The difficulty of actually implementing CICO suggests we should have sympathy for those who fail. This doesn't refute CICO.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maintain your caloric intake level “at maintenance” and add 5 miles of running per day and you’ll lose weight.
That's not what the evidence says.
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/
Scientifically it is possible, but that’s not backed up by how humans actually behave.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.