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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out

Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.

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Why go to space at all? Just stretch your arms until they form a great circle around the Earth. Where your hands meet, hold a dumbell the mass of your bodice. Once your hands interlock, you can safely lift your feet from Earth's tyrannical force and you will gracefully float like a ring of pure joy.

But what if I don't have a bodice? Do I need to go get one or can I just skip the dumbbell too?

Without the bodice you would be out of balance while holding the dumbbell. If you're making a ring around the world, you must learn to reason circularly.

98% of people are unable to follow your "simple" idea. Hence, it's not simple by definition.

Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.

People are always going to make these arguments. Yes, I know that there's scientific evidence that your mass effects your weight and that hunger, metabolism, etc. effect your mass. But we have to look at effect sizes. Whatever diet you try, you are only every going to have, at most, a modest effect on your own mass which will indirectly lower your weight.

I challenge people to go out there and start launching chunks of matter on escape trajectories from Earth. Yes it is hard, yes it takes a lot of energy, but you will start reducing the force of gravitational attraction acting on you. These are real results, not just a temporary change.

I'm inclined to agree with the parent comment on this, maybe argue they're being conservative. I'd say closer to 99.999% of people would struggle with this weight-loss plan, and hurling chunks of matter from your backyard to out of earth's orbit doesn't sound simple to me. But I'm not gonna knock an idea before I've tried it.

Fair, but if just 1 person can do it, it works for everyone on Earth.

Have you personally shown people how to do this? Can you link to some testimonials or endorsements from former clients?

After all, anyone can say anything, and even point to lottery winners, but I want to learn from the best what it takes to actually win the lottery. I myself am not a success coach but the other day, someone very successful told me that anyone can succeed at a startup. All they have to do is get their billionaire parents to give them a small loan of 10 million dollars, and let them iterate through and fail a few times. The key is to go back to the family trough and then you can get bailed out multiple times. If your parents are not billionaires then there are ways to fix it. This can work for anyone. He showed that such an approach actually pays off because in the end you make back everything you lost AND you can now afford an amazing car and TV!

His friend said he was “reducing a hard problem to a much harder problem”. But what does his friend know, he is poor by comparison and seems bitter

True. And I suppose it does get easier the further you go, what with escape velocity going down as you remove more mass..

This is very reasonable

Wouldn't it be easier for me to go live on the moon instead? Or better yet, a nice, comfy asteroid?

Easier, but far more selfish. By helping reduce the Earth's mass, you not only help reduce your own weight, but the weight of all current and future inhabitants of the Earth!

> Hence, it's not simple by definition.

simple != {easy, convenient, etc}

Exactly, thank you. Simple != convenient is absolutely the best way to summarize it. Losing weight this way is extremely inconvenient. It does mean that earth will become uninhabitable. But that does not mean that it's not worth the hard work!

You’re ignoring genetics. We have evolved to store fat to survive in harsh conditions, but this does not mean we can survive a missing crust and exposed mantle.

Perhaps CRISPR can help?

there were no fat ppl in concentration camps.

genetics matter but not as much as you think they do

With the Earth’s crust missing I assure you that certain genotypes will fare worse than others.

insert obligatory Rich Hickey mention

I once lost 17kg (50 pounds) by caloric restriction (500cal deficit per day). I’ve got news for you: you will be slightly hungry most of the time. Meals will be the highlight of your day.

You only know that you were slightly hungry most of the time. For you, meals were the highlight of your day.

But you didn't need to go hungry. Folks lose weight by caloric restriction and fill up on a lot of fruits and (non-starchy) vegetables. Some folks have luck with legumes and beans and filling foods. Some folks snack and don't have meals.

And the experience of hunger changes, too! Sometimes, in the same person and definitely between folks.

Examples: I used to smoke. Nicotine is an excellent appetite suppressant, and honestly made it easier to lose weight.

High stress can make me lose most of my appetite or do the opposite.

I menstruate. A few days each month, I have indescribable hunger. It is hormone driven, and unlike other hungers I've experienced. Suddenly, I feel like I've skipped meals. It consumes me. I can't do anything about it, but if I eat a little, I can go back to paying attention to other things.

Not me personally, but there are a number of drugs that increase your appetite, too.

Again, the point really is that hunger isn't as simple as "you'll be slightly hungry most of the time".

Interesting. You may be right - in fact, I’d never considered filling up on broccoli or other calorically thin ingredients to suppress hunger. I was just working on the assumption that hunger is the body’s response to caloric deficit (in the absence of drugs).

True hunger is a feeling of deep fatigue, not a craving to eat something.

What we call "hunger" is just habit of eating food regularly. You can untrain yourself, just like with any other habit.

I've lost about 15kg in the last year. (109 to 95 or so). While I'm not explicitly counting calories, I've definitely scaled back snacks, desserts, and "eat until I'm fed up" lunches.

I wonder if it's worthwhile to find some compelling distraction-- the equivalent of "I'm grudgingly coming to the table and slamming the least amount of food possible so I can get back to my task" sort of thing. If I'm at my desk away from food sources, I'm not consuming calories.

> 500cal deficit per day

Does this assume the body expends a constant amount of energy, or do you actually work out until the deficit level is achieved?

Because for most people trying to lose weight, the struggle is not only to reduce calories in, but in preventing the body from being more thrifty with those calories...

It's simple by definition but not easy to do. Cravings (fat, sugar, filling boredom with eating, depriving yourself from flavor of diet soda/soda) is easier said than done.

It's true, spending time eating can distract from the only real way to lose weight, which is by reducing the mass of the planet Earth. Stay focused, everyone! Together we can do it.

No way, I'm already at a good healthy weight. If I lose 20 lbs my doctor will get concerned, and I'll end up spending a lot of time getting tests for various cancers.

If you follow elil17's suggestion your concern is moot. There won't be any doctors. Anywhere.

> Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.

Metabolism/energy levels/etc are Calories Out. If your metabolism is low, your Calories Out is lower.

Look at BMR, such as https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/bmr

Very simple. CICO.

e: there are relatively rare medical conditions, such as water retention, that can affect weight loss. A better term might be "body fat percentage". But the end result is that if you want to lose body fat, consistently intake less calories than your body uses for energy.

I think if we're looking at body fat percentage that's a very different question, and something that's probably more in the realm of biology than physics. But weight loss is simple, it's not going to be effected by medical conditions or "metabolism" if you can just reduce the mass of the Earth.

> Crust of the earth Out

Read the linked article, they're making a pun.

> 98% of people are unable to follow

This would imply 98% of people are overweight which, even in America, is far from the truth.

I think they key question is "overweight" compared to what? Yes, far less than 98% of people are overweight compared to a baseline created by doctors that was essentially biased by the existing distribution of weights in western society. But 100% of Americans are overweight compared to how much they would weigh if the Earth's mass was reduced by 50%.

Yeah, it's much closer to 65%. And it's been constantly ticking upwards for years. Haha, uh oh.

e: overweight Americans are about 32.5% of the population. Obese is another 36.5%.

Simple != easy. Simple/complex vs easy/hard if this illustration helps

It’s simple but not easy.

"simple" <> "easy"

simple != easy

> Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.

It is that simple: people simply are looking for an excuses why they aren't willing to do it.

I'm going to again plugin this guy https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-lose-fat-with-science-based-t... because his lectures are amazing and he breaks down the actual scientific consensus on these topics rather well. He is neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has made contributions to the brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration and repair fields.

I’m surprised how many people stopped reading at CICO. It’s like a meta example of clickbait in 3 sentences.

Yes, next time I get annoyed at someone on HN I plan to return to this thread and remind myself that I'm in the elite 1% of commenters who actually read the article and the other comments before I write something.

I'd get offended, but I wasn't paying enough attention to what the conversation is about to understand what side to be on!

I think it's more that people did not even bother to open the article

My favorite fact about weight loss is that most of the actual physical loss of atoms is through your breath.

It's important to note that in the method of weight loss discussed here, you don't have to lose a single atom from your own body, but your weight can go down by an almost arbitrary amount. For example, Yuri Gagarin had his weight reduced to almost 0kg, together with his rocket, while not losing a single atom (talking about the indie of the cabin, of course).

It takes a lot of effort, but you don't have to feel hungry, and the results will beat exercise by orders of magnitude in terms of pure weight loss!

If you had said 0N maybe. But his mass, measured in kg, was never reduced.

That's fair!

Though, in fairness to me, his scales would have also shown 0kg if he stepped "on" them!

Yes! Through CO2 to be precise.

so does that mean working out more => more breath/CO2 => more weight loss?

trying to reconcile this with the conventional advice that weight loss is 90% about eating right

You are always breathing, but you breath about 3x more while you're working out cardio style, but you're not significantly changing your average breath rate for the day unless you're working out for hours daily. 24 "rest-hours of breath" on a lazy day, 26 "rest-hours of breath" on a day when you spend a full hour doing cardio/running/etc, so spending an hour doing intense workouts only increased your carbon exhaled by 8.3%. Also, somewhere around 2/3 (if not 3/4+) of the weight you lose per breath is simply water vapor restored when you have your next drink, not carbon atoms being attached to oxygen molecules in the air. Also, working out makes you hungry, rightfully so (in a world that isn't essentially full of infinite tasty food for those of us with a little money). The only way to lose significant weight is to feel hungry, and to stop eating before you "feel" full. This is de facto psychologically insurmountable (or nigh unsustainable) to everyone who is overweight and wants to lose it but just can't bear to be hungry enough for long enough. Spoken as someone slightly overweight who just needs to feel a little hungry for a couple months to get to a much better weight. And of course, once you've made a habit of eating over your ideal calories, even after you've lost the weight, your stomach is still bigger and it's effortless to go back to eating your usual large-self amounts even after you've lost all the weight, and go right back to large-self weight.

I can't remember where I read it unfortunately, but yes, breathing harder will contribute to weight loss.

edit: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/breathing-exercises-for...

I love how he captures it in a balloon during this Ted talk on fatloss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE

The problem with working out to loose weight is that your body knows it takes more calories and so it happily ups your appetite

I don’t see why these things must be as interconnected as you’re question suggests.

If you have a relatively constant outflow of breath, measurably but not drastically affected by exercise, the CICO conception could still account for the net difference in body mass.

Your exhalations are a direct result of the chemical reaction that gives you energy: C + O2 -> CO2. C is your carbon-based food, O2 is your inhalation, and CO2 is your exhalation. When you burn more calories, you increase the speed of that reaction, and you breath out more CO2. That is why exercise makes you lose weight (and why it makes you heat up). They are inextricable. The mass has to go somewhere!

the fork is mightier than the metabolism!

the breath thing is how the metabolic waste products leave the body (when your fat gets broken down eventually the mass of it leaves your body as co2).

also, the amount of hours you spend not working out dramatically trumps the amount of hours you spend not working out so working out itself doesnt change your mean..

So we should all be wearing masks after-all.

It's never been this evident to me how few people on HN even read the comments they spend time replying to.

I always knew that a lot of people didn't read the article before commenting, but I'm still surprised at the number replying here without reading the whole three-sentence comment.

It's not "basic physics."

You're implying that "calories in" are all absorbed equally. We poop. Literally. Calories go out that are never absorbed. Every body does this differently. Is that physics too?

Also: some people get calories from certain foods that other people don't get calories from. Is that physics?

Can you lose weight from a calorie restriction diet? Of course! But don't claim that it's the only answer. It's not. The human body deserves more respect than that.

Of course many diets could work for losing weight. But that’s going to be 20 pounds max for most people. I’m saying that we can lose potentially 50% or even nearly 100% of our body weight through some simple physics. F=G(m1)(m2)/(r^2)

> even nearly 100% of our body weight through some simple physics.

You're really drifting away from reality here. You're going to die well before you lose even close to 100% of your body weight. Yikes!

He/She is only drifting away from earth

I've been had. I think I need a break from the internet. lol.

Some calorie measurements are done via bomb calorimeter- you measure before eating, and then, er, after eating, and subtract the difference. So the inefficiency of poop can be baked in.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-the-calorie-is-b...

Like a good engineer I used to follow CICO religiously. It’s so simple and ‘right’, you just budget your calories and that’s all that matters.

This led to me eating treat bags of sweets for lunch. Cycles of months putting on weight and then the following months doing a 500 deficit per day to lose it. Radical hunger spikes l, nights awake in bed because I was so hungry and dreams of eating marshmallows. Lack of nutrients.

By the end of it I’d lost a lot of hair (I put a lot of this down to the inflammation caused by insulin resistance), my sweat smelled sweet, my temperature was totally out of whack, and maintaining my weight was a constant struggle.

However, since fasting and eliminating sugar from my diet I’ve maintained my weight with way less effort. By focusing on low GI food, nutrient dense food, Ive reduced my hunger pangs, my sweat smells normal, my hairs started to grow back, my sleep has improved, I recover faster from exercise, etc.

So yeah, CICO works. But it’s not optimal. The worst thing about my new diet is just how expensive and time consuming it is compared to just reading the calories on a packet and buying the cheapest thing that fits my daily budget. But it’s worth it.

CICO is simply saying caloric deficit with is the main mechanism of weight loss. It is not saying that a caloric deficit is all that is needed for optimal health or that all calories are created equal from a health perspective.

Health and weight loss shouldn’t be conflated. I would venture to guess that your new diet of fasting and nutrient dense foods is still giving you a caloric deficit to lose weight. You’ve just swapped counting calories for alternatives that serve as a proxy for reducing caloric intake.

Ex.

- intermittent fasting makes it easier to create a deficit because you're reducing the amount of time you can shove calories into your intake port

- carnivore diet works because you're cutting out all the carbohydrates in your diet and protein/fat tend to be more satiating, resulting in fewer calories overall

- Low GI foods reduce the amount of caloric-dense food options and reduce ghrelin, making you less likely to binge

They just use a different heuristic to ultimately reduce calories.

IMO this is one of the causes of yo-yo dieting. A proxy works well for a while and people lose weight. But then it stops being a good proxy for creating a caloric deficit and they plateau. Leading them to drop it, gain the weight back, and then jump onto the next fad that will serve as a rough proxy for caloric deficit again.

CICO is the mother of all motte-and-bailey fallacies. The motte is a restatement of thermodynamics and therefore completely unassailable, at least in this universe. From this the proponents sally forth to make claims like "counting calories is a good way to lose weight". Whenever someone refutes this or anything else CICOs pulled from the bailey they, the CICOs, retreat to the motte and say stuff like "see, you did have a calorie deficit from IF".

Yes, thermodynamics is always correct but usually not the appropriate level of analysis at which to address human problems.

A simple restatement of CICO arguments in terms of car fuel is enough to see how utterly trivial they are:

"My uncle got stranded on the highway"

"How so?"

"Ran out of gas"

"Well, he must have had less energy in the tank then he needed to get to his destination. Simple CICO"

Notice how the response is completely correct yet utterly useless. We haven't learned anything about why the uncle ran out of fuel. Was it a leak? CICO is true. Did he forget to fill up? CICO is true. Was he out of money and desperately hoping for the best? CICO is true. Thermodynamics is always true!

Notice how all of the different real reasons need a completely different solution. If you responded with "you just need to have enough fuel available to the engine to make it to the destination" as your "solution" people would think you are autistic.

If, when presented with the real solution, you said "well, see because he gave his uncle money for gas, now the fuel balance is postive" people would ask if you had a stroke.

Why is it that this level of "argumentation" is somehow okay for intelligent people when it comes to weight loss but would get you laughed out of the room on literally any other topic? Try it: poverty? money-in-money-out! Housing? Houses-built-Houses-used! Job problems? Literally just get fired once less then you get hired!

The reason people always go back to CICO is because it’s almost always the root cause, barring some extreme edge cases. Yet people won’t acknowledge it has anything to do with it.

People get distracted by other claims. “It’s seed oils!” No, it’s because seed oils are used in ultra-processed food that have a ton of calories. “Its the hormonal effect of carbohydrates!” No, it’s because carb-rich foods are extremely easy to overeat. “It’s because we evolved to only eat plants!” No, it’s because animal products are calorie dense by comparison. If you eat less calories than you metabolize you will lose weight, yet people get fixated on all kinds of heuristics of that point.

Eating kosher is a rough heuristic for avoiding food poisoning. It doesnt make germ theory useless, it distracts from a more rooted understanding.

I do agree that making the behavioral changes to lose weight is much more complicated. But we have to first agree on the cause. The reason why people constantly hammer on it is because so many people don’t accept that idea. To extend one of your examples, it would be like trying to convince someone how to get out of debt, but they refuse to believe their debt problem has anything to do with their spending habits and instead constantly point to things like the predatory nature of credit cards. Those can all be proximate causes, but at the end of the day they are in debt because they spend more than they earn and they’ll never fix the issue if they refuse to acknowledge that simple fact. The govt can pay off their loans and they’ll still be in debt if they don’t shore up their ledger.

CICO is literally not the root cause. In the strict sense it can't be since it's simply a thermodynamic equation applied to body weight. Equations are not causes.

If you mean "overeating" then that's also not the reason. It's like saying that being sad is the root cause of depression.

If your analysis of obesity doesn't factor in hormons then it's not going to get you any working solutions. Which is exactly what we observe in the public health sphere since the 1970ies.

> Debt

Nobody is contesting that. What you say is true but it's also just a very obvious and unhelpful restatement of the problem.

I play soccer, badly. When better players give me feedback there is two kinds. One boils down to simply a restatement of the goals of the game: pass better, don't miss the goal, get the ball. I hope you agree that if you really think about it such exhortation are silly. What I actually need is advice that tells me HOW to achieve this. It's the same for debt, weight loss etc.

Not to forget that Ketoers and Low Carbers starting with Attkins where and are viciously attacked by the CICO mainstream. When people here say stuff like "well get your deficit anyway you want" than this shows the influence that losing to LC for the last two decades had on the CICO faction. It wasn't like this when I started my keto journey. Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.

>If your analysis of obesity doesn't factor in hormons then it's not going to get you any working solutions.

Nobody is debating that there are systematic effects. I mentioned ghrelin before, I'm obviously not ignoring the effect of hormones. But that effect is to rebalance CICO. In some ways it's behavioral, like when ghrelin impacts you satiety. In other ways, it's a thermodynamic effect like how eating protein takes more energy to metabolize than the same number of calories of simple carbohydrates. But it all still boils down to the balance of calories in to calories out.

I still maintain that's what keto is doing for you. It's giving you an easier set of heuristics to balance CICO. But at the end of the day, it's still CICO and the same principle applies to a variety of dietary choices. So keto isn't some holy grail body hack; it's just a simplified model for reducing the complexity of human metabolism to rules that ultimately reduce calories.

>Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.

Yes, fat has the highest energy density but it's not the density that matters unless you factor in mass of fat consumed. You can still have less calories while eating fat.

If you can show that someone can have a long-term weight loss eating more calories than they burn (outside of hormone therapy) with something like a keto diet, that would be a reasonable counterpoint.

It seems to me what you're saying is "Yes, CICO is correct but hard to implement. Keto is a way to implement it." I can partially agree, but it doesn't make an understanding of CICO unhelpful. Keto can help rebalance CICO. However, it can also be used to increase caloric intake by drinking cups of olive oil. It's still keto, but it won't lead to weight loss because it's undermined the more fundamental principle. That makes the context of CICO important.

Put differently, can you lose weight by running against CICO principles and following keto? I'd say no. Can you lose weight running against keto principles and following CICO? I'd say yes. They aren't mutually exclusive, but that makes CICO a more fundamentally important principle.

It feels like we are discussing two different aspects. I'm talking about the overall strategy of rebalancing CICO. You're talking about the tactical methods to do so. The latter doesn't negate the former.

> doesn't make an understanding of CICO unhelpful

A naïve person might see CICO and immediately conclude that the most direct way to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more -- which can work except that the body reacts to this change by making you more hungry and conserving more energy. Now you get into the realm where systematic effects dominate: how do you reduce hunger? how do you coax the body to burn more fuel? At this stage, what you eat, how you eat it, and when you eat it becomes much more important than strictly controlling the calories -- because while it's possible to do so, it's also impractical to do so consciously in many cases.

At this point, any practical solution still needs to comply with the laws of physics (i.e. CICO), but that's kind of like insisting that a person needs to understand the laws of quantum mechanics to play basketball.

>conserving more energy

I think this, like the idea that your metabolism slows as you age, has been shown to be antiquated myths.

You burn less calories as you lose weight because you have less body mass to support. Your body doesnt flip a switch to “conserve” calories, all else being equal. This is why understanding the fundamental principles is key.

Your basketball analogy is a bad analogy. Yes, everything must adhere to the laws of physics. The difference is I’m saying there’s a ton of ways to adhere to CICO, you just need to find what works within the behavioral framework of the individual.

For some keto works great. For others, it’s not sustainable because they can’t have a simple piece of cake at a birthday party. But flexible dieting may work if they accurately count calories. For others, counting calories is too tedious and they can’t do so accurately. But they may be able to eat a vegan whole food diet. All the approaches that work have the same goal: rebalance the CICO model.

A better basketball analogy is having a zone defense vs man-on-man. Different tactics but the same goal to score more points than the other team. You don’t need to understand quantum mechanics, you just have to know how to count. If you can’t count, your approach needs to weight the game outcome in your favor. But it doesn’t make counting irrelevant to basketball any more than it makes CICO irrelevant to weight loss.

I get if you say CICO isn’t helpful for you because it is too tedious, or too much uncertainty given your food choices to implement accurately. But that doesn’t mean it’s unhelpful for everyone, especially when it’s the fundamental principle that governs weight loss with literally every approach. It just means you haven’t found a way to implement it effectively. Other people who can estimate CICO accurately find it works just fine.

I think it's because people just want to find a simple reason that lets them look down on fat people.

'It's CICO! Just lose the weight.' Done. No thought needed, and they get to feel superior.

General knowledge around proper nutrition in western countries is abysmal. In the UK for example I was pretty much convinced by government guidelines that potatoes are unhealthy. That couldn't be further from the truth!

I think this is a bad-faith argument. I didn't see any say "Just lose the weight." There's a difference between acknowledging a fundamental principle and treating it as if that fundamental principle is easy to implement.

Re:

> I didn't see any say "Just lose the weight." There's a difference between acknowledging a fundamental principle and treating it as if that fundamental principle is easy to implement.

It's right at the top:

> elil17 1 day ago

> I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out

Did you read the rest? It’s obviously a shitpost.

Reading it as generously as possible, they’re tongue-in-cheek admitting CICO isn’t easy just like obtaining orbital velocity isn’t easy.

You say that, but a few years ago CICO was heavily conflated with IIFYM dieting. The nutrient aspect was heavily overlooked in popular fitness

That’s the point. You can still lose weight on IIFYM. The issue is people conflated “weight loss” with fitness.

I can lose weight on the tapeworm diet. It’s doesn’t mean it’s healthy. They’re two different (but sometimes related) goals, so they are easily conflated.

It sounds like you're agreeing with me but with argumentative phrasing. Maybe it's just down to the way I'm reading it though.

I think we do agree. I'm not arguing, I'm just saying it seems like you're discussing a different point than the OP and it's digression from their topic.

This is utter trash and clearly you're a shill for the CICO industry. The real secret to weight loss is CICU Calories in, Centripetal force Up. This has been suppressed for decades by rocket scientist, the government, Elon Musk and other elites.

The only real thing that will be shrinking under CICO is your bank account as it's drained dry by the subsidies for crust flingers.

Under CICU your weight will go down as energy is expended to increase the rotational speed of the earth. This will not only leave the crust intact but would also allow us to see multiple sunsets/sunrises in a single "day".

> Calories In, Crust of the earth Out

I think a lot of people didn't notice the "Crust of the earth"-part in "Crust of the earth Out".

I gotta admit, I was a bit confused why there was a "calories in, calories out" argument in response to TFA and how it could connect to orbital mechanics.

I consider myself trolled along with most of my sibling commentors!

Have you heard of planetary fasting? Pretty much you just stop absorbing sunlight and the planetary insulin levels drop when all of the carbohydrate producing plants die off. Works great!

i get the joke but reminds me of a good talk where some googlers got a little upset when gary taubes started going into the problems with CICO thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4

Moving from asia to europe, I find sugar way more prevalent here in europe. Desserts everywhere and sweeter. Drinks are sweetened, breads are sweetened. My sugar consumption has increased significantly compared to my asian life and I don't even have a sweet tooth.

Haha, for me moving the other direction was shocking. What do you mean the desert is red bean paste? Beans are not sweet! Where's chocolate?!

Over time though I got used to it and started enjoying it, now that I live again in Europe I actually miss Asian deserts

Glad you enjoyed the time in asia :)

I would agree that Asia is a much better place to go to work on weight loss, but not because of food or sugar. They have the JSA, Roscosmos, and CNSA, whereas Europe only has the ESA.

Your commitment to this thread is awe-inspiring.

most of the salty food in asian countries contain some sugar especially in restaurants

Simple does not mean easy. In fact sometimes a simply difficult problem is the hardest.

That is absolutely true. I'm not trying to tell anyone this isn't a hard challenge. But I think we can all lose weight this way given enough effort.

I actually dislike any extended conversation on losing weight. Just stop eating is basically the answer. It sounds blunt but it feels like we need to hammer the message in.

> these click-bait articles

Did you read the article? It didn't seem like click-bait to me.

I did. It gets into all this stuff about "density" and "distance from the center of the Earth." I just feel like that is missing the point. As I said, weight loss is simple CICO, Calories In, Crust of the earth Out. You don't need to think about it any more than that, no matter what "scientific publications" like XKCD tell you.

You didn't get the joke :(

> Calories In, Crust of the earth Out

Someone can correct me here, but I believe CICO is false, due to the the difference of efficiency in difference foods and the different people consuming them, leading to significant differences compared to CICO values.

CICO is absolutely true, that's a fact. All you have to do is look at the basic physics. If you reduce the mass of the Earth by 50% (without decreasing your distance from Earths center, a common trap people fall into when they're trying to lose weight), you will lose 50% of your weight.

Fad diets and "body mass" are, excuse my harsh language, B.S. Yes they can contribute to weight loss but they are going to let you lose 10 or 15 pounds tops. Reducing the weight of the Earth, on the other hand, can get you to lose essentially any amount of weight.

I love how you're committed to the bit now.

I truly find this thread so enjoyable. Just at my desk, smiling.

I've been coming to HN for the better part of a decade now, and this is already in my pantheon of Greatest Threads

Very glad I decided to come back to this thread and see what it turned into.

It's the same bit as the article itself, right?

Yes LOL

I know you know, I was trying to see if the other commenter does

What is an article ? Is that the top comment you see below the title when you open an HN post ?

What a mike drop comment.

I'm sorry, I went further down the thread, but it never got better than this.

I take full credit for encouraging this

The trick to giving up cigarattes is not lighting them, putting in your mouth and inhaling the smoke.

CICO certainly isnt false.

CICO is not false, and that is at most a +-10% variance. Food absorption is definitely is a part of Calories In. If you're worried that you're absorbing more or less calories versus other people, adjust your Calories In.

More likely, you are miscounting calories - a common mistake that people trying to lose weight make. For example, you'd be surprised how many calories are in that packet of creamy sauce that came with your fast food!

CICO is hard to stick to, because we are biologically wired to enjoy high calorie diets. As a result, lots of people have come up with justifications as to why it wasn't their fault that they failed to adhere to it.

The reality is that weight loss is simple. It's very difficult, especially if you're not willing to completely overhaul your diet and relationship with food as an American.

I would say that overhauling your diet/relationship with food is really not what it's about. It's about gathering the necessary energy, resources, etc. to start putting significant amounts of Earth's mass on an escape trajectory.

Don't eat breakfast and don't gorge on snacks before bedtime. That will be a huge benefit to most people that struggle. Now...getting the willpower to stick with it is another battle...

Well, if your going to help us all lose serious weight via CICO, I think having a big snack here and there is more than deserved.

After all, shooting any significant amount of the planet's crust into space is definitely hungry work...

Personally, I drink these 100 cal nutrition drinks for breakfast, or have a banana, and a sparkling water.

I've settled on

- Very lightweight breakfast (~100 cal)

- Light lunch (~700 cal)

- Heavy dinner (~1400 cal)

- Hard liquor only (tall single vodka/soda is my goto)

You'll notice that's over 2000~ a day. I also walk a lot, use an exercise bike instead of the couch when watching TV, and bicycle everywhere I can. On lazy days, I adjust downwards.

One thing I've done that's helped a lot is eating a low carb diet - I did keto, found it was incredible effective in losing weight, but kinda brutal. Instead, a low carb (non-ketosis) diet allows for some carbs but significantly reduces "empty calories".

> weight loss is simple. It's very difficult

Wait, which one is it? Simple or very difficult. Lol. I think you meant the calorie math is simple.

The opposite of simple is not difficult, it's complex. The opposite of difficult is not simple, it's easy.

Simplicity has to do with the effort needed to understand something, difficulty has to do with the effort needed to perform an action. It's not unusual that something that requires little effort to understand requires a great deal of effort to execute.

CICO is still true. While some foods can increase metabolism (the other reply suggested up to 10% - sounds reasonable to me), that is an increase in calories out. You can also increase metabolism by exercising, or some drugs.

What exactly does food have to do with CICO?

You're certainly not going to get very far at ejecting the earth's crust by burning food...

There's no reason why certain physically and calorifically dense foods (eg. Christmas pudding) couldn't necessarily be combined with oxidizers and fitted into solid rocket motors, which could then be used to launch significant chunks of the earth's crust out of its gravity well.

That’s not why I nicknamed my chili recipe Red Mercury.

There are different ways to measure calories. In a calorimeter you can measure all the calories in some stuff. In your body the amount of calories available to your body to digest is some amount less depending on what that stuff is. This can vary from foodstuff to foodstuff by (iirc) about 1-15%

So one could be more accurate and say Available CaloriesICO I guess

Unless you are an athlete or have some condition the simple CICO rule is accurate enough to be useful. Eat less, move more, and weight will be lost (or at least gains will slow).

None of this says anything about each person’s own life challenges that alter how difficult it is to do that.

I think that the energy density of rocket fuel is pretty easy to measure. If you're trying to do a food powered rocket it's true the energy measurements could get more complicated.

Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure modern calorimeters won't catch the energy available via nuclear reactions. What if our digestive tracts have evolved some as-of-yet undiscovered mechanism to tap into that energy, thereby invalidating all the "CICO" people's claims? Now that would be a real pickle.

Hark at Nibbler!

Wouldnt the undigested calories just get added into calories out?

Also, you don't need git, just memorize code changes.

If it were that simple you and your car would be able to use the same fuel--it is likely a bad idea in most cases.

No. "Calories" are a measure of fuel heat capacity, not nutrition.

Alcohol is more caloric than Coca-Cola, but drinking two liters of alcohol per day won't make you obese.

I think the fact that calories are a measure of energy in fuel makes calories extremely relevant to the Calories In, Crust of the earth Out weight loss method.

You misunderstand simple for easy, and the fact that you refer to physics for something that belongs to biology and psychology show that you don't really know what you're talking about

Weight really has very little to do with biology, and nothing to do with psychology. It is a simple matter of how much the earth's mass bends space-time - the more mass we eject of the earth, the less bent space-time will be in the vicinity, the less we'll all weight.

It really is the simplest weight loss method possible, it will work for everyone living on the planet at once, and the article presents it (and its difficulties) quite clearly - not sure why you'd go off topic by talking about biology and psychology.

You're totally missing the joke. Read the article and check back.

It's not. What you eat is just as important as how much you eat.

The body is complex, self-regulating system with hystersis and set points. You should go learn about "metabolic syndrome".

And everyone's body reacts differently, so there's no one solution.

>And everyone's body reacts differently, so there's no one solution.

Absolutely disagree. F = G(m1)(m2)/(r^2). It's that simple, it's physics. Reduce m1 and your F goes down, same for everybody on the planet.

But how do you reduce m1 without reducing r? TFA (correctly) points out that many attempts to reduce m1 will also reduce r, which can be counterproductive.

hollow earth - just find a way to eject the convenient liquid layer inside the earth elsewhere

Sure, there are ways around it, but someone who is only given the "CICO" advice is likely to run afowl of r naturally being correlated to m1.

Sure. And our stomachs aren't bomb calorimeters.

Literally not sure what a stomach has to do with any of this.

CICO often makes the assumption that we metabolize food in the same way that a bomb calorimeter burns it. Calorie numbers on labels refers to the latter.

It's not physics, it's biology. There are processes that adjust and compensate to changes in the body and diet.

For example, if my BMR is 3600cal, and I don't eat for a day, why am I not 1lb lighter?

Or if I fast for 5 days, why am I 13lbs lighter and not 5lbs lighter?

Why is it easier for obese people to lose weight initially, but then harder to lose that last 10lbs? Which is also true for non-obese people.

You're not seeing the bigger picture. If we pull our work together, we can all collectively lose significant weight, and all it would take is a few measly kilometers of the earth's crust being thrown off into space - this is what this thread is all about!

Discussing fat loss is really short sighted when ejecting a little bit of mass could help the entire population lose some weight forever.

What's hilarious is that jasonpeacock didn't just avoid reading the article, but it's clear that he also avoided reading the very comment he replied to.

It's like people just want to get outraged over nothing.

And not once, but twice!

Even though it's a lot of fun, it's honestly a bit eye opening to see how little some people engage with the substance of the comments they are replying to...

ok, jokes on me :) I did the read the article (and have bought both books).

but I've seen so much garbage about CICO that I took the response seriously..

To be clear I agree with you. I find “CICO” a totally dissatisfying explanation of obesity, not because I don’t think it’s true, but rather because I think it fails to provide any insight that’s actionable from a public health perspective.

Yes, I've been there once or twice myself, no judgment on you personally! The amount of people responding this way was a bit surprising though. I will note that I completely share your feelings about the boring version of CICO.

Go back and read the original response again. It doesn't say anything about calories out.

So you provide a single, simple method of weight loss and then you edit your comment when attacked and add a single case of weight loss to make your point. You then claim there's no possibility for debate, it's proven, and you reiterate how simple it is

I did write all of that, because I’m absolutely right. Google Yuri Gagarin and you’ll understand. He lost 100% of his body weight.

CICO is true, of course, but it doesn't do justice to how interesting the whole topic of weight loss is. Why do some people need more food to reach satiety, why do some people move more, for example.

To be fair, in the CICO model, everyone on Earth would lose the exact same amount of weight, regardless of any of the factors you mention - or at least, the weight loss we'd experience from truly following the tenets of CICO could easily offset any individual mass modification from food or exercise!

It's also true that you'd get far more, and quicker, weight loss by increasing your distance from the earth instead of reducing the earth's mass, but that seems a little selfish...

While this is true strictly speaking, whether weight-loss actually happens is 99% a psychological thing, and ignoring that is ridiculous. People aren't magical machines with infinite, perfect willpower, ignoring that this is the main factor is completely out of touch. That's what the whole conversation is about, how to make it easier for people, more realistic. Find foods that make people feel sated while still eating less for example. Find ways to make habits. etc.

Not really - your psychology really has absolutely nothing to do with how much force the Earth exerts on you (and everyone else). CICO captures this perfectly: the more Crust of the earth Out, the less force the Earth will exert on us, so we'll all weigh less. No amount of psychology will help or prevent you from losing those newtons of weight!

This really doesn’t work.

BMR is a thing. Gut bacteria are a thing. How your body conserves energy is a thing. How your body tries to find efficiencies while doing the same thing is a thing. Insulin is a thing.

The only way the CICO model has any value is through it’s most trivial “physics based” interpretation at which point it’s not useful in any way. It’s like saying “Developing software is simple. It’s Code in, Executable out”. Its not wrong, but it’s also a completely pointless statement, which only serves to trivialize a complex issue and end discussion on it.

You could write that comment on every software development related article on HN and dismiss the article as clickbait on that basis, which would obviously be ridiculous, even if your statement wouldn’t be wrong.

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