Here’s another interesting article about the surprising nuance in weight gain that goes beyond CICO. I think that @■■■■■■■ is probably right that this informs public policy more than individual dieters.
1 Like
The reason why I don’t interact with Vict0ar is that he, like so many other people I find hugely irritating, demands that everyone else accept his framing of reality which excludes a great many things that are inconvenient to that. I lived in an alternate reality like that for the first 26 years of my life and I’ll never go back to letting someone else have control over which sources are acceptable or not.
Strongly ideological people and the religious have a lot in common lol.
Right here ITT he straight up called me a liar in the presence of evidence to the contrary easily available. You’ve gotta be providing me an awful lot of value to keep my attention when that’s in your range.
1 Like
Fair enough. I am assuming some other readers may be driving some value from me beating my head against a brick wall, lol. I may be wrong if course.
To each his own I guess. I personally find it more convincing than a declaration that weight loss is simple. Where we agree is that a person must deal with the circumstances that they find themselves in, but I think its simultaneously interesting to explore and even influence with public policy the environment that gives rise to those situations. If you don’t that’s fine.
I mean it was an interesting conversation about weight before he started ‘contributing’ to the thread and turned it into a dumb argument. I’m not criticizing everyone for interacting with him, I’m pointing out that knowing how to push a conversation along to somewhere productive is a skill, and the more I work on that skill the more certain I am that the right way to deal with closed minded people is to not involve them.
Being closed minded was a pretty good strategy for most of human history. They used to put open minded people below a certain social class to death for not being good enough at keeping our thoughts to ourselves. But our time has absolutely come with the worlds complexity multiplying dramatically.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t let the closed minded speak their peace. But they aren’t actually participating in the conversation, they are simply inputting their own thoughts as data. Letting them continue to participate in the argument is counter productive if our goal is to arrive at truth. Their goal isn’t truth it’s having their viewpoint win out no matter what that costs and that’s exhausting mentally and never ends with a resolution other than everyone giving up and them ‘winning’.
I’ve had enough arguments like that to last me the rest of my life. I go into every conversation persuadable within the available data. If I’m extremely wrong I’m actually pretty pleased with myself as it means I’m about to improve my understanding pretty significantly. I expect the same back or the feedback I get from the conversation is basically worthless.
And yes I’m thinking about every conversation in terms of the value it gives me vs the amount of energy I have to expend for it. Is it selfish? Sure. It also saves me from banging my head against walls in totally unproductive ways which I used to do a lot.
Exactly! If counting calories was the key, then the median skinny person would be able to show you all their data collected over the years. But hardly anyone that is a healthy weight counts their calories.
3 Likes
I eagerly await the “convincing” study that you read to help to reach this conclusion.
Try Google.
The whole argument about CICO and how useful it is feels super aids-y to me. Of course on some level it’s pedantic and literal, and there are a hundred other things that are more important to address when it comes to the actual process of weight loss.
The reason it’s important to teach CICO as a starting point is that there are literally a million overweight people out there who are just kinda dumb and don’t understand it. That still think that the secret to losing weight is to eat six times a day or more to “jumpstart their metabolism” and “not go into starvation mode”. That think that the calories listed on a beverage don’t really count, since don’t you just piss it all out anyway? That say things like “I started eating vegetables this month” (and changed nothing else) and don’t understand how that didn’t cause them to lose 10lb. In a world full of flat earthers and anti-vaxxers and Trump voters, is anyone here really surprised that many/most people are totally ignorant about basic thermodynamics of food?
Meanwhile everyone keeps strawmanning the shit out of each other ITT and it’s annoying. “Ha ha by saying CICO you’re totally disrespecting all the nuance and real issues behind weight loss!” “Well you’re ignoring science!” Nobody’s doing any of that, it’s silly.
5 Likes
Sure, lots of truth to this. The most salient question IMO is what are the strategies available for weight loss and what had a track record of working. I think there’s room between understanding CICO as a concept and trying to implement it as a weight losing tool by instructing Joe Heavyweight to track his CO and CI in detail for months. There are better behavioral tools to achieve CICO goals.
2 Likes
For sure. Ideally it’s a matter of finding the biggest leaks and the easiest things to change, see where those have the biggest overlap and just go that route, especially if it’s somebody that has a ton of weight to lose and a ton of bad habits. Cutting out liquid calories is a great starting point that can make a huge difference by itself if the person is a soda addict. Eliminating the worst of the fast food binges is next, maybe finding the couple of things that are non-awful and still taste OK from their favorite places. Seeing if they can skip the starch at dinner (that they inevitably have 3 helpings of) and have a little more protein instead. Etc. Etc. This way they can potentially go quite a while seeing results before they even get to the point where they have to count a single calorie.
Once they’ve seen results for a long time and hit a plateau and actually might be at the point where they need to make tougher choices, weigh their food etc., hopefully the previous success and momentum will make that less of a chore.
1 Like
That’s true but an important question is what is more actionable advice:
Look fat, replace your soda with water and fill half your plate with vegetables.
Look fat, track your calories in a spreadsheet for 3 months so we can figure out what’s going on here.
I’m convinced that my BMR drops as a diet. I feel more lethargic. And what worked in month 1 stops working in month 2. The other thing is I get super stressed and grumpy when I diet too hard. And I never seem to lose weight when I’m in that mode, even if I barely eat. It’s like your body retains water or something.
There are a lot of schools of thought that you can actually eat too few calories (at least until you get to starvation level). The idea being there’s some sub-optimal level that sends your body into shutdown mode. Or something. My coworker lost 100 lbs by logging his food on MyFitnessPal religiously and following their calorie recommendations to the letter. He said at first it felt like he had to force himself to eat more than he was used to.
Please don’t come at me bros. I’m not saying my BMR drops that dramatically. But I do think it drops some when I diet and I also think crash dieting in college helped contribute to my body going into that kind of panic mode.
Any new diet I try (and I mean stuff like South Beach or Zone - which seem pretty sound, not crazy fad stuff like full-blown Atkins) seems to work once. Then if I try it again my body gets wise and throws up stress defenses. Like you tricked me once, but I’m not giving up w/o a fight this time. Yes I am aware that stress/grumpiness just makes me less likely to follow the diet and might not be much about BMR.
The one thing that really worked when I lost 60 lbs was switching to carb-cycling when I seemed to “plateau” at about 25 lbs lost. 4-day cycle of 200-150-100-50. That kept working until I got all the way down to 208 (from 270). But also I was on testosterone. I managed to hang around at 215 for months, and then I hung around 235 for a year or so. But eventually I gained it all back :(
This time around I got up to 283 or so - nightmare. Although hiking up 4000’ at a time at 280+ got my legs in amazing shape. Now I’m at 255 for a while and considering carb loading again. But I haven’t been killing myself to lose for the last couple months. I bought $2000 worth of weights and racks - so I’m focusing more on that.
3 Likes
Makes you think.
For sure. I just thought it was interesting that he felt like he was eating more calories than usual at first. But maybe it was healthy foods made him more full.
My problem in the past is I’d follow my fitness pal religiously for a month, except for one or two social occasions, like a home poker game, where I’d completely blow it. Apparently that’s enough to completely wreck my diet. I’m guessing that not having that 1.5 blowouts/month is the main reason I’ve lost 25 lbs. this year.
It’s very hard for me to do a party w/o drinking or eating - it’s like why even be there. I’m just not that social of a person naturally, yet I do need socialization just like everyone else. But if I don’t enjoy the food and drink - I’m completely miserable having massive willpower battles with myself the whole time.
Sometimes I even last a few hours. But if I drink, then I eventually eat, and then when the damn breaks I’m like fucking Cookie Monster shoving everything I can into my face. Once I hit that point of “fuck it, I’ve already blown it” and I’m buzzed, then I just go nuts.
If I don’t drink at a party I’m miserable watching everyone else have fun. I’d rather be somewhere else. One exception is if there’s a big game I can focus on. That has worked. But trying to be sober for just a normal party, or putting up with my drunk stoned buddies playing a home poker game - ugh.
So the only solution was to be a hermit. But that’s stressful too. However in covid times I could maybe actually pull off my fitness pal.
I have done stuff over time like join a hiking group and look for other ways to socialize that don’t always involve a massive spread of food and alcohol. But it’s hard to make all new friends.
Thanks for that. It’s great to hear some confirmation of what I’ve experienced - that my body seems to adjust to the diet. Another reason why CICO isn’t that simple to pull off - BMR is at least somewhat of a moving target.
1000 calories/day probably closely describes how I lost 50 lbs in less than 6 months in college. I still dunno though. I’ve been told my whole life that was a bad way to lose weight.
I’ve been in fitness circles for years, and I’ve seen variations of this so. many. times.
A lot of them sound more diligent than you (no offense meant by this)–like ppl who cut out refined sugar entirely and stuff like that, in addition to a major HIIT exercise program. People who couch to marathon in a year or so. They definitely lose weight for a while, and usually this feeds more diligence and devotion as they get excited about the positive results.
Then they plateau. No effort, however herculean, can move them past the plateau.
It’s definitely healthy and worthwhile that they went about these lifestyle changes, but many people being thin is the goal and yet they remain overweight and unable to do any better despite being a hell of a lot more diligent than, for example, me. Years of seeing this made me stop preaching that everyone can find salvation in a lot of HIIT + a lean diet with few empty calories (although I do think that generally is the best way to get in shape).
1 Like
I’ve read that cortisol makes fat-burning harder and it certainly seems to match my experience. But the CICO people will jump on you for saying it.
And once you teach it to them, does this provide them with an effective way to lose weight? The evidence is absolutely screaming “no”. Like if “tell people about CICO” were a government program which had to be funded based on the strength of outcomes, it would have its funding pulled. It doesn’t work in the real world. If people say “abstinence only education works, people just need to try harder at it” we will call them an idiot, but if people say “calorie counting works, people just aren’t trying hard enough” for some reason everyone is like “yep”. One of those reasons is that we simply don’t have any better ideas. We don’t really know why obesity is an increasing problem.
It’s amazing that Victor rejects out of hand that study showing the extremely obvious fact that there are enviromental issues going on which make it harder for people to lose weight, because the only alternative explanation is the reactionary idea that KIDS THESE DAYS are soft and weak and can’t handle a little discipline. Like FUCKING LOL if you buy the idea that Boomers are some sort of exemplars of self-discipline.
2 Likes
–didn’t say anything about people not trying hard enough being the problem
–didn’t deny anything about environmental issues
–didn’t say anything close to CICO being the only thing that works in the real world
–tried to make a nuanced post about why calorie facts are an important part of the solution, acknowledging the other issues, but not well enough for you I guess
You’re fucking exhausting.
4 Likes