best way to lose weight is via exercise. Studies show that hardly ever works because people overestimate how much they burn exercising and underestimate how much they eat. Also in my experience, people statistically never get to the point where they exercise long enough, hard enough or consistently enough to lose weight. I would always tell people to focus on their diet and tell them to talk to a dietitian if they wanted to lose weight.

I don't think anyone disputes the laws of thermodynamics, just how the body processes different macronutrients in the presence of certain levels of hormones. By changing those hormones, you change the balance of the total energy equation. For example, I know someone with crohns disease, and her body just doesn't metabolize nutrients the same way mine does. I burn a donut more efficiently than she does. In this case it isn't about hormones, but about inflammation, but it's generally the same concept just on a more apparent scale.

I hate to use the old correlation is not causation....

But even if the virus does “cause” obesity, is it causing obesity by slowing down the host’s metabolism (decreasing the calories out) or increasing appetite (increasing calories in)?

I'm not sure how I could have made that any clearer. I included (show correlation) specifically for that very reason.

But not causation and still didn’t explain whether that could be explained by the standard CICO equation.

You might try clicking the link I provided. The Wikipedia page details the virus and provides links to other sources one of which was conducted on chickens where they measure input/output and still saw positive weight gain.

So exactly how do you explain mass just coming out of nowhere?

I think all berdon is trying to say by "not simple physics" is that even though CICO is true, it's not helpful to people trying to lose weight because there are many other conditions (e.g. a virus) that can affect the body's metabolism - to a limited extent. This particular virus seems to make you fatter even on a precise calorie controlled diet, which implies it must reduce your metabolism.

For the record I disagree with this - I think CICO is a helpful way to think about weight loss, because it implies that if you aren't losing weight on a calorie controlled diet, you simply haven't cut enough. (Though serious problems might be indicative of some medical condition, in which case you should consult a doctor to see if it can be alleviated to make CICO easier.)

CO may be difficult for a person to manipulate, and raising CI to put on weight may be physically difficult, expensive, or ineffective. However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people though; certainly not people like myself. If I mustered the willpower to eat less, I would doubtlessly lose weight.

If I were to fall for some of the new-age mumble jumble about weight being some innate genetic trait like iris color, I'd think myself helpless. If I were such a person, being informed of CICO would doubtlessly improve my life.

> However, reducing CI takes willpower but will make you lose weight. If you reduce it enough. Somebody may have a CO so low that the reduction in CI required to lose weight might require medical supervision (e.g. to prevent malnutrition.) That's probably not the case for most people though; certainly not people like myself.

Yes, this is exactly my point. I'm simply giving a measured defense of what berdon has been saying further up this thread: CO is not a known constant and may vary based on certain medical conditions. Because of this, CICO can sometimes (I think berdon would say frequently) be unhelpful advice to someone trying to lose weight, because they struggle with cutting CI far enough to lose weight, which may be due to a person's health and biological makeup.

Then I think berdon's concerns are misprioritized. It's very rare for the necessary reduction in CI to require medical supervision. The overwhelming majority of obese people in America are eating more than is reasonable to eat, and a reduction in consumption would improve their lives considerably with no real risk of malnutrition occurring.

By focusing on obscure edge-cases, all we're really doing is to make it easier for people in the common case to rationalize away their situation. That's very common. There are more voluntary overeaters who claim they have an involuntary obesity-inducing disorder than there are people who actually have such disorders. I've got a whole family full of them. A big bowl of ice cream after every meal is a choice, not a genetic condition.

Partialrecall - my concerns are my own but the point I was attempting to make has nothing to do with what you're talking about. All of which I agree.

My point is the body is very complex and any attempt to simplify it is doing a disservice to anyone listening to you.

I was overweight for 20 years and lost the weight by calorie reduction. It works - clearly. But in a forum reserved for educational discussion I'm not OK glossing over the complexity of the body because it's true in the general case. That'd be as sinful as saying quantum physics is wrong because newtonian is generally the deciding set of rules.

Nobody is glossing over it, it is subject of active research. Until that research produces any generally useful results (drugs, tests, treatments), the advice stays the same.

We know exactly one applicable test: thyroid hormone levels. This one is worth checking.

Eat less everything but more fresh vegetables, especially greens, exercise more. How much depends on how fat you are - not necessarily just overweight, body composition and fat percentage is more important and still reliably measurable.

"Toffee" kind of fat is a thing, where a thin looking and not very heavy person is actually fat inside, just lost muscle so weight stayed similar.

On the other hand, nobody wants people with big muscle mass to always cut diet to levels expected of show body builders.

CICO is a copout. Calories in is relatively simple. Calories out is hideously complex. When people describe weird things that metabolism does, real or fake, they're things that shift the Calories Out numbers way beyond the simple results you get from body composition and exercise level.

There are so many separate ways for calories to go "out", too.

So it gets used in this unfair double-standard way, where managing weight is "just CICO", as if it's a handful of inputs into a one-line equation, but if someone argues against that, saying it's more complex, then the natural response is "well actually CICO includes every single complication you've mentioned, so you're wrong to object".

It is just CICO, whether you won the genetic lottery that makes the calculation simpler or not doesn't mean it's any less of a cop out than saying that it would be simpler for me to be a great basketball player if I were 6 foot 8 instead of 5 foot 5.

Something can be both true and used in a misleading manner.

To use your same metaphor, there are people going around speaking as if height and total hours of training are the only things that matter for basketball skill.

Understand that there are necessary and sufficient conditions. A sufficient condition for obesity is too high chronic caloric intake. A necessary condition is retention of this surplus. Some people will feel correctly full when they overeat high calorie foods, others only if volume is too big, yet others have the distended stomach where even that does not work. Some have hormonal deficit that makes them retain more (e.g. hypothyroidism) or counters satiety signaling. Others have very wasteful metabolism or digestion where less is retained. Some really do highly strenuous activities that just demand more energy.

Ultimately you set a caloric target with a carefully constructed diet and watch the long term weight slope over months. That's the science of it. Even high fat ad lib diets ultimately resulted in caloric input restriction, stronger than other diets they tried. (see Cambridge study)

> Ultimately you set a caloric target with a carefully constructed diet and watch the long term weight slope over months. That's the science of it. Even high fat ad lib diets ultimately resulted in caloric input restriction, stronger than other diets they tried. (see Cambridge study)

Agreed, but I'd characterize all that as focusing on the "Calories In" part. That's complicated enough itself, and avoids implying that the entire situation is some trivial function.

> Calories in is relatively simple.

There are at least two categories of issues that make calories in not so simple: eating disorders and malabsorption disorders.

> Empirical

I think the word you’re looking for is “anecdotal”.

No one here knows anything about your TDEE so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that you could lose weight on 3500 calories/day. If your TDEE is >3500, then yeah, weight loss. Especially since the thermic effect of food is quite high for protein, and that people suck at accurately recording or even measuring their actual intake.

I addressed your concerns over my TDEE by stating both instances occurred under the same level of activity and general conditions. In both instances, I lost about the same amount of weight weekly as well. I've also been counting calories for longer than 10 years and at that time I had a spreadsheet with such granular detail I could track the average duration and quantity of protein still within my gut based on average timing, etc.

...

Actually...empirical works as well. I think anecdotal is just the latest trend.

Empirical

based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. "they provided considerable empirical evidence to support their argument"

You didn’t originally say that you lost weight at the same rate, making your statement almost meaningless. Now that you’ve added that statement, I honestly just don’t believe your assessment. This isn’t a judgement call and I’m not questioning your truthfulness. I simply think your observation was either biased, incomplete, or insufficient.

My gut says you did this for too short of a period of time for the results to be meaningful, or else that you’ve left out something meaningful, or that you simply didn’t accurately measure your caloric intake. If you were losing weight on 3500 calories/day, then your TDEE was north of 3500. If you dropped to 900 calories, you’d be in a 2600 calorie/day deficit without even accounting for whatever deficit you were in initially. I don’t care if that was all HFCS, you’d be losing over 5 pounds a week. That’s major weight loss and I don’t believe you saw the same weight loss at 3500 calories and 900 calories for an extended period of time. It simply doesn’t work from a physical standpoint.

“Empirical” to me implies a level of data that you don’t get from a singular anecdote.

You're right, I didn't say I lost weight at the same rate. Oh well.

Cool? It seems you're mostly interested in your own opinions - both with regards to my empirical evidence and your connotation of the word. I'm not interested in either.

Also, your analysis of my losing weight on 3500 calories requiring my TDEE to be >3500 is drastically marred by your clear assumption that a calorie = a calorie. You're incapable of accepting anything that doesn't fall into line with that assumption. Strong bias.

Please provide any evidence that a carb calorie counts for nearly 4 protein calories and I’ll take your anecdote a lot more seriously. You’re making an extraordinary claim with no evidence. Why would I accept your anecdote over my “assumption” that dietary scientists weren’t all completely incompetent when they agreed that a calorie is roughly a calorie? How is it that you calculated a 4:1 conversion and everyone with an actual lab doesn’t?

If you told me that one time your car got 120 mpg because you switched to premium fuel, I’d likewise not believe you. I’m much more likely to think your gauge is faulty or you misread your actual results.

As much as you might want your personal anecdote to be compelling, it just isn’t. I’m not going to give your anecdote the same weight that I give the broad scientific consensus.

>Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics

I assume you're referring to the "energy in" vs "energy out" meme in weight-loss.

The body is not a closed system. While you _do_ have to balance your chemical equations for glucose catabolysis (or whatever), weight loss is far from a "simple physics" problem.

Surely energy going into and out of the body, which is the point of the "meme", is mutually exclusive with the body being a closed system.

Yes, that's very much my point!

By extension, it excludes reasoning about weight loss in terms of conservation of mass/energy.

I think you're missing the point of the "meme". The point of the meme is that human bodies are not closed systems, and that the way to regulate the state of the system is to regulate what goes into and out of the system (if bodies were closed systems, there wouldn't be inputs or outputs to regulate.)

If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere. So in a sense it is actually a pretty simple physics problem.

It gets tricky because calculating calorie consumption is really hard (how much of what you ate was actually turned into energy) and calculating calorie expenditure is probably even harder.

The point is that the body adapts to burn more or fewer calories depending on how much you eat. Restricting calories can possibly have the side effect of just lowering your metabolism, rather than just losing weight.

Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't change the calories in calories out equation.

If your metabolism goes down, so do the calories out. That's one of many reasons that counting the calories out is extremely difficult.

That's also one of the reasons this equation is not very useful in practice.

Restricting your calories and causing lower metabolism only works for so long. Otherwise a person would not be able to starve to death, which is obviously not the case.

Why are you bringing extreme cases when they're not relevant?

Reduced metabolism when dieting is a thing, and it's also correlated to weight loss. Less weight, less base metabolic rate. Down to a point which is irrelevant.

>If you eat 500 calories and burn 600 calories, the energy has to come from somewhere.

Yes, hence "you have to balance your chemical equations", but we need to agree on what we're calling "eat" and "burn", here.

Burning 600 calories can just as well "work up an appetite" as it can "draw upon fat reserves".

We're used to thinking of weight loss as a behavioral problem withy metabolic symptoms ("he eats too much, so he got fat") whereas there's reason to consider it as a metabolic problem with behavioral symptoms ("the kind of food he eats signals to the body that fat should be created, so his body signals for him to eat more").

I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods.

"It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.)

Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.

Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.

Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that.

In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight.

It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight.

Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.

I’m always hungry. There is hardly ever a time that I feel completely satiated. In other words, there is never a time that I don’t have a drive to eat too much. It takes constant discipline to keep my calorie balance in check. As humans, we all have the mental capacity to not give in to our lizard brain.

I think the fundamental mistake of the last three decades of health advice is overestimating that capacity in the face of declining insulin sensitivity due to persistently high glycemic loads.

>Of course they eat too much. The question is why?

Because they are gluttons and lack self-control. Why coddle them?

Your bodies absorbsion of nutrients and yes calories is not a system in a vacuum. Nor it’s decision to store excess calories as fat. There’s a wide range of how much different types of foods affect different people. I had a friend who would eat (we counted) 4000 calories a day and couldn’t get over 120lb. Turns out they had a soy allergy and their bodies didn’t absorb the food.

Simplifying it to calories in calories out is a generalism of a generalism.

Just because your friend was pooping out the calories instead of burning them for energy doesn't change that it was still calories in vs calories out.

Like I said, calculating both ends of the equation is tricky.

I think by definition it does change that it was calories in vs calories out.

Which is why it's just easier to tune and (as accurately as possible) monitor intake until expected results happen.

Which is weight loss and/or belt size loss.

And watch for side effects which may require dietary adjustments. (not necessarily caloric)

Variable you cannot control is relatively worthless. Focus on what you can control.

So your friend was unable to digest at least a thousand calories a day, likely more, and didn’t see fit to mention the endless diarrhea they must have been experiencing? If you’re spewing a thousand undigested calories out of your ass every day, you should know something isn’t right.

Also this is still calories in, calories out.

Yes, nobody is disagreeing with physics. But a discussion about weight gain/loss that always has people saying "calories in = calories out" is like a discussion of every business saying "well profit = revenue - expenses". Obvious but not helpful. The interesting thing is discussing how to modify those variables.

The flipside of this is that people generally want to argue endlessly about what are essentially micro optimizations instead of addressing the core issue. Maybe your gut flora are “out of balance”. Maybe your metabolism is a little lower than average. Sure, there are factors that can matter. But if you’re not losing weight you’re not in a caloric deficit. If you’re not gaining weight, you’re not in a caloric surplus (or you’re spewing diarrhea and should talk to a doctor).

Address the core issue first before arguing about minutiae. The emphasis on relatively low impact factors is especially unhelpful and unhealthy because people latch onto all these discussions as justification for why they can’t lose weight. Sure, an obese person might have a low metabolism[1], but if they eat 3500 daily calories and live an entirely sedentary lifestyle, those are probably the major causes.

[1] But they don’t. Study after study have shown that obese individuals have high metabolism because metabolism is tightly correlated with total body mass.

I think people cling to their narratives of lazy people like it’s a religion, and ultimately it doesn’t help people lose weight.

Most people aren't fat because they're lazy. Most people are fat because they eat too much. We have a culture that glorifies food, junkfood more than the rest. Overeating when eating junkfood is absurdly easy. Teaching people how to eat healthier and eat less is the best known way to help people lose weight.

Constantly talking about genetic predispositions, obscure metabolism suppressing viruses or gut flora does about jack shit to help people lose weight.

The minor difference between the weekly calorie expenditure of the average person and the morbidly obese is mostly meaningless. It’s much more about how much they eat.

Calories out usually refers to energy expenditure. Nobody measures their waste energy calories.

That’s because waste generally doesn’t contain any significant usable calories. If you’re passing undigested food then obviously it starts to matter, as abusers of laxatives know. It’s not typically discussed because it’s not typically a meaningful factor and if it is you should already know.

Yeah, crapping out calories is a time-honored tradition among people with eating disorders who don't like to vomit.

Your body doesn't care how the calories go out. If they're gone, they're gone. If you eat 3000, but crap out 2000, your body doesn't say "Yeah, well, that's not how you usually get rid of calories, so get fat."

Just because our methods of recording aren't perfect doesn't mean that the core idea is wrong.

Your body of course doesn't use energy it doesn't have. But it can balance the equation by restricting the output - lowering muscle repair (so post-workout recovery is slower), lowering brain supply (lowering concentration), lowering heating (so you fell cold), etc.

Whether the body decides to use stored energy or lowers output (while signalling hunger) is mostly hormonally controlled, by insulin and glucagon - this is why insulin resistance is such a problem.

Some research seems to show that portion restriction leads to lowered output while increasing time between meals (i.e. not snacking) lead to use of reserves, but I don't have a nice article to link.

You're not counting the amount of energy gained through o2 and released as co2. That changes the calculation.

That’s the same process, the lungs are only collecting oxygen and returning waste carbon dioxide for the muscles doing said work.

That is still part of your BMR or if you are exercising part of the increased calories out.

Some[1] will never drop the "simple physics" line because they don't care about learning about the biology of body weight, but rather reaffirming their aesthetic judgement that people they decide are overweight are also morally weak.

[1] Emphatically not judging anyone posting here; that's not my goal. I'm simply bluntly stating what has become painfully clear after having this discussion multiple times.

It’s not about aesthetic judgement. If you won the genetics lottery and have a high metabolism, you will have more calories out. If you won the genetic lottery and grow to be 7 feet as oppose to be 5 foot 5, you will burn more calories and find it easier to be slim.

I didn’t win the height genetic lottery or the higher than average metabolism genetic lottery, but I did win the mesomorph one. I naturally look muscular whether I lift or not and I pack on muscle quickly. That isn’t due to any moral strength.

Somatotypes are pseudoscience.

Are you really saying that different people don’t naturally have different body types? I’m 5 foot 5 and 175 pounds. Based on BMI, I am “morbidly obese”. But I have a 32 inch waist, muscular looking legs and an objectively toned upper body with little body fat measured with calipers - 6 points. It’s not because I am a body builder. I’ve had this same basic shape whether or not I was lifting and I only occasionally been to the point where I lifted heavy.

I’ve seen other people my same height and weight with large stomachs and no tone and with a completely different waist to hip ratio.

Again somatotypes are pseudoscience, but belt size, waist-hip ratio and abdominal fat or muscle percentage are actual science.

You can look whatever and still be fat inside where it matters...

That’s exactly what a somatype is. Some people also naturally gain muscle easier. Do you think that if your average person and a top tier athlete train the same amount of time they will have similarly outcomes?

And some will endlessly argue against “simple physics” because magical thinking about metabolism avoids any hint of personal agency.

In a sense, the body isn’t “simple” because so many things can affect your total energy burn. But all of that really doesn’t matter much. If you continually decrease your caloric intake, eventually it will fall below your calorie burn and you will lose weight. Conversely if you continually increase your caloric intake, you will eventually gain weight (assuming you aren’t literally shitting out undigested food).

While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others. There is a reason power lifters are spiking insulin post workout, people are taking steroids, and medical conditions can make you fat.

If my mother wants to cut weight, I'm telling her this. If an athlete has to make weight for a fight, this is a stupid way of thinking. At the end of the day, calories in calories out is an objectively good rule of thumb. It's not the be all end all rule though.

“medical conditions can make you fat.”

Medical conditions don’t cause mass to appear from nowhere that goes against the laws of physics. Yes medical conditions can cause your metabolism to slow down - decreasing calories out.

> While this is probably mostly true, there is good science indicating that certain hormonal portfolios "hold" onto calories better than others.

Yes, that's true, but too many people believe that hormones have a whole number multiplier effect when in fact they probably just nudge TDEE by, what, (off the cuff here) ten percent plus or minus? Maybe less?

Is that enough to significantly reduce a person's margin of error when they're doing CICO, particularly as they get closer to their ideal weight?

Absolutely.

Does that mean they'll get fat eating less than a thousand calories a day because hormones?

Almost certainly not.

But nudging TDEE by 10 percent over the course of a year has a HUGE effect on body composition. Even 0.01% does.

I never understood this point of view. It’s like people who didn’t believe in washing hands until bacteria were discovered.

Yes sure calories in calories out. But metabolism has so many variables. It can be revved up and burn a lot of calories. It can become quiescent when you are in starvation mode. What causes it to start using the fat reserves is definitely more than a univariate analysis. If there is a catalyst that starts breaking down fats faster it won’t matter that you are eating more.

Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope!

It is still just calories in and calories out. Some people naturally have a higher metabolism and a higher basal metabolic rate. It still doesn’t change the equation.

Yes, it’s a well known fact that if you eat too few calories, that your metabolism slows down - and you burn less calories. That doesn’t make anything that the original poster said scientifically valid.

I saw all sorts of crazy crap that people believed would help them lose weight and tone when I was a part time fitness instructor like excercises that would help them spot reduce (no such thing) to people who tried to come into my classes wearing those plastic bags because they thought it would help them lose weight. They reported me to management plenty of times for not allowing them to come to my class like that and I would budge.

ah yes spot reduction, doing crunches will not remove the fat on your stomach. If anything it'll make your stomach bigger with muscle gains!

> It is still just calories in and calories out.

The problem with this line of thinking is the "just".

Sure, physics says it's calories in and out, and we all agree that mostly makes sense.

But -- how do you measure how many calories are going out? Sleep is known to have an impact on weight. How does one translate their sleep quality or sleep issues into a better "out" measure? How do you know how many calories are going out during all of the other things you do during the day? What about the thousands of assorted complex processes going on in your body that you aren't really aware of?

For the "in"... ok, so you studiously track everything you eat. What's the efficiency that your body absorbs all of the calories from the food you ate? How many of those calories pass through and aren't actually consumed? Is eating 1000 calories of lettuce really the same thing as eating 1000 calories of pork?

If fixing this for people was just about "the equation", weight loss would be a lot easier to solve.

"Calories in, calories out" is one of those things that sounds great, but is not nearly as practical for people to actually implement as people like to imagine.

Sleep only has a second order effect on weight. Almost all of the reasons that lack of sleep affect weight loss is due to overeating (calories in) and lack of exercise (calories in).

https://www.topfitnessmag.com/lifestyle/sleep-important-weig...

This is just like all of the studies showing diet soda causes weight gain.Diet soda doesn’t actually cause weight gain. Diet soda gives people the license to overeat and it may cause some people to crave real sugar more. I’m sure we’ve all seen people order a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a large fry and a Diet Coke.

This still boils down to calories in/out though. Metabolism goes under the 'out' column. It fluctuates, sure, but it's just as much an 'out' variable as exercise is.

The body has a choice: burn the stuff now or lower metabolism and store the stuff for later. You can lower your intake, and the system can decide to lower metabolism to store some more. Obviously this can't go on forever, but maybe it can go on enough to impact other factors, like availability of glucose to run willpower.

Or not. Figuring out how and if those adjustments are made and how to control them is the next step after you say "calories in = calories out", which is only a first and smallest step in figuring it out.

> But metabolism has so many variables.

You're drastically overestimating the difference in people's metabolism.

> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly.

This is about appetite. Skinny people have a smaller appetite than overweight people.

Show me a "skinny" person who can eat 4,000 calories a day and I'll show you a fat person.

This is a very false assumption, genetics absolutely do play a role in how much fat from dietary intake will be stored vs expelled as waste. Burning fat on the other hand, is universal and follows the law of conservation referred to in my other comment.

While I'm sure genetics makes a difference (as it does with everything), I doubt it's that significant. I'd be shocked if there's more than a 10% difference, if even that much.

Would love to see a source that backs up your claim.

It's enough of a difference to turn a surplus into even a deficit. Long term, it makes someone skinny or obese, or preferably normal weight.

Would love to see a source that backs up your claim.

> Some people are naturally skinny and others put on weight quickly. This is already well known and shows that there are complex genetic inputs as well as other ones. We have to discover what those are. So saying it’s just calories in/out, stupid... nope!

I never really understood why this was always a catch-all trump card. So you can't gain/lose weight as easily as others. In my mind that just means you need to work harder rather than shrug your shoulders and say "nothing to be done". Specifically its people doing this that never look into their diet or are willing to change any of their habits.

Slightly related but Carol Dweck's growth mindset for education is literally this, but the difference is in people who believe they can't get in better shape and people that can.

Or people who are naturally fit with no effort vs. people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives since the body permanently adapts to expecting a certain amount of food: https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/weight-loss-metabolism-slows-...

I’ve never known anyone who was “naturally fit”, defining fitness as the ability to work out at a certain level of intensity for a given amount of time.

I’ve known people to be naturally skinny or even tone but not “fit”.

First, I take issue with the cited article because the study referenced in the opening paragraph because they do not provide any discussion over limitations of their study. In particular, that members of the "Biggest Loser" show may have also been more extrinsically motivated by money and fame than intrinsically motivated to become healthy. Thus, when they failed to earn said money/fame, they returned to their normal behaviors.

> people who aren't willing to massively restrict their diet and live in discomfort for the rest of their lives

I also take issue with this statement. Many fitness motivation images on the Internet talk about rejecting temptation to work towards your goals. As I was thinking about this comment, I was reminded of Ben Stiller's pizza scene in the movie Dodgeball [1]. Jokes aside, the scene is a hyperbole to how even fit people are susceptible to temptation and take actions to not giving in. Not to Stiller's degree, but I can distinctly remember times where I just stare at the ice cream aisle with grocery shopping. It is my own mental discipline to not buy it. Quitting World of Warcraft to get in better shape is also a part of my past. Shifting to an active lifestyle is hard, it has a difficult initial start, but persevering through it has helped me become the healthier person I am. I also recall Jesse Shand's transformation [2], where I believe one of the phases of his weight loss was simply reducing the number of fast food meals he'd consume in a single sitting (instead of 8, only eat 7, etc).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPmX2gNIqE8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpy1FlGKYz0

There's a big difference willpowering yourself to stay at your natural state of skinnyness and willpowering through hunger-regulating systems in your body being permanently broken. Here's another reference if you didn't like the other study. https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-weight-...

You still seem to confound skinniness and willpower and again, the second link I showed someone well into 40+ BMI changing. Secondly, this article has a few issues as well. The participants are older, which we know is difficult to lose weight at (which does support your claim, but not for the same reasons). The article also does not appear to compare the participant's appetite increases to those of "healthy" individuals. What does an "8" represent, and would any person show the same signs?

I will assume that formerly obese people have higher cravings. No doubt a former heroin addict has cravings. I will accept that it is harder for these individuals. But again, that does not mean you shrug your shoulders and say "that's the way it is".

It kind of is actually. Nobody escapes the law of universal conservation of energy. Sure some people due to genetics will store more of the energy they consume as fat than others. But if you have an energy deficit the body will consume itself to the tune of that exact deficit, period, end of. It will be a mixture of fat and muscle, but the body does try to maintain muscle to the extent you are utilizing it given there is sufficient protein to maintain it. So lift weights or do resistance training enough to keep the muscle you wish to retain and maintain a good amount of protein intake to support this as well, and the bulk of your body mass consumed will be fat. Other than that it is just maintaining an energy deficit, and the best technique is the one you personally can adhere to consistently.

> "The chess players are forgetting to eat. "

This surprises me. I find that being hungry dulls my edge and makes me noticeably less clever. It's easy for me to forget to eat if I'm doing something mindless, but when I'm actively problem solving I find that I become more aware of my hunger (and other forms of general discomfort.)

Odd. I find the high from being hungry makes me output my best work. I feel sharper and energized.

One form of discomfort that sharpens me is the sensation of sleep deprivation kept at bay by caffeine. It has a dissociative effect that I find helps me concentrate. Reaching that state probably takes a toll on my body though.

Perhaps the effects of discomfort on concentration are malleable, not inherit traits of the individual. Maybe, with the right kind of expectations and mindset, I could make the sensation of hunger work for me instead of against me.

Same, though I'd phrase it differently.

For me at least I feel its more like I'm dealing with unmedicated ADHD and need to slow my brain with tiredness and then jolt it just enough with some Diet Dr Pepper to get the sharpness back.

I suspect id depends on why (and how long) you're hungry.

If you're hungry from missing your regular meal, your blood sugar may drop and you feel lethargic.

If you're hungry from fasting, your liver may start producing ketones which our brains seem to like.

I suspect it's your second point. I already maintain a low carb/ketogenic diet which would prevent me from having those crashes.

Elsethread another poster was downvoted for saying it[0], but amphetamines make it much easier to get so focused on a task you forget to eat. I experimented with it for a while and even I, a food addict, forgot to eat if I was truly engaged in something.

[0] Probably because his tone was accusational, though anyone who thinks chess grandmasters are any less willing to use performance drugs than any other high-end athlete is kidding themselves.

My own anecdata supports the idea that amphetamines can cause me to forget to eat. If I take two of my dextroamphetamine pills, eating becomes a chore.

Chess players are drug tested by WADA for major tournaments. Amphetamines would not necessarily help those without ADHD because they would slow down their thought process. Time management is an important part of the game and simply remaining focused is not difficult for top players.

Also amphetamines don't "make you so focused that you forget to eat." Amphetamines directly inhibit appetite.

Interesting. For a lot of gamers and programmers it's the opposite. Intense focus and engagement often results in forgetting to eat and/or sleep. This is well known in the gaming community.

Gaming is an activity that I filed under mindless, I don't play many games these days but I have in the past and generally noticed myself eating less. Typically when I play games these days I listen to an audiobook or podcast at the same time and my attention is on the audio more than the game, for which I'm basically on autopilot.

I never been big on puzzle games though, I prefer games like doom or quake. Fast games that focus on reaction time and spatial awareness, rather than problem solving. If I were playing something slow and complex (chess, minesweeper, etc), I expect I'd probably be more aware of my hunger.

I find that there's a window where being hungry makes me mentally lethargic, but past that window, hunger tends to disappear and I find my focus and energy renewed

Hunger (at least to a small intensity) is prodromal. If I'm already tilting hypomanic, skipping lunch is a huge trigger.

It may be the case that timing of meals affects how your body stores the resources from them. Anecdotally, I've also felt that if I eat the same amount of food earlier in the day, not right before bed, that it doesn't stick as easily.

This is a common misconception, let me explain.

> Losing weight and gaining weight is simple physics. > you are losing weight because you are consuming less calories.

This is only true in the first up to 6 months of a calorie-restriction diet. Then, body adjusts its metabolism (lower body temperature, making you feel more lethargic to keep you from exercising, etc) and your weight begins to slowly climb back up, sans any further calorie restriction. At this point, it's easy for a dieter to blame himself of lacking willpower: "it worked, and it stopped working now, I must've been not strict enough!".

The same thing happens if you force someone to overeat even if they're not hungry. They will gain weight -- for up to 6 months. Then, the body increases its base metabolic rate and adjusts to the new food intake level.

As Dr. Jason Fung meticulously explains in his book Obesity Code, there seems to be a weight set point. He then argues that the root cause of obesity, and the body's set weight point, is insulin resistance.

The books hails your grandma's advice: "Cut back sugars and starchy foods. No snacking."

This is from the last part (The Solution):

1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars. 2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. 3. Moderate your protein intake. 4. Increase your consumption of natural fats. 5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.

The author also stresses the importance of fasting.

Everything the book asserts seems to be pretty well backed by science, go check for yourself.

Source: Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Read it, it's not only a brilliant weight loss book, but also a wonderful book about how the wrong incentives for companies have led to the obesity epidemic in the US.

This is absolutely false. Having lost 160 lbs over the course of two years I can say it is absolutely possible to continue losing weight from calorie restriction. Does it get harder to lose the same amount of weight? Absolutely. You are getting lighter and your base metabolic rate diminishes. You have to eat less food or do more exercise to maintain the same deficit. In reality, your burn rate just goes down. I was initially losing 3.5 lbs a week not even trying, in the end it was down to maybe half a pound a week in the final weeks. Your body doesn't enter some magical mode at 6 mos though, of course if you don't change what you're doing you will plateau in line with your decreasing BMR, but it just means you have to keep tweaking the formula of energy in vs out or accept a slower rate of fat loss. The exercise in itself though is pretty much entirely psychological.

> This is absolutely false.

I'm not saying it's impossible to keep losing weight by calorie restriction beyond 6 months, I'm saying that _sans further calorie restriction_ you don't lose weight.

> Yes, it gets harder to continuously lose weight

This is your body adjusting its basal metabolic rate and you having to implement further calorie restriction to achieve the same benefit.

People aren’t misunderstanding what you’re saying; what you’re saying is just wrong. It may be accurate within a limited range - a few hundred calories/day, perhaps - but is obviously wrong in the limit.

Yeah. To weigh 300 pounds you need to consume so many calories a day.

To weigh 200 pounds, you need to consume a different number of calories.

If you weigh 300 and start eating the 200 pound amount, you will lose weight. Slower over time as the difference between your weight and your consumption becomes less.

Once you reach 200 pounds, you won't continue to lose weight.

There is an existence proof that this isn’t true - watch “My 600lb Life”.

See overeating studies led by Ethan Sims in the 1960s.

How does the existence of a TV show that put subjects under calorie restriction prove that this doesn't work?

P.S. from skimming the wikipedia page I'd expect that the participants were subject to further calorie restriction beyond the first one

They didn’t gain 600 pounds plus by overeating up to six months. They have spent years overeating and gaining weight.

They way to look at this from a insulin resistance perspective is that years overeating caused them to develop insulin resistance, which in turn caused them to become obese.

And when they are given tools to help them not to overeat like a gastric bypass did their insulin level resistance decrease?

Also on the same show, when they were put under medical supervision where they had to consume only 1200 calories a day they would drop around 30-50 pounds. There was one guy who would lose 20 pounds in a week (he weighed over 800 pounds) when his mom couldn't sneak food to him.

I'm sure they were quite obese before insulin resistance kicked in.

That depends, in some people it's resistance first (essentially prediabetes), in others it's obesity first. Some others develop insulin resistance when even moderately obese, there are a few who never develop it despite being extremely overweight.

The lower insulin resistance, the better the effect of diet, usually.

If that were true, weight loss surgery wouldn’t help. It takes away their ability to eat too much at once by reducing the size of their stomach. - it doesn’t change their insulin levels.

If you watch the show, most of them overeat as a coping mechanism and part of the treatment is psychological help.

Yeah, I lost 100lb from calorie restriction over the course a year. Eating the exact same things just less of it.

There is no panacea for weight loss - everyone is different.

A book is not a source. Providing a book and then cavalierly saying people should read it because it's backed by science is pretty rude.

CICO implies equal weight to all foods, it's moronic. White sugar has less calories, 407 calories per 100 grams than peanuts have for example, 567 calories per 100 grams. Let's do an experiment, I'll eat 502 grams of peanuts per day (2835 calories) while you eat 700 grams of white sugar per day (2835 calories). Surely it will have the same effect according to CICO.

I am just reporting on real data I collected and asked a question. What are you suggesting is "pseudoscience" that I said?

I agree that not eating is what caused weight loss more than anything else. But, I have found that solid waste is not where I lost weight, but through urine. And I mean weight loss as in fat, not water.

“Data” based on a sample set of 1 that can easily be explained by known phenomena? Did you measure your body fat percentage daily?

I understand that it's on me to prove my methodology, not expect you to assume I did it right. That is fair.

The data is multiple points of weight recorded every day (4 times a day) over a month, with a follow up a few years continued observance based on the results. Also, daily exercise and daily diet were documented as well (during the month of testing).

Granted, I did not measure "fat" with calipers or other methods, but I measured my waist (though I did not document this, my failure), where I lost my fat from. Sure, not perfect. But it's enough to prove _something_ was happening. I went from 202 down to 185 lbs. And my pants didn't fit properly half way through, and were baggy by the end.

I think it's fair that "explained phenomena" here, with one meal a day, 2 miles (up to 3 by the end) of running (8 minute miles avg. by the end) and slimming waist, limbs and neck was evidence of 15+ lbs of fat loss, not dehydration.

Science doesn't have to be perfect to demonstrate worth or value in a concept.

Aren’t you arguing against your point? You cut down the amount of calories in and you increased calorie expenditure. You probably also gained lean muscle mass that helped to increase your basal metabolic rate.

This goes more to show what everyone knows based on accepted science.

No, because I think I presented my observation poorly.

I think 100% of the weight loss is from use of calories, and limiting the intake of calories.

What I meant to state more clearly is that I think the waste or _something_ related to the removal of the fat (after being used) happens during sleep.

I'd put it at 90%, because keeping BMR higher helps. It's very hard to run even close to half of the BMR extra for most obese people as that's very strenuous, many hours of exercise.

This. It's all an input/output ratio.

The quickest way to gain two pounds is drinking 32oz of water.

>It's all an input/output ratio.

Except it's not. The body is not a closed system. The law of conservation of mass & energy just means you have to balance your chemical equations. It doesn't necessarily mean eating more will make you fat. (Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't ... it's just not necessarily the case.)

Appeal to intuition: you can eat 10k calories of straight lard, and you will crap most of it out. You can do other things to "burn off" that excess energy, too, like build muscle, raise your body temperature, etc.

To be clear: I don't know to what extent (if any) the body does any of the above things. My point is that the "calories in vs calories out" meme is so inaccurate that it borders on dead-wrong.

> crap most of it out

What’s not absorbed by your digestive system is not considered “in” which why cellulose for example is not counted as calories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system

However, you also absorb and excrete more than just energy calcium for example.

In any case where someone is mentioning CICO seriously, it's meant in the sense of a regular human diet (not necessarily balanced and healthy). Making a point from a fallacious example is a waste of time.

> I hate to be blunt. But this is as much pseudoscience as the anti vaxers.

There's a scientific term for what it is. It is called bro-science

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