Cars and footlong burritos and a pint of Haagen Dasz for dinner.
You remind me of my mate Amite who is far larger than you (330lb, 5ft 9) but says its the result of him âbeing a â â â â â when he was younger wrt to lifestyle choices. 
I just shrug my shoulders and tell him he had a whale of a time (pun intended).
I think this is important for people to understand. I think the saying in the 2p2 H&F forum was that precision is more important than accuracy. OK you want to eat at a 200cal/day deficit, you were sure you were burning x and eating x-200, but you didnât lose an ounce? Keep logging as precisely as you can, subtract another 200 calories because something was wrong; donât knock yourself out trying to figure out which number was fucked up.
I think one of the reasons that concepts like the above (and CICO in general) are super important as a starting point for people, is that most folks are desperate for an excuse to say theyâre a snowflake who canât lose weight, and quit. Itâs important to understand that the numbers ultimately donât lie even if there are a bunch of things that obfuscate them and make it frustrating.
Obviously all the other issues of psychology and willpower and stress and support are of paramount importance in whether one is gonna successfully stick to whatever winds up working, but I think the above is an important foundation in helping somebody understand that itâs possible to do. The average IQ ITT is pretty high, and I think people here are forgetting that the world is full of folks that believe silly stuff like that skipping lunch makes their metabolism drop by 1000cals, or that they somehow ingest calories from the moisture in the air or something to make up for any attempt at weight loss, and that they just have a âset pointâ. They absolutely need to have the basics drummed into them.
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A really good conversation starter to get people thinking about weight loss more rationally is to ask them where they think the fat goes when people lose weight. You canât really formulate a response to that based on emotions.
Itâs a rare thread where Vict0ar seems to be the least controversial poster.
Gotta agree with his assessment. This thread is indeed crazytown.
Just because you believe CICO (of course there are some edge cases, but for 95+% of the population, it will be a very reliable way to project weight loss/gain), it doesnât mean that youâre ignoring the other aspects of maintaining a certain diet.
Yes, eating at a deficit sucks, makes you feel like shit, and is hard to adhere to, especially if progress is slow. I believe all of those things and just because I believe them and think theyâre important doesnât mean that CICO is incorrect.
Why do you think? Obviously the guy stopped logging and lost his discipline. As a result his calories in exceeded his calories expended and he gained weight.
In his case I think the logging was huge. A lot of people busted his balls, but it was mostly good natured and along with that he got a fuckton of advice and support. I think that if he just kept logging, things likely would have gone very differently for him. Once again, believing this doesnât deny CICO.
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Yep, and people are poor because they spend more than they make. There are no other factors involved at all.
Iâm sure itâs been said recently, but it bears repeating: CICO is simple, but by no means easy.
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Correct (once again, barring some edge cases; obviously we can nit this statement if we really wanted to).
What youâre calling factors are really just reasons why they spend more than they make. Some of which are very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.
100% this. My wife is significantly overweight and has lost the same ~100lb (which is not all she needs to lose, unfortunately) multiple times and gained it back. Every single time sheâs gone off the rails itâs been because she stopped logging. Of course that doesnât happen in a vacuum either, and was the result of other things like major life stress that caused her to run out of fucks to give, but stress on its own didnât derail her when she would still manage to sit down every day and crunch the numbers and figure out how many calories (or points, when doing WW) she had left for the day. She has zero delusions about weight loss and knows exactly what works, itâs just a matter of staying accountable.
Needless to say, I blame myself for not keeping her accountable either. Of course when you mention a couple of times that sheâs stopped logging and get the ânot now, honâ you tend to stop mentioning it to avoid being a dick. It also doesnât help that Iâm a guy who has 9" of height on her and a lot more muscle, and can maintain my weight on the same daily calories that sheâd gain 1-2lb/week on. When sheâs not keeping track, itâs ridiculously easy for her to just eat somewhere in the vicinity of what I do.
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Nope, they can just eat rice and stay on a friends couch and save money. They just donât want it bad enough.
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Iâm not sure you understand how poverty works. Plenty of people do that and still spend more they make.
Everybody believes CICO - but you need to know calories in, calories burned during exercise and BMR. The last two can be very tricky to estimate. Calories in is by far the easiest.
But for 95% of cases if they cut all extra spending they would be able to save some.
Ok, now is the point where I guess we have to nit your original claim. I was just ignoring the inaccuracy, since I didnât want to get bogged down in that. But I can see thatâs where weâre headed. So, letâs do it.
Strictly speaking, not spending more than you make is not really the definition of poverty. For example if one makes a million dollars and spends a million and one dollars a year, theyâre not poor by most reasonable definitions.
Similarly if someone makes 10K a year and spends $9999, then they are poor despite the fact that they are technically making more than they spend.
The point here is that poverty is probably better defined by a certain amount of income as well as a certain amount of assets.
The more important point is that we can actually define all of these things in whatever way you like and that will define poverty. Reasons for poverty (e.g. structural racism, lack of educational opportunities, etc.) will not change whatever definition you decide to come up with. That will remain unchanged.
I donât know about this. Certainly not everybody. If weâre limiting it to everybody here, maybe. But I have my doubts.
Not really. As pointed out up thread, you can empirically figure these things out. For most people you can enter height and weight into an online calculator and get an estimate that is good enough for the vast majority.
As an aside, if youâre trying to lose weight, you should almost never include calories burned in exercise. Just pretend itâs zero. Youâll do better that way.
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So when I lost so much weight on testosterone - my BMR was probably higher right? Otherwise what would explain it being so much easier?
Does that mean people with high testosterone naturally have a high BMR?
That would make perfect sense.
Testosterone will make it easier for you to gain muscle if you are trying to and it will cause you to hold on to lean muscle better as you are losing weight. Muscle is very metabolically active (i.e. calorie burning) tissue, so having more muscle will help you burn more calories and lose more weight.
There may be other effects as well.
Why do you not think those are also reasons for people being overweight?
Maybe weâre just having a semantic argument here. But, sure.
If we define overweight to be a certain BMI and a certain body fat % (to avoid very muscular people with high BMI but no fat),
then anyone who meets that definition is overweight. The reason you get to that point is because for a while your caloric intake was greater than your caloric expenditure.
There are many reasons why your consumption may have been like this. And I suppose some of those reasons are the same as the reasons for poverty. But once again, identifying those reasons doesnât change the definition of âoverweightâ or the direct mechanism for getting to that point.
You donât need to know either of these they arenât important, stop obsessing over BMR. I couldnât tell you what my BMR is but I know through trial and error that at my current weight and lifestyle habits my TDEE is around 2800 cals (not exact but in that ballpark). Log everything that goes in your body, weigh yourself regularly (I always weigh myself right away in the morning after I go to the bathroom), adjust what goes in your body if you donât like the direction your weight is going. Look at longer term trends and ignore minor day to day weight fluctuation. Perform regular exercise and or resistant training during this for quicker/better results.
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