Comment by mister_mister | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mister_mister | Hacker News Reader

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> A model being difficult or tedious to quantify doesn't make it false. And, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Here is a link from Harvard saying to stop counting calories[0]. Here is another link from Havard[1] going over the contestants of the biggest loser and how they are doing now.

There is new model The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity[2] which has explanation that does explain the edge cases CICO is missing.

But calories are measuring food, and at the moment there is no better way to have overview of how much across different types of food. But CICO itself doesn't help with long term weight loss.

[0]https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...

[1]https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/lessons-...

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082688/

I understand that by quoting my reply on usefulness, you claim that “calories in, calories out” model is not useful. For the model to not be useful, one should prove that people gain weight while consuming a caloric deficit, or that people lose weight while consuming a caloric surplus.

I don't see how these references show that. They are irrelevant to our discussion. The first Harvard piece is bullshit, written for those feel-good types who don't want to put in the effort of losing weight. The second one has nothing to do with “calories in, calories out”. It just states some observation on contestants. The paper has “calories in, calories out” in the title, yet doesn't talk about the model at all. It talks about something else, called conventional model.

Nowhere in “calories in, calories out” I understand that it is easy to create deficit by eating junk food or that one can go back to their old lifestyle once they have lost weight. People fight with an imaginary enemy.

I think that I've explained my view as well as I could. Thanks for your participation.

Thank you, for at least reading the sources:) At this moment you'll be aware that are other ideas out there. To explain the link with biggest loser, the show used CICO model for the contestants to lose weight. And they did lose weight, So that would suggest CICO is working. But there was follow up and almost all contestants got their original weight back, and others could only eat 1200 calories in a day, that's unsustainable.

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