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Comment by _zamorano_ | Hacker News Reader

It's not. That idea is obsolete and is very easy to prove.

Take patient A in a control room and make him eat 2000K calories a day. Take patient B into the exact same environment, eating the same calories.

Apply insulin shots only to patient B

Patient B will get fat, and patient A won't, eating the exact same calories.

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That's not what the OP is suggesting, though. "calories in, calories out" does not mean that my 2,000 calories is the same as someone else's 2,000 calories. It means that if I am gaining weight eating 2,000 calories a day, I will eventually lose weight if I eat fewer and few calories. (ie, I may not lose weight at 1,900 calories per day, but I would absolutely lose weight at 500 calories per day.)

I don't see this is a contradiction when you chemically alter someone's calories out by messing with their metabolism.

But sure, we can rephrase CICO in a way that's more precise. For any person with a given diet there exists a caloric intake where they will lose weight. Or as a one liner: "if you're not losing weight, you can always eat less until you do."

BMR might drop around 10% when doing traditional calorie restricting dieting. Some diets try to prevent that the best they can (keto, for example).

If a specific diet was able to mitigate the drop in BMR (unlikely to completely mitigate if you're losing weight), then it might be the difference between like 2000 calories burned a day and 2150 burned in a day, right?

Is that optimization worth considering? I don't think so. People should focus on a diet that they can stick to, not something that optimizes that much.

That's great if we all live in control rooms. The part 'calories in calories out' misses is that what you eat, how you eat, where you eat, how your body reacts to what you eat, who you eat with, where you live, what food is available, the price of food....all impacts how much you eat.

I think of 'calories out' as including all the the what, how, where, etc. I think 'calories in calories out' is true, but I think often only things like exercise and BMR are considered in the sum of the out.

The part that it gets right, though, is that way too many people are lying to themselves about how many calories they are actually consuming. It's not like the average overweight-obese person is sitting at 2000 calories a day and can't figure out why they aren't losing weight. They're eating 1000 calories a meal, drinking soda, eating snacks.

Sure there are metabolic outliers and everyone loves to bring them up. They are, however, outliers. Horrible diet and a sedentary lifestyle are the main culprits where calories in/out very much holds.

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