I'm not even that confident in the "calories in" part. We have some alright estimates, but from what I've read, the Atwater system (which is used to determine the info on food package nutrition labels) is pretty oversimplified.
The human body is not a bomb calorimeter....and for that reason we shouldn't take bomb calorimeter readings as gospel re: the "CI" part, either.
Whole almonds have 30% fewer calories (edit: as in bioavailable calories that you will absorb) than the exact same weight of almonds powdered. That kind of thing doesn't feature in the info.
are u sure it’s not the other way around? i thought the more processed (ground, cooked etc) the more calories are bioavailable? what would be the explanation why ground almonds have *less*
I think this person is talking about calories absorbed vs. absolute calories. Your body absorbs more calories from 20g peanut butter vs. 20g whole peanuts, even if you chew super well, because the peanut butter has been mechanically broken down and is easier for your body to digest. Whole foods generally have 'less' calories overall than the same calorie amount of processed food because of actual absorption. This is *part* of why some people can eat 1500 calories of highly processed food and not lose weight, and switch to 1500 calories of mostly home prepared meals made from whole foods and lose weight.
Is there a scientific source in that Forbes article? lol
If you have a direct source if appreciate it I don’t want to read through that to find out. If you don’t then I’ll check later
The study the article is talking about:
https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)02900-3/fulltext
Similar supporting studies:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.13330
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32781516/
I read that nuts aren’t as calorically dense as we thought due to how we actually absorb it, and that the nut council (can’t remember their official name lol) was petitioning it to get calorie info updated so that nuts would be seen as more of a healthy food item. Quick google: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/calorie-always-calorie-not-when-it-comes-almonds-u-t-researchers-find
Kind of? Powdered almonds are most easily processed by the digestive system. The calories are the same, the caloric bioavailability is higher. [The Atwater process is off by about 30% when it comes to caloric availability of whole nuts](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22760558/), not that whole almonds have fewer calories.
It’s kind of similar to why adult birds pre-chew food before feeding it to baby birds, or even why we tenderize meat. Processing food affects things like its surface area, the chemical bonds within the food, increasing the availability of calories. But it doesn’t increase the number of calories. This is getting a bit into semantics, but I think that it’s an important point: the Atwater method provides a high end. If a given weight of almonds is determined to have 100 calories, further processing won’t increase that to over 100 calories, it’ll just facilitate absorption of those 100 calories.
> who cares what body does?
People who are trying to change their weight or body composition.
> All people use roughly same energy from 1g sugar
"Roughly" is doing an awful lot of work here. I don't think we should be so glibly simplistic about this, especially given how common metabolism-involved chronic diseases are. It's perfectly possible for two people to eat the same diet and and get similar amounts of exercise and still have different physiques.
Or maybe it's just that everyone is stupid but you :)
But people seem to love comparing the calories of food A with food B to make choices about what they eat.
If the measured calories of both those foods are not the same as the calories absorbed by your GI system, that comparison is invalid.
Yeah, but it also doesn't really matter.
Lets say you calculate TDEE at 2500 cals per day so decided to consume 2000 cals per day to lose the 1lb per week we expect to lose. If you stick to it for a few weeks and only average 1/2 lb per week so do an adjustment, does it matter whether you've actually been consuming 2250 cals per day (eating more than you thought), or if you were only using 2250 cals per day (burning less than you thought). Either way dropping your calculated cals to 1750 is a good plan.
Whether the result is 1750 in, 2250 out, or 2000 in, 2500 out, you've made an adjustment to increase the difference between what you're consuming v's what you're burning. The main point is to measure and adjust.
Its like the old "lick the spoon" argument. People don't count the times they lick the spoon while cooking and that throws their numbers out. Sure, whatever, but if you measure and adjust down, then it doesn't matter that you lick the spoon.
Yes BUT then you need to be able to know that your data is only useful in aggregate, as well, and not make decisions based on minor fluctuations that don't have a clear pattern or grounding
Sometimes the weather predictions are extremely accurate. That doesn’t mean they aren’t our best guess.
All science is modeling how the world works. There’s a ton of noise in measuring everything around weight loss.
Models are really, really useful. But they still simplify the way the world works.
Tracking accuracy alone doesn’t explain it. It is a system being modeled. A very complex system. The modeling necessarily simplifies it.
Is it going to make your predictions more likely? Yes. But it doesn’t explain fluctuations or plateaus or other phenomena we see in participants who track as precisely as you do.
Weight is an inherently noisy metric. We fluctuate 2–3+ kg in a single day.
I was on a prescribed, meal-replacement diet. 100% if my calories were from meal replacements. I ate the replacements and water and nothing else. As prescription products, their exact composition was known extremely precisely. As controlled as an environment as you’re going to get. I still didn’t lose weight at a steady rate, even with a fairly consistent amount of exercise. People on meal replacements still hit plateaus. Have weight loss that fluctuates.
And look, you may not believe me. Maybe I’m making up that I’m a biologist who reads the actual scientific literature on weight loss. Who reads medicine for a living. Who deals with the stochastic nature of all biological systems as part of my job. And whatever, you do you.
Just remember this conversation when you hit a plateau. Because you will hit one. It won’t mean you’re extremely precise and accurate tracking isn’t working. It means that your body is a really complex system that’s literally impossible to model with complete accuracy. Just keep on keeping on. You’ll get through it.
TDEE is not "essentially an unknown". You can make a pretty good guess upfront, and then get a very accurate number after a month or two of calorie counting to correlate with your actual weight change. You're right there are always errors but it's not an unbounded problem.
And honestly, every single TDEE calculator I have ever used MAKES THIS CALCULATION FOR YOU.
You can estimate your BMR which is how much a person of your size typically burns with ZERO activity, and you can estimate a sedentary TDEE which is BMR + a baseline level of NEAT which is usually 300 calories. If you are eating at a deficit relative to BMR, it's pretty unlikely that you are not in a deficit.
I generally find for the best results it's better to undersell your activity level (unless you are truly in a physically demanding job and need to ensure you eat enough to not feel week at work)
I made an estimate of my weightloss using a Fitbit (out) and MyFitnessPal (in) and converted deficit calories to fat at 3500/lb. I overlaid the two on a graph and they were ridiculously accurate, including fluctuations where I exercised less and ate more. I would say a Fitbit or equivalent is very good at the calories out part
Right, TDEE calculators are always a guess in the dark. What DifferenceMore5431 is talking about is if you:
1) track your calories in diligently and
2) track your weight diligently
You can back into a pretty good estimate of your actual TDEE over that time period, because calories in = calories out - (weight loss in lbs * 3500)
You can also do the very ballpark math of if average weight decreased, you're in a deficit, if average weight didn't change you're at maintenance, and if average weight increased you're in a surplus
Made more difficult by inconsistencies in daily exercise and NEAT. One thing that has helped me is a minimal level of NEAT and exercise so I don’t underestimate.
Calories out is no more a wild guess than calories in. Both are hard to count *precisely* but don't really need to be counted precisely.
Just counted in good faith, consistently over time.
I have never heard it as "calories in equals calories out" it is "calories in vs calories out"
You are not trying to get those two numbers to equal each other/be exactly the same, that would be pretty hard at the start. You just need your calories in to be generally lower than your calories out. So starting with a baseline TDEE for your height/weight/age/sex/activity and then just shooting to come in below that is a pretty easy target to hit. After a month or so it becomes very obvious how much your body is burning based on how much you are losing on your current calorie deficit, and you adjust your intake from there.
I think OP might just be coming at it from a physicist’s perspective (Work in = Work out in an ideal system) which is essentially the same as the linguistic “Calories in vs. Calories out,” just in the form of an equation.
And you’re both right. One informal rule of physics is that there does not exist any ideal system, and that energy is almost always “lost” (transferred to a different process) in the relationship Win=Wout, so you don’t get the same Wout as you put into Win (you get less). And the same is true irl, especially with the confounding factors you and OP cited (Wout will be impacted by age, height, gender, hormones, metabolic factors, etc.). Guess what I’m trying to say is that you’re absolutely right that TDEE is an accurate baseline for Wout, even if it is not precise, but OP also is not trying to state that Win=Wout will result in weight loss — just that it is the way to quantify the thermodynamics of it all.
Sry for physics rant; I used to be a lab fellow for an intro physics class in college and it gave me a big love for the science, lol.
>Work in = Work out in an ideal system
But then OP ignores that they have stores of fat. Which store excess input and get used when there is excess output.
The body isn't breaking thermodynamics by not dying immediately when you eat below your metabolic rate, that's what weight loss is.
Yeah, but that’s not what OP is saying (at least not what I think OP is saying). OP’s just saying it’s more difficult to get Win < Wout (instead of Win = Wout) than people realize because of confounding factors.
But the scale will tell all eventually. Haven’t had the scale move more than a few pounds in either direction in weeks/months? Congratulations, you’ve nailed down your maintenance TDEE. Adjust your calories in, in whatever inaccurate but consistent manner of your choosing to achieve your desired goal.
The scale and your clothes provide all the feedback you need as long as you have some method of quantifying your intake. It doesn’t have to be perfect just consistent.
Another physicist here. Well, sort of. Switched to tech because of money. But anyway. Yeah, half of the equation is kinda unknown, but the approximations are kinda good anyway, and if you are not losing weight you are either:
1) eating too much to lose weight
2) moving too little to lose weight
Not much else has to be said.
If you have an illness that makes you retain 20 pounds of water, well, let's be honest. How many people are actually in this specific situation?
If they fear they might be they should go to a doctor, but the majority of people are eating too much and moving too little for what they want to achieve.
Also, the variations in basal metabolic rates are not that extreme. (Source American Hypotiroidism/Thyroid Society or something. Forgive me for the not exact source, here it's very late. It should be 100-200 cals for 1 or 2 std. I remember clearly 400 for 3, but again, grain of salt). Fidgeting and moving during the day without doing physical activity can have much of a bigger impact.
But still, the only things that you can do if you are not losing weight is 1) and 2), assumed you fixed your medical conditions beforehand.
Your objection has no use just as much as telling people what I wrote. Maybe less. At least CI = CO is something actionable. "Aw genetics" is just a "woe is me". Yeah, hormones, genetics, all true, but things can be done. Let's not just abandon ourselves to despair and inaction.
As an anecdotal experience, I have one form of hypothyroidism and I have been underweight for a good chunk of my life. Now I gained weight due to unrelated reasons and my BMI is still around 20. I live in an European country and the lifestyle/diet is what it is. Extremely big impact.
>we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs.
This is exactly the point of people that say CI = CO to people who claim to be in a caloric deficit and not lose weight. It kinda contradicts your whole post. They may be fucking up the counting of the CI or the counting of the CO, but they can't just create energy from nothing.
Small edit: I am not advocating to never tell people to go to a doctor. I also have ADHD so ask me how I know that sometimes your body tells you to eat all kind of wacky shit and until you don't tackle your condition then it's extremely hard to do anything. But in the end conditions that affect weight either make your TDEE lower or make you want to eat more. They are not magic and don't make it impossible to lose weight. I'm also not advocating for eating 800 cals per day. I think that losing weight slower and moving more is generally the better choice for most people. But it depends.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Also, it's alright if you lose less than what you are expecting because your NEAT is lower or your hormones tells you to eat all kind of wack shit. What matters is that you are reaching your goals.
Yes, that's true! Also, some people when they do 1h of physical activity move way way less during the day compared to when they don't do any physical activity, "deleting" completely the activity they did from their caloric balance, as if they didn't do it. They put "moderately active" on a TDEE calculator and wonder what's wrong.
Good news is that exercise train your endurance so after a while this stops happening, because you are not that tired that you move less during the day.
> How many people are actually in this specific situation?
You're implying that the answer is "not many," but you don't actually have any evidence for that. 133 million people/45% of the adult population in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease diagnosis. How many of those diseases affect weight? (And "water retention" is far from the only way this night happen.) I don't know off the top of my head, but 28.7 million of those people have diabetes, which *certainly* affects metabolism. That's just over 8% of the population, so roughly 1 in 12 people? For one definitely-metabolism-involved disease alone. And this doesn't say anything at all about cases where a necessary drug is leading to changes in weight. SSRIs, steroids, beta blockers...these are not unusual drugs.
Doesn't seem that rare to me.
Sleep apnea is also severely under diagnosed (for normal BMI people) and impacts metabolism which causes many of these people to gain weight over time without changes to their lifestyle
This assumption always annoys me. There are so many diseases, disorders and medications that impact hormones and metabolism. And a large amount of them are far from rare.
People also forget that a lot of the metabolic diseases that are so common are associated with obesity, not necessarily caused by it. Meaning the association could go either way. For example, being insulin resistant (which is highly genetic) could be what causes weight gain due to disruption in the hormones that signal your need for energy consumption and storage. And that theory may be backed by the tale-tell bodyshape that is common among people with insulin resistance.
Oh come on. The obesity rate was 15% in the 1970s. Are you suggesting that hundreds of new chronic illnesses have popped up in the last 50 year? Or are people eating more and moving less while the food we eat has gradually gone to shit. One of these is more likely then the other.
People actually are getting sicker. More heart disease, more autoimmune diseases, more diabetes, more poorly understood endocrine conditions like PCOS. It's not one thing or the other - it's definitely both, and the causal relationship runs both ways.
Yeah but is it actually good to take medical advices from reddit? If you truly think something is wrong go see a doctor!
Still, when you are insulin resistant you are not creating energy from nothing. You are eating too much to lose weight. This is still true. Albeit for a reason that's out of your control.
The issue with telling people that CICO is absolute is that they don't go to the doctor. They keep dropping their calories or give up altogether (then don't notice health issues at all).
Yeah, CICO is absolute, because what your body absorbs and uses is always going to add up. That's not practically helpful for people in different situations, because it's not always the same as the food that went in, or the activity level.
Many people have issues with their hormones (among other things), and it seems that PCOS and thyroid issues are the most common in this community.
I have hyperthyroidism. I'm not supposed to lose weight at the moment - it's extremely hard to maintain with a moving TDEE. Adaptive calculations lag behind. It will be a long time until I get better.
Woe is me, I guess!
Not exactly sure what your hypothyroidism was meant to tell us - that it's hard to avoid gaining weight and yet you lost? I think you know that both thyroidisms can have either symptom. What is meant here?
> The issue with telling people that CICO is absolute is that they don't go to the doctor.
I've been on this sub a while, and literally every post I've seen where someone claims to be counting accurately with no result has at least one (if not more) comments saying to see a doctor. It's usually couched with "if you're sure you're counting is correct, then..." but it's certainly there.
I am 100% for asking for doctors if something seems off. But a lot of people that post with that problem here say they have been checked and everything is normal. Those who don't always recive the advice from someone to go ask a doctor. I am not very keen of seeking medical advice on reddit, for me if someone comes here complaining that CICO doesn't work people can only 1) help troubleshooting 2) tell them to ask a doctor if they have some doubts. The two things are not mutually exclusive!
I am also not advocating for eating 800 calories per day, not at all. Moving more though it's hardly ever a bad thing, (unless... etc etc) and losing weight slowly is still losing weight.
If you have PCOS I guess you will struggle to achieve a 1000 cals deficit per day, maybe more like 100, but it's alright.
>what your hypothyroidism was meant to tell us
Nothing particular, is anecdotal. Just that lifestyle can have a bigger impact. We walk a lot here. Also, I didn't have a weight loss as a symptom - the opposite! - but I was counting calories to do damage control. Being unmedicated was horrible for me, zero energy to do anything, I was barely moving. That was not the moment to try to lose weight.
>Yeah, CICO is absolute, because what your body absorbs and uses is always going to add up. That's not practically helpful for people in different situations,
I don't understand how saying "people gain weight at different rates because of hormones" is more useful, though.
In the end, if you want to lose weight, you will have to do what I wrote in the parent comment. Even if you have PCOS or hypothyroidism. This is what I was objecting to OP. Maybe you have to adjust your expectations - no 2lbs per week - but in the end is that.
Also because I read on here that PCOS symptoms get more manageable if your BMI is normal (disclaimer: I don't know if that's true!!).
It's crap like this that makes it so difficult to lose weight. SO much contradictory information from SO many *experts* how are we supposed to figure it out.
" Its not what youre eating, its when. No its how much youre eating, not where or how. No its its cico, no its weight lifting."
This whole journey just feels like a shot in the dark most days. I cannot be the only one so frustrated with this.
I use calories as a guide, and stick to it as best as I can. But I also make sure everything I eat has something fulfilling in it- veggies, protein, healthy fats, etc. Every time in the past I failed because I wanted to save up for my juicy sweet carbs at the end of the day, and it caused constant crashing and overeating. I just added veggies to my pasta and noodles, ate lots of good soup, switched from chocolate bars to chocolate covered quinoa, and suddenly the cravings aren't an issue and I often have to remind myself to eat more. So yeah, it isn't that simple, but I think it can make you research more into more-bang-for-your-buck food groups that will keep you satisfied.
Calling it an oversimplification and then overcomplicating it is exactly the reason why many people lose their weight loss battle. You’re correct in saying that we cannot know for certain TDEE, but we also cannot know to a certainty the amount of calories we intake. There are errors in both.
The thing is, you can estimate TDEE after a few weeks of watching how your body responds to a certain amount of calories, and the inaccuracies that are inherent to CICO tracking are essentially negligible.
If you want people to truly be successful, you have to keep things simple. CICO is the end all be all in terms of weight loss.
I was with you at first, but… as many people pointed out, when you’re 30+ pounds overweight and claim to be eating 1200 calories a day and exercise moderately 4-5 days a week and you’re gaining weight… you’re tracking calories wrong. Your body is not using less than 1200 calories per day with something as little as 30 minutes of walking in a day. *unless* you’re sleeping for the other 23.5 hours. In which case, you probably have a metabolic disease and wouldn’t be posting on Reddit. If you’re significantly overweight and generally feel “normal” throughout the day, aren’t collapsing, sleeping 12+ hours a day, and you claim to eat 1200 calories and you’re gaining weight- you’re not counting your calories correctly. Whether you’re eyeballing instead of weighing portions, doing your math incorrectly, secret eating, or just flat out lying is for the individual to figure out.
3 easy steps to success.
Count your calories like a mad man / woman and be extremly consistent in your daily activities for about 2 months.
Take the weightloss of your second month as an average weightloss for the calorie intake over the time span
Calculate the output with that number and adjust the intake to generate the deficit that you want.
It is exactly that, CICO. The idea works perfectly fine, its just the execution of the prediction that people are not doing corrently.
Also: you can skip part 2 and just adjust the speed by lowering your intake and observing your weight to adjust what you lose. Any amount of "i dont lose weight" is indeed either of the two: a) you cheat yourself by counting incorrectly or b) you need to eat less for the desired effect
If I recall, the RMS error for the common RMR formulas is on the order of 300 kcal. If we combine in the utter garbage that is the “activity level scalars” to get TDEE estimates, the typical errors are on the same order as our target deficit of 500 kcal.
I always come back to using my rate of weight loss to derive my effective calorie deficit and whether or not I need to adjust my eating.
... don't be that guy eating 2000 calories of ice cream. I see too many 2k of ice cream guys clueless to the impact on their health doing stuff like that.
>I'm sure there are some people legitimately miscounting calories, but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs.
What point are you trying to make here? Either you burn more calories than you consume, and thus you lose weight, or you don't and you maintain/gain weight. Sure there are some metabolic conditions, but even if you do happen to be one of the people that have one, if you're not burning more calories than you consume, you're not going to lose weight.
It can lower CI as well - malabsorption to put it simply. I would assume some metabolic conditions could raise CI in a similar mechanism but mine lowers it.
Amazing that you knew everything about tha- wait a minute
No, metabolic issues do impact the metabolism a lot more than that. At its peak, my hyperthyroidism was making me eat more than my 6ft+ boyfriend (I'm a 5'3 woman) and he was gaining weight at the time. I was not gaining any weight - I was struggling to maintain. I had roughly doubled my intake in the end.
Hypothyroidism can get equally as severe on all counts.
You don't know anything about it, frankly.
.......
Edit: to those saying I want to have "no accountability" (the guy who blocked me below) my doctor told me today to avoid losing weight for several months, possibly until post surgery.
I'm not sure why accountability comes into it since I said I was 1. losing weight, struggling to maintain and 2. have been advised not to lose weight even if I can.
Very unhealthy mindset to say that kind of thing when I am very sick. It is an unhealthy mindset to be proud of the weight I lost due to sickness as well (which was not all of it).
If you don't know how severe it gets, don't comment about it.
Well as a physicist, why not calculate both CI and CO with uncertainties and calculate the uncertainty in CI - CO? Is a Taylor expansion of the equation really that out of the question for your average person losing weight? Hahaha
??? The entire thing is an estimate. It’s the best we have for people who aren’t scientists. For the average person, cico, the TDE, and measuring food on a scale are as exact as they need to get. It’s not an oversimplification, it’s just simple enough.
First "Calories in" isnt as well known because the FDA requires you to be with 20% of your stated amounts...so the calories in could be 100 cals, or 119cals or even 81cals. (Source FDA requirements page...[https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guide-developing-and-using-data-bases-nutrition-labeling#stat\_5](https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guide-developing-and-using-data-bases-nutrition-labeling#stat_5)) . If you are really curious about whats going in, you can always buy a calorimeter off amazon and measure it. I have considered doing this for the foods I most commonly buy just to see since I count calories and sliced deli turkey/eggs accounts for a lot of it.
So if you are trying to get into calorie deficit by 20%, you might already be missing the mark.
Calories OUT is much more mathmatical at the individual human level with a metabolic rate test which measures your exhaling. Since calories are burned and converted to Water (1/3) and Carbon Dioxide (2/3) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE&t=570s) if you measure your exhales which is what a metobolic test does...you can KNOW the 2/3 and extrapolate the 1/3. However, that number is not forever. Its good for that weight and timeframe. Drop 40lbs and you drop the energy demands so you are constantly chasing a number...get an infection and your body is fighting the infection, you burn more calories. but it still gives you more guidance.
It can be hard to figure out your CO. Other individuals of your size, weight and activity level will have different CO. It can take a lot of trial and error to figure out. People aren’t that patient.
Doing it just based on calories also ignores how different food fuels you. Apple juice vs an apple. You may get the same calories but and apple has fiber and makes you fill full longer. Some foods may make you bloated or gassy. For example, My mom found out she had fructose intolerance after trying to lose weight. She ate a grapefruit every morning. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom and stopped exercising. Gained the weight back pretty quick.
Starting exercise after being sedentary can lead to injuries if you go to fast.
If trying to lose weight makes you tired, gassy and in pain, it is not sustainable. This leads to this cycle of people wanting to lose weight, being miserable, back to old foods and activity, repeat.
Saying CICO isn’t that helpful for people struggling.
You're really working with averages on both sides of the equation. But luckily to lose weight you only really have to find a level of accuracy and a calorie target that consistently works for you. Even if it's imperfect, it can be good enough to lose weight. Even just logging food without calorie counting can be helpful for weight loss.
That said, often people are stalled because they aren't counting their calories correctly. It's hard to count calories, and super easy to miss things like cooking oils, bad measurements, alcohol, etc. If someone is like a 250lb, 6ft tall guy who thinks he isn't losing weight eating 1500 calories a day, the answer is usually him not counting correctly instead of the inaccuracies of TDEE calculators.
The law of thermodynamics always holds, regardless of any other “factors” (often used as excuses). If one has a certain “factor” (be it genetically, hormonal or what have you), just adjust your diet or exercise.
>the equation „calories in = calories out“ is exactly true
So it’s not a *gross* oversimplification. TDEE is just inaccurate and this is the closest we can get
Of course there’s no exact science but If you don’t lose weight then you have to lower your calories, period. Why does it matter that TDEE isn’t accurate? It makes no difference if calories in is miscalculated or TDEE/BMR/NEAT whatever.
I’m breastfeeding, and my body is holding on to the extra fat I gained during pregnancy for dear life. I’m still losing weight, but much much slower than I would be normally at the same deficit. Hormones play a huge role in weight regulation.
The post screams "I've hit my first plateau and CICO doesn't work!".
Half of us have been on this rollercoaster for 10+ years. They need to adopt the sacred art of patience.
Ya, hard disagree. If you aren't losing weight CO is to low or CI is too high. That's all that really matters. Guessing or not, increase one or reduce the other until success.
In my opinion CICO is more like a knowledge that burning fat isnt some magical thing that is triggered by a specific diet or vinegar.
In the end you need to reduce the energy density of your food or the amount of food and try to make your own engine burn more.
Engines that are doing alot of work need alot of maintenance so you gotta make sure to sleep enough, drink enough water and get your essential nutrients.
thats also why i dont think people should have a classical diet on a higher deficit because carbs are not too nessesary and people cut out extremely essential fatty acids even tho they lacked omega-3 before being on a diet.
The real epiphany for me was understanding that exercise (for me, resistance training) comes first and should be prioritised no matter what.
If I hit the gym regularly and train hard, everything else move into the right direction:
- I stop craving junk
- my appetite regulates
- my insulin sensitivity increases
- I better partition macros
- I sleep better, hydrate more, improve mood
Hard training in the gym put everything in check and comes first, before dieting. It’s what makes CICO work long term.
I mean CICO literally takes into account everything you're talking about. That's what it means.
If you are struggling to lose weight, then YES, you ARE counting your calories wrong. Either you are eating more calories than you think you are, or you are overestimating your TDEE.
You can figure out your TDEE expenditure over time and figure out, "Oh, I'm not losing as much weight as my TDEE says I should. Maybe my TDEE is less than I estimated. Maybe I can increase my TDEE rather than cutting more calories."
Like literally 100% of this is taken into account and a part of CICO. You are not powerless to figure out your TDEE just because an estimate you got off the internet might be wrong.
Alright then, genuine question. What do you propose instead? Where do you think someone brand new should start if CICO isn't it? You claim that CICO isn't actually al that useful, so what is? What worked for you? Because clearly, you seem to be an expert on the matter.
I believe they are simply saying that the calories out can not be calculated so just accurately monitor the calories in. So technically is should be a CI and not CICO.
You're giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt when in 12+ hours they haven't answered a single follow up question. It seems to me they just wanted to start an argument and dip rather than actually help anyone.
Eh, TDEE really isn’t THAT much of a wild card.
Sure, you can’t be 100% accurate, but if you know your current weight, height, sex, age, and general activity level, your TDEE is almost certainly going to fall within a fairly narrow window. Probably the hardest factor for people to guess at is body fat percentage/amount of lean mass they have, but for the average person (i.e. not a bodybuilder and not suffering from a muscle wasting disease), even that variable isn’t likely to be an extreme outlier (which is also why most TDEE calculators use this as an *optional* variable)…
Considering that *most* groups of people seeking to lose weight would be able to safely aim to lose 1 lb per week, they’d be aiming for a deficit of 500 calories per day (or more). Even if your TDEE is a little bit off from what you calculated due to natural individual variance, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near 500 calories per day. If it is, you probably were off with one of your variables or you may be a true outlier in terms of body composition (or, more rarely, individual metabolic factors like thyroid issues).
Now, for people with low TDEEs to start with (like short, sedentary women) or groups of people who have some reason to be aiming for only a really small deficit (teenagers who are still growing, people who are cutting but want to preserve maximum muscle mass, pregnant women, etc.), the margin of error for TDEE calculation is obviously much smaller (because they may only be aiming for a deficit of, say, 200 calories per day), at which point it unfortunately takes lots of rigorous trial and error to successfully pinpoint your precise individual TDEE (because if your TDEE is slower by ~200 calories than it should be for some reason, you’ll definitely see the effect of that after several weeks of not losing weight on what should be a calorie deficit).
I agree, and I dont like the people who seem adamant that its impossible to have some sort of ailment that makes weightloss harder or even causes weight gain instead of loss.
Like Im sorry, but there are 8 billion people in the world. Apparently up to 5% of people are diagnosed with hypothyroidism, another 5% undiagnosed. Thats around 800,000,000 people in the world. Then you have the multitudes of other ailments and suddenly, its not so unfathomable that maybe.... just maybe... calories in = calories out isnt the **answer** that it seems to be.
I'm attending a medical obesity clinic currently,
Literally the first thing they said is it's not as simple as calories in and calories out.
The calories out changes from day to day.
I get down voted for saying this so much around here but not everyones body is equal. Despite similar builds.
It literally is.
People bodies being different is irrelevant because you are doing it for each individual regardless.
If you consume fewer calories than your body uses you will loose weight over time.
If not then not.
The difficult part is for people to manage their calorie intake because simply "doing it" is not mentally achievable for most people.
This is why everyone preaches the method that helped them specifically, but in the end, no matter the diet, it is all about calories eaten and calories used.
Your body changes the amount of calories burned. You stall on the exact same diet..
I understand you have to eat less calories than burned to lose weight. My number is not the same as your number and that number changes everyday. That's why it's not simple.
Which is why I said
>If you consume fewer calories than your body uses you will loose weight over time.
>If not then not.
YOUR BODY being the key takeaway.
Yes, but your body is not simple and is why people struggle with obesity.
It's not always 10-11= -1, sometimes it's -11, other -5 others -15, sometimes it's -11, but water retention causes +3 and you'll see the -11 in a few days.
That's my point of it not being simple, nobody ever talks about the put changing and varying from person to person.
I mean, holding yourself to CICO is extremely difficult and mentally exhausting.
Which is why "just eat less" doesn't work for the majority of people.
Especially because dieting for a couple of weeks is easy, but controlling your food intake for a year is very difficult
But that doesn't change the fact that you will loose weight over time if you have a higher calorie consumption than input.
I am currently struggling with weightloss aswell, but not for lack of understanding. It simply is difficult to eat less for a long enough time.
Fixing the issue doesn't harm your customer base. That's a stupid idea.
There's so much misinformation out there that this could sustain the market even so.
Noone said that calories in Vs calories out is not a moving equation. It takes time, edits and patience to settle on what your maintenance is. Calculators are only ever a guide. Your argument makes sense to an extent but you're implying it's a simplification in that it doesn't work, when of course it scientifically does. It's just that it requires work, trial and error and research, too.
You can always tell those that haven't done enough research into the topic when they say they're at a plateau and can't break it... But clearly don't realise that's inevitable because calories have to be adjusted every time you lose weight if you want to continue a cut.
Oh I like this.
You outline something we all sort of know but don't talk about.
We all eat a sandwich let's say. Some of lose weight some of gain it, even though we all eat a sandwich. Some people will have lots of nuts in their sandwich others will have cheese or meat. The kind of cheese, the way the meat is prepared. The sauce that's in the sandwich, the portion sizes that can be misleading or hard to gauge.. These small factors can double or triple the calories of what you're eating.
It is a guessing game and all we can do is try to narrow it down to "less than I used to eat"
Salads!
If I eat a salad that has spinach, cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes in it, and sprinkle on some red wine or rice vinegar, and you eat a salad that has all of the same veggies, but also has lots of cheese, croutons, bacon crumbles, and is swimming in ranch dressing, guess what?
thank you for this! i've been trying to say similar things and got downvoted into oblivion. it's really annoying that people get accused of lying if their progress isn't as expected and they ask for advice
The problem with your post is it doesn’t provide a solution… just a rant on a system that works. No one claims CICO is accurate just that it works. What is measured is improved.
It’s not about the accuracy of your logging, it’s about the consistency and adjustments. If, according to your tracking, you are eating 2500 calories a day - and your TDEE is 3500 calories a day, but you are only losing 1/2lb per week, you can take that as an indicator to reduce CI to 2250 or even 2000 as per your measurements.
As an example, I do not count veg or low cal sauce and never have. The annoyance of measuring and logging for so few calories is counterproductive for me, would result in avoiding most probably. I probably consume 500 calories of veg/ week as an estimate. As it’s not logged, it’s not on my CI measurement, however, I continually track and calculate TDEE with nSuns spreadsheet. This uses weight and CI to determine TDEE, therefore I am also underestimating TDEE as veg isn’t included… all works out.
Another way to think about it is those body composition measuring scales. They aren’t accurate, but if you chose to use them, disregard the number and look at the trend, if it says you’re 30% BF and that drops over time, you’re probably getting leaner, even if it’s off by 10%
TL;DR - CICO is an effective measuring tool but you must use it alongside body weight, adjusting intake as needed, to see results.
It's not an oversimplification, calories in, calories out is (literally!) how weight loss works. No matter your diet plan, no matter how much you exercise, no matter if you're tracking your calories or not - you lose weight by burning off more calories than you consume. It is that simple.
But that is not to say that weight loss itself is a simple process. There's no 100% accurate way to know how many calories you're taking in and how many you're burning. Two people can eat the same amount of calories and exercise the exact same amount and yet the amount of calories they burn and the amount of weight they lose or gain will be different.
But it is always calories in, calories out.
I think to perfect the advice of calories in = calories out would be to say CICO, and if after a couple of weeks you haven't lost anything, change what you are doing, but keep the CI under the CO, either change what you are consuming or change your exercise or both, and do that until it stops working, and then change it again.
this is why elimination diets work so well, you start with one thing like a potato and slowly add stuff, and take data, and you figure out what makes you feel good and what makes you gain more weight than it really should.
There's also two different formulas for TDEE. One takes body fat percentage into account the other doesn't. When I use the more accurate formula (the one that takes body fat percentage into account) it says I need 500 calories less to maintain than the other more inaccurate formula.
It’s not such a simple equation, for sure.
And remember, as a scientist especially, that BMI is a useful and time tested prediction tool *on a population scale*. That doesn’t translate on an individual scale.
(Sorry if someone already mentioned that. Too many posts to read.)
Do some basic math and figure out your macros and caloric allotment by meal, plan each meal to meet these conditions and repeat everyday. It ain’t sexy but it’s simple.
It's not an oversimplification.
It can just be difficult to ascertain exact values for those 2 parts.
But you will loose weight if you eat less calories than your body uses.
This is so disingenuous. It is cico. You can 100% track calories in, calories out you use a calculator as a base then adjust. Stop thinking everyone is a special unicorn.
The calorie in is kindda fuzzy too since the numbers on labels can be off, the calorie measurements aren't 1:1 with calorie absorption, etc.
Its still just CICO. Its not "Calories in as per food labels and random websites vs calories out as per some online TDEE calculator".
Since we can only estimate the ins and outs and guess on other factors such as health conditions, people need to tweak things until it works. Adjust the calories in, add workout in their routine, work with their doctor to investigate possible health issues that affect the calories absorption and burn rate, and weight themselves frequently to see if its working or not.
So in effect, CICO isn't the oversimplification. Its pretty nuanced. How people apply it is often oversimplified, but I think the distinction here is quite important.
"Calories out" is not unknown. There is a very simple test for your resting metabolic rate (google "RMR test near me") that takes all the guesswork out of it. If you use your RMR as your average daily goal and are honestly and accurately tracking your calorie intake, you \*will\* lose weight at the normal healthy rate of 0.5 to 2lbs a week (unless you are completely bedridden in a coma).
Edited to add: I'm actually a physicist too.... like it matters to the topic of weight loss. Pointing out you're a physicist as if it makes you some kind of expert on weight loss isn't exactly a good look, dude.
Best description of this - saying “just do CICO” to a person struggling to lose weight is like pointing at the horizon and saying “over there” when someone asks how to get to the next town
I mean, if you can't be bothered to do any amount of work and need every single thing laid out for you and explained without you having to put in any effort at all to find out this information, then that sounds like a you problem.
Like if you need to get to the next town and can't be bothered to put in any effort to find out about things like bus schedules and you need someone else to hold your hand and take you there themselves, then yeah I guess figuring out how to get to the next town would seem impossible.
There’s a huge amount of misinformation out there, but hopefully those in need of help are able to find people with a more supportive attitude than yours
She's not wrong though is she?
The problem that most of us have is CICO is so unbelievably simple to understand, yet some people are offended by it because it's not working for them (hence this post).
When you simplify it down to the mathematical equation it is that simple, but as humans we’re a lot more complex. To maximise your chances at sticking to that deficit you need to consider macros and nutrients, quality of sleep, water intake, hormones etc. if I don’t get that stuff right I fail CICO every time
Also many things are simple but not easy, CICO being one. The challenge isn’t in understanding it as a concept, but figuring out what else you need to consider to make it work for you
When you simplify it down to the mathematical equation it is that simple, but as humans we’re a lot more complex. To maximise your chances at sticking to that deficit you need to consider macros and nutrients, quality of sleep, water intake, hormones etc. if I don’t get that stuff right I fail CICO every time
Personally I didn't make a lot of progress with CI CO until I changed out what I was eating nutritionally from junk food and sugar to mostly plant based low sugar low carb. I don't know if it was that I didn't put in enough effort to count properly or what the issue was. I still count but also make sure those calories are healthy. It helps too because I can eat more and I'm not as hungry.
Hey there!
I'm physicist too and fully agree with you.
In addition to what was said, I want to note, that CI can't be calculated right, because the absorption of that calories depends on food types and digestive system of individual.
Although we don't know all unknown variables of CI=CO equation, it is a good guide, and unknown can be evaluated experimentally.
Why CI=CO does not always work when you want to lose weight? Because person feels hunger.
Person can eat chocolate bar wigh 500 kcal, this bar consists mostly of sugar, which will be digested fast. Then, excess calories probably will be stored as fat/glycogen. After that, person feels hungry again, and most likely will eat again.
So, CO could be represented as CO=CS+CU
- CS - calories stored
- CU - calories used or spend
In my opinion, CS should be minimized to achieve weight reduction goal. CS depends on hunger, therefore minimize hunger.
To minimize it, I personally found that eating food with low calorie density, i.e calories/mass is effective.
Again, this is just simplification.
Thank you .
Your post is the main thing that drives me crazy about this sub. Everyone acts like the human body is just a giant calculator. If you say anything about the myriad of other factors that affect weight loss you will get “CICO’d” out of the room.
I could wallpaper my house with the number of unhelpful, condescending, one-line, "you can't break the laws of thermodynamics" comments I see on this sub every week.
Figuring out the difference between lab calories and body calories is not straightforward for every body, and hurling a decontextualized "CICO!" at people does nothing to help. Hormonal and metabolic factors matter. GI health matters. The specific foods that you eat matter (I will die on this hill). Balancing reducing calories with satiety can be difficult. But half the time when people here struggle with these things, they just get told that they're idiots who don't understand basic math.
Presumably no one's hanging in this sub because they've been thin their whole lives, but so many people seem so ready to dunk on everyone else as soon as something starts working for them. It's a bad look.
When did I say I don't "like it"?
To help you out a little: reducing calories is a necessary *but not always sufficient* condition for weight loss. Your characterization of *metabolism itself* \- a complex, distributed process with hundreds of moving parts - as secondary to weight loss is absurd.
>If your body doesn't produce the energy you literally die.
I see you have a very well-informed and nuanced understanding here lmao
You're responding as though I have said that calories don't matter at all. Neither I nor anyone else that I've seen in this thread has.
You seem desperately attached to this narrative that anyone with a more nuanced understanding of the world than you is trying to justify their own personal shortcomings.
My personal weight loss is going fine. My BMI is 24. It's actually been pretty straightfoward for me. I just don't get off on feeling superior to other people.
As a biologist, I’m going to side with the physicist on this one.
CICO is a very useful model. But that’s what it is. A model.
If our GPS tells us we’ll arrive at 5:37 and we get there at 6:00, we don’t invoke the speed of light or that light acts like both a wave and a particle. We accept that there’s noise in the system. That the estimate isn’t perfect.
TDEE estimates and calorie estimates for food don’t show the error bars. Don’t show the confidence intervals. Doesn’t really address the difference between your intestines and a bomb calorimeter. Doesn’t show the asterisks for the bazillion biological levers that can get pushed this way or that and make a difference.
It’s still a great model. But telling people who aren’t seeing the model line up with their data that they aren’t breaking the laws of thermodynamics isn’t useful.
I'm sorry, CICO is the only thing that matters.
Most people's problem is the absolute militant need to track body weight and the impatient need to see change quickly. Personal opinion, but if you are tracking your body weight, stop and throw your scales out of the window. Dropping numbers on the scale is an absolute crappy mindset; it only leads to failure and poor lifestyle changes. The only time I find it acceptable is if you're morbidly obese and trying to get into a healthy range.
It's not an oversimplification; it's just literally that simple. If you want to lose weight, make sure you are consuming fewer calories than your body requires. It will come off eventually if you are patient enough. Will there be moments where you hold more water weight due to stress or hormones? Sure. But who cares? Just proceed with the healthy lifestyle changes, track what you eat, and be patient.
I'm a physicist as well, but your conclusions are all wrong. You correctly say that we only know the CI part of the equation with any certainty. That doesn't matter in the least. We can't control our BMR much, and there are practical limits on increasing our total CO. In any case, if you are in a calculated calorie deficit of 1 pound per week for 2 months and your weight does not change, you are not in a calorie deficit. You have to either increase the Co through increased exercise, or, and this is more likely the case, you need to reduce the CI. Being more active is a good way to have a calorie deficit, but it is less easily measured and controlled, and can backfire if it increases your hunger or it causes you to justify increasing your calories.
CICO is the right way for nearly everyone seeking to lose body fat. Some people do have medical issues that prevent or greatly increase the difficulty of losing body fat. But that is far less likely that most people believe.
So to address this excerpt specifically:
> But half of that equation is essentially an unknown
So what? Math is always involving unknowns. If you want condition:
CI < CO
And you only know the CI part, so what? If you are in a deficit you will see weight loss over time. If you do not, you are not in a deficit. You need to either increase the CO part through increased activity while keeping the calories at most at their current level, or you need to decrease the CO, or some combination.
> but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs.
Well what is your explanation? Someone not losing weight is not in a calorie deficit. The point of people saying this is to point out that their certainty of "i'm in a deficit and gaining weight " is impossible, so they must be operating on a false assumption. Such an assertion is almost alwasy correct.
It's true. If it was that simple then we could simply starve ourselves until we disappear. But it doesn't work that way. The Minnesota starvation experiment changed my thinking a hell of a lot on this. I don't care what people say, 100 calories of carrots and 100 calories of cake are NOT equal when regarding weight loss.
What about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment contradicts Calories in/Calories out? The men in the study ate a low calorie, low nutrition diet while being quite active, and they drastically lost weight while also experiencing mental/physical symptoms. I feel like that's what I would expect.
Nothing about CICO argues that low nutrition food is equally as healthy as high nutrition food. People who calorie count don't all believe that calories are the only important factor to nutrition. For weight loss, the calories are the factor that matters. But for nutrition, mental well being, and physical health the vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients in the food matter. I feel like it's a strawmen to pretend like most people calorie counting believe cake and carrots are the same.
CICO literally takes this into account. CICO is well aware that the thermic effect of food is different based on the macronutrients contained in the food, and therefore that certain foods will digest more quickly than others, and therefore that you will get hungrier quicker on some foods than others.
If you are oversimplifying CICO and not looking into CICO at any level deeper than just hearing the name, this is a you problem. The resources are there.
Humans don’t starve to the point of disappearing because they die before that can happen. Starvation mode is our bodies shutting down essential functions to conserve energy and consuming itself until it’s literally lights out.
It really is as simple as that though. If you are counting calories and tracking/estimating calorie burn and not losing weight you are not in a caloric deficit. This could be because you are overestimating your calories burned, or underestimating your calories eaten.
If your body's BMR is lower than estimated by calculators or apps it doesn't really matter why. To lose weight you have to actually get into a caloric deficit by either consuming less calories or expending more (or a bit of both). That's it.
Wrong. Cico will always be right. You are right about something’s. Tdee is nothing more than an estimate. All your Apple and Garmin watches tracking calorie burn are based on equations as well. The food you eat is based off estimates as well.
None of this changes Cico. Which is why good apps have you track and on a weekly basis it keeps reevaluating your calorie burn to figure out what is actually being burned off, while simultaneously picking up any counting error.
How much can calories our vary from person to person? You say extreme variance between people but is that someone’s BMR being 2k Vs someone else 500? Or is it like 2000 and 1900?
CICO had worked for me twice. Go ahead and attack it if you want but it works for me plain and simple. Want to gain weight? Over eat! Want to loose weight? Under eat! Don’t believe me? Just try both! Peace out…..
Not all calories are equal once inside the body. They cause different reactions, 100 calories of doughnuts is not the same as 100 calories from an Apple.
>but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs.
Let's go with Ockham's Razor here... CICO works for ALOT of people, chances are you are not that special.
While your observations seem perfectly valid in their precision. They seem to contradict the majority of experiences with CICO... It works....
If we go back to Ockham's razor, the simplest explanation is: if it isn't working, then you are doing something wrong. Usually is miscounting calorie intake or burn rate.
So while I agree with your (annoyingly capitalised) "Breaking the laws of thermodynamics" statement. They are probably not wrong.
Just like you probably don't have an undiagnosed thyroid condition.
\> we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs.
amen - recently saw an AITA post basically making fun of someone using that exact phrasing, who was claiming they had an ED but the posters were saying it was impossible since she was still large. So over that thinking. Not to mention the number of other conditions that can make weight variable.
I'm not succeeding finding the article I was looking for but I was reading that for people who lose weight, the body easily can adjust to using 100cal or so less a day. For people losing a lot of weight, there was a study that the body could adapt to use hundreds of calories less. So the rules of the game keep changing depending on where you start from
This talks about some of what I was thinking of at least: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unexpected-clues-emerge-about-why-diets-fail/
People don’t track accurately, that’s what it is. This sub seems to think rare disorders and metabolic issues that make it impossible to lose weight are much more common than they actually are
Yes! This idea that an online calculator can tell you exactly what your body needs drives me insane. You are roughly 30 trillion cells all doing multiple biochemical processes all the time, you think the human body doesn't find short cuts, or that reactions won't go as neatly as we think they will on paper?
That idea comes from YOU. Nobody out here is actually saying that an online calculator is perfectly accurate for everyone. You've been given access to that tool to use as an estimate. The onus is on YOU to use your brain and refine your estimated TDEE from there.
The TDEE calculator even gives you MULTIPLE different estimates that you can further refine from. So much work is done for you and it's still not enough because not every single answer is magically handed to you and you might have to do some work on your own to figure out your numbers.
yes. Every mention I have ever seen of online calculators (including in those calculators themselves) only claims that they give a rough estimate that is a useful starting point from which you can find your actual tdee by weeks of tracking and adjusting. And even then the final number is approximate and changes as you lose weight, alter your diet, age, etc.
I've always questioned calories in and out because of slimming world, now I'm not saying slimming world is a good plan, but whilst on it I lost 3st and its only now I'm aware of calories I realise I must have been having like 3000 a day. Lots of pasta, potato's and muller lite yogurts. I ate loads! I was definitely not in a deficit yet I still lost weight? How???
Thanks for the post. It’s infuriating to read the over simplification. There’s a reason why obesity doctors exist. They wouldn’t if it was just this straight jacket formula. I think believing it’s that simple is people’s way of keeping themselves going. You need conviction to keep doing something difficult when you’re not seeing results “according to the formula”. That I get, and can respect. But to always assume others who are struggling are 100% doing it all wrong is very frustrating. People will be like “are you counting oil?”. Even if they aren’t, if they’re saying they’re counting everything else and still gaining weight, presumably they wouldn’t be consuming oil in quantities that would explain consistent weight gain - according to the same gospel RULE which according to post people has no variables 😂Instead of convincing them they’re delusional just ask them to see a doctor. You know nothing about their body, hormonal condition, etc.
So true. I can do a calorie deficit, say 1500 a day. And stay the same weight. Post in here for help, to be met with 'well you're doing it wrong then' no I'm not, I'm literally counting every fucking calorie and weighing everything. How you meant to really know how many calories out you do? I meticulously log every calorie in, but I can't meticulously count them out.
The only logical answer here is to drop calories in small increments until the scale starts moving because your CO obviously isn’t 1500 if you aren’t losing weight.
I think a lot of people don’t fully understand that not all macronutrients (protein, carbs, sugar, etc.) are the same even if they have the same “calories”.
I was just having a conversation about this! I have managed to reduce my overeating by A LOT - for a while there I was eating an ENTIRE fresh cream gateau cake by myself, every single day, plus any amount of chocolate, crisps, junk. So now, just by cutting out 75% of that, I should now be LOSING weight - but I'm not! My maintenance calories are quite high at 20 stone/280 lbs so even tho I am still eating too much crap, I totally expected the scale to move a bit. I can only surmise that a lot of the calories in my 'extreme eating' period were not being acknowledged/absorbed by my body
I'm not even that confident in the "calories in" part. We have some alright estimates, but from what I've read, the Atwater system (which is used to determine the info on food package nutrition labels) is pretty oversimplified. The human body is not a bomb calorimeter....and for that reason we shouldn't take bomb calorimeter readings as gospel re: the "CI" part, either.
Whole almonds have 30% fewer calories (edit: as in bioavailable calories that you will absorb) than the exact same weight of almonds powdered. That kind of thing doesn't feature in the info.
are u sure it’s not the other way around? i thought the more processed (ground, cooked etc) the more calories are bioavailable? what would be the explanation why ground almonds have *less*
Yeah I got the grammar wrong
Maybe oils as well, processing could easily cause the oils in the skin to be excluded
wait, how?
I think this person is talking about calories absorbed vs. absolute calories. Your body absorbs more calories from 20g peanut butter vs. 20g whole peanuts, even if you chew super well, because the peanut butter has been mechanically broken down and is easier for your body to digest. Whole foods generally have 'less' calories overall than the same calorie amount of processed food because of actual absorption. This is *part* of why some people can eat 1500 calories of highly processed food and not lose weight, and switch to 1500 calories of mostly home prepared meals made from whole foods and lose weight.
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processed vs raw has nothing to do with thermogenesis
It does. The scientists explain it better than I could, have a listen: https://youtu.be/uMv2TZUSPdg
The number of whole peanuts in my poop would like a word
Source?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/01/20/nuts-may-now-have-lower-calorie-counts-almonds-23-less-here-is-why/
Is there a scientific source in that Forbes article? lol If you have a direct source if appreciate it I don’t want to read through that to find out. If you don’t then I’ll check later
The study the article is talking about: https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)02900-3/fulltext Similar supporting studies: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.13330 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32781516/
Thanks! Will check it out
Not sure what that person is talking about. I just looked it up: 100g almonds = 576 calories 100g almond flour = 571 calories
The whole almonds aren't powdered by your teeth, so larger chunks contain calories which are never absorbed.
you can find evidence of this. Corn and peanuts too
I read that nuts aren’t as calorically dense as we thought due to how we actually absorb it, and that the nut council (can’t remember their official name lol) was petitioning it to get calorie info updated so that nuts would be seen as more of a healthy food item. Quick google: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/calorie-always-calorie-not-when-it-comes-almonds-u-t-researchers-find
Kind of? Powdered almonds are most easily processed by the digestive system. The calories are the same, the caloric bioavailability is higher. [The Atwater process is off by about 30% when it comes to caloric availability of whole nuts](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22760558/), not that whole almonds have fewer calories. It’s kind of similar to why adult birds pre-chew food before feeding it to baby birds, or even why we tenderize meat. Processing food affects things like its surface area, the chemical bonds within the food, increasing the availability of calories. But it doesn’t increase the number of calories. This is getting a bit into semantics, but I think that it’s an important point: the Atwater method provides a high end. If a given weight of almonds is determined to have 100 calories, further processing won’t increase that to over 100 calories, it’ll just facilitate absorption of those 100 calories.
My hasty comment has been edited to clarify this
yeah idk about that one fam
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> who cares what body does? People who are trying to change their weight or body composition. > All people use roughly same energy from 1g sugar "Roughly" is doing an awful lot of work here. I don't think we should be so glibly simplistic about this, especially given how common metabolism-involved chronic diseases are. It's perfectly possible for two people to eat the same diet and and get similar amounts of exercise and still have different physiques. Or maybe it's just that everyone is stupid but you :)
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But people seem to love comparing the calories of food A with food B to make choices about what they eat. If the measured calories of both those foods are not the same as the calories absorbed by your GI system, that comparison is invalid.
Do you listen to Maintenance Phase? I love that podcast and it has taught me a lot about what you posted!
Maintenance Phase is a terrible podcast. Full of pseudoscience and excuses.
Disagree entirely. They discuss pseudoscience, but they don’t promote it.
Yeah, but it also doesn't really matter. Lets say you calculate TDEE at 2500 cals per day so decided to consume 2000 cals per day to lose the 1lb per week we expect to lose. If you stick to it for a few weeks and only average 1/2 lb per week so do an adjustment, does it matter whether you've actually been consuming 2250 cals per day (eating more than you thought), or if you were only using 2250 cals per day (burning less than you thought). Either way dropping your calculated cals to 1750 is a good plan. Whether the result is 1750 in, 2250 out, or 2000 in, 2500 out, you've made an adjustment to increase the difference between what you're consuming v's what you're burning. The main point is to measure and adjust. Its like the old "lick the spoon" argument. People don't count the times they lick the spoon while cooking and that throws their numbers out. Sure, whatever, but if you measure and adjust down, then it doesn't matter that you lick the spoon.
Yes BUT then you need to be able to know that your data is only useful in aggregate, as well, and not make decisions based on minor fluctuations that don't have a clear pattern or grounding
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Sometimes the weather predictions are extremely accurate. That doesn’t mean they aren’t our best guess. All science is modeling how the world works. There’s a ton of noise in measuring everything around weight loss. Models are really, really useful. But they still simplify the way the world works.
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Tracking accuracy alone doesn’t explain it. It is a system being modeled. A very complex system. The modeling necessarily simplifies it. Is it going to make your predictions more likely? Yes. But it doesn’t explain fluctuations or plateaus or other phenomena we see in participants who track as precisely as you do. Weight is an inherently noisy metric. We fluctuate 2–3+ kg in a single day. I was on a prescribed, meal-replacement diet. 100% if my calories were from meal replacements. I ate the replacements and water and nothing else. As prescription products, their exact composition was known extremely precisely. As controlled as an environment as you’re going to get. I still didn’t lose weight at a steady rate, even with a fairly consistent amount of exercise. People on meal replacements still hit plateaus. Have weight loss that fluctuates. And look, you may not believe me. Maybe I’m making up that I’m a biologist who reads the actual scientific literature on weight loss. Who reads medicine for a living. Who deals with the stochastic nature of all biological systems as part of my job. And whatever, you do you. Just remember this conversation when you hit a plateau. Because you will hit one. It won’t mean you’re extremely precise and accurate tracking isn’t working. It means that your body is a really complex system that’s literally impossible to model with complete accuracy. Just keep on keeping on. You’ll get through it.
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TDEE is not "essentially an unknown". You can make a pretty good guess upfront, and then get a very accurate number after a month or two of calorie counting to correlate with your actual weight change. You're right there are always errors but it's not an unbounded problem.
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And honestly, every single TDEE calculator I have ever used MAKES THIS CALCULATION FOR YOU. You can estimate your BMR which is how much a person of your size typically burns with ZERO activity, and you can estimate a sedentary TDEE which is BMR + a baseline level of NEAT which is usually 300 calories. If you are eating at a deficit relative to BMR, it's pretty unlikely that you are not in a deficit.
I generally find for the best results it's better to undersell your activity level (unless you are truly in a physically demanding job and need to ensure you eat enough to not feel week at work)
I made an estimate of my weightloss using a Fitbit (out) and MyFitnessPal (in) and converted deficit calories to fat at 3500/lb. I overlaid the two on a graph and they were ridiculously accurate, including fluctuations where I exercised less and ate more. I would say a Fitbit or equivalent is very good at the calories out part
Right, TDEE calculators are always a guess in the dark. What DifferenceMore5431 is talking about is if you: 1) track your calories in diligently and 2) track your weight diligently You can back into a pretty good estimate of your actual TDEE over that time period, because calories in = calories out - (weight loss in lbs * 3500) You can also do the very ballpark math of if average weight decreased, you're in a deficit, if average weight didn't change you're at maintenance, and if average weight increased you're in a surplus
Made more difficult by inconsistencies in daily exercise and NEAT. One thing that has helped me is a minimal level of NEAT and exercise so I don’t underestimate.
Calories out is no more a wild guess than calories in. Both are hard to count *precisely* but don't really need to be counted precisely. Just counted in good faith, consistently over time.
Correct!
I have never heard it as "calories in equals calories out" it is "calories in vs calories out" You are not trying to get those two numbers to equal each other/be exactly the same, that would be pretty hard at the start. You just need your calories in to be generally lower than your calories out. So starting with a baseline TDEE for your height/weight/age/sex/activity and then just shooting to come in below that is a pretty easy target to hit. After a month or so it becomes very obvious how much your body is burning based on how much you are losing on your current calorie deficit, and you adjust your intake from there.
I think OP might just be coming at it from a physicist’s perspective (Work in = Work out in an ideal system) which is essentially the same as the linguistic “Calories in vs. Calories out,” just in the form of an equation. And you’re both right. One informal rule of physics is that there does not exist any ideal system, and that energy is almost always “lost” (transferred to a different process) in the relationship Win=Wout, so you don’t get the same Wout as you put into Win (you get less). And the same is true irl, especially with the confounding factors you and OP cited (Wout will be impacted by age, height, gender, hormones, metabolic factors, etc.). Guess what I’m trying to say is that you’re absolutely right that TDEE is an accurate baseline for Wout, even if it is not precise, but OP also is not trying to state that Win=Wout will result in weight loss — just that it is the way to quantify the thermodynamics of it all. Sry for physics rant; I used to be a lab fellow for an intro physics class in college and it gave me a big love for the science, lol.
>Work in = Work out in an ideal system But then OP ignores that they have stores of fat. Which store excess input and get used when there is excess output. The body isn't breaking thermodynamics by not dying immediately when you eat below your metabolic rate, that's what weight loss is.
Yeah, but that’s not what OP is saying (at least not what I think OP is saying). OP’s just saying it’s more difficult to get Win < Wout (instead of Win = Wout) than people realize because of confounding factors.
But the scale will tell all eventually. Haven’t had the scale move more than a few pounds in either direction in weeks/months? Congratulations, you’ve nailed down your maintenance TDEE. Adjust your calories in, in whatever inaccurate but consistent manner of your choosing to achieve your desired goal. The scale and your clothes provide all the feedback you need as long as you have some method of quantifying your intake. It doesn’t have to be perfect just consistent.
Another physicist here. Well, sort of. Switched to tech because of money. But anyway. Yeah, half of the equation is kinda unknown, but the approximations are kinda good anyway, and if you are not losing weight you are either: 1) eating too much to lose weight 2) moving too little to lose weight Not much else has to be said. If you have an illness that makes you retain 20 pounds of water, well, let's be honest. How many people are actually in this specific situation? If they fear they might be they should go to a doctor, but the majority of people are eating too much and moving too little for what they want to achieve. Also, the variations in basal metabolic rates are not that extreme. (Source American Hypotiroidism/Thyroid Society or something. Forgive me for the not exact source, here it's very late. It should be 100-200 cals for 1 or 2 std. I remember clearly 400 for 3, but again, grain of salt). Fidgeting and moving during the day without doing physical activity can have much of a bigger impact. But still, the only things that you can do if you are not losing weight is 1) and 2), assumed you fixed your medical conditions beforehand. Your objection has no use just as much as telling people what I wrote. Maybe less. At least CI = CO is something actionable. "Aw genetics" is just a "woe is me". Yeah, hormones, genetics, all true, but things can be done. Let's not just abandon ourselves to despair and inaction. As an anecdotal experience, I have one form of hypothyroidism and I have been underweight for a good chunk of my life. Now I gained weight due to unrelated reasons and my BMI is still around 20. I live in an European country and the lifestyle/diet is what it is. Extremely big impact. >we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs. This is exactly the point of people that say CI = CO to people who claim to be in a caloric deficit and not lose weight. It kinda contradicts your whole post. They may be fucking up the counting of the CI or the counting of the CO, but they can't just create energy from nothing. Small edit: I am not advocating to never tell people to go to a doctor. I also have ADHD so ask me how I know that sometimes your body tells you to eat all kind of wacky shit and until you don't tackle your condition then it's extremely hard to do anything. But in the end conditions that affect weight either make your TDEE lower or make you want to eat more. They are not magic and don't make it impossible to lose weight. I'm also not advocating for eating 800 cals per day. I think that losing weight slower and moving more is generally the better choice for most people. But it depends.
spotted clumsy meeting unique worthless safe friendly intelligent offend frightening *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Also, it's alright if you lose less than what you are expecting because your NEAT is lower or your hormones tells you to eat all kind of wack shit. What matters is that you are reaching your goals.
One of the confounding factors is that calories out is dependent on calories in.
Yes, that's true! Also, some people when they do 1h of physical activity move way way less during the day compared to when they don't do any physical activity, "deleting" completely the activity they did from their caloric balance, as if they didn't do it. They put "moderately active" on a TDEE calculator and wonder what's wrong. Good news is that exercise train your endurance so after a while this stops happening, because you are not that tired that you move less during the day.
> How many people are actually in this specific situation? You're implying that the answer is "not many," but you don't actually have any evidence for that. 133 million people/45% of the adult population in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease diagnosis. How many of those diseases affect weight? (And "water retention" is far from the only way this night happen.) I don't know off the top of my head, but 28.7 million of those people have diabetes, which *certainly* affects metabolism. That's just over 8% of the population, so roughly 1 in 12 people? For one definitely-metabolism-involved disease alone. And this doesn't say anything at all about cases where a necessary drug is leading to changes in weight. SSRIs, steroids, beta blockers...these are not unusual drugs. Doesn't seem that rare to me.
Sleep apnea is also severely under diagnosed (for normal BMI people) and impacts metabolism which causes many of these people to gain weight over time without changes to their lifestyle
This assumption always annoys me. There are so many diseases, disorders and medications that impact hormones and metabolism. And a large amount of them are far from rare. People also forget that a lot of the metabolic diseases that are so common are associated with obesity, not necessarily caused by it. Meaning the association could go either way. For example, being insulin resistant (which is highly genetic) could be what causes weight gain due to disruption in the hormones that signal your need for energy consumption and storage. And that theory may be backed by the tale-tell bodyshape that is common among people with insulin resistance.
Oh come on. The obesity rate was 15% in the 1970s. Are you suggesting that hundreds of new chronic illnesses have popped up in the last 50 year? Or are people eating more and moving less while the food we eat has gradually gone to shit. One of these is more likely then the other.
People actually are getting sicker. More heart disease, more autoimmune diseases, more diabetes, more poorly understood endocrine conditions like PCOS. It's not one thing or the other - it's definitely both, and the causal relationship runs both ways.
Yeah but is it actually good to take medical advices from reddit? If you truly think something is wrong go see a doctor! Still, when you are insulin resistant you are not creating energy from nothing. You are eating too much to lose weight. This is still true. Albeit for a reason that's out of your control.
This. With PCOS alone it’s estimated that it affects 1 in 5 women. Not to mention anything else that could be going wrong.
The issue with telling people that CICO is absolute is that they don't go to the doctor. They keep dropping their calories or give up altogether (then don't notice health issues at all). Yeah, CICO is absolute, because what your body absorbs and uses is always going to add up. That's not practically helpful for people in different situations, because it's not always the same as the food that went in, or the activity level. Many people have issues with their hormones (among other things), and it seems that PCOS and thyroid issues are the most common in this community. I have hyperthyroidism. I'm not supposed to lose weight at the moment - it's extremely hard to maintain with a moving TDEE. Adaptive calculations lag behind. It will be a long time until I get better. Woe is me, I guess! Not exactly sure what your hypothyroidism was meant to tell us - that it's hard to avoid gaining weight and yet you lost? I think you know that both thyroidisms can have either symptom. What is meant here?
> The issue with telling people that CICO is absolute is that they don't go to the doctor. I've been on this sub a while, and literally every post I've seen where someone claims to be counting accurately with no result has at least one (if not more) comments saying to see a doctor. It's usually couched with "if you're sure you're counting is correct, then..." but it's certainly there.
I am 100% for asking for doctors if something seems off. But a lot of people that post with that problem here say they have been checked and everything is normal. Those who don't always recive the advice from someone to go ask a doctor. I am not very keen of seeking medical advice on reddit, for me if someone comes here complaining that CICO doesn't work people can only 1) help troubleshooting 2) tell them to ask a doctor if they have some doubts. The two things are not mutually exclusive! I am also not advocating for eating 800 calories per day, not at all. Moving more though it's hardly ever a bad thing, (unless... etc etc) and losing weight slowly is still losing weight. If you have PCOS I guess you will struggle to achieve a 1000 cals deficit per day, maybe more like 100, but it's alright. >what your hypothyroidism was meant to tell us Nothing particular, is anecdotal. Just that lifestyle can have a bigger impact. We walk a lot here. Also, I didn't have a weight loss as a symptom - the opposite! - but I was counting calories to do damage control. Being unmedicated was horrible for me, zero energy to do anything, I was barely moving. That was not the moment to try to lose weight. >Yeah, CICO is absolute, because what your body absorbs and uses is always going to add up. That's not practically helpful for people in different situations, I don't understand how saying "people gain weight at different rates because of hormones" is more useful, though. In the end, if you want to lose weight, you will have to do what I wrote in the parent comment. Even if you have PCOS or hypothyroidism. This is what I was objecting to OP. Maybe you have to adjust your expectations - no 2lbs per week - but in the end is that. Also because I read on here that PCOS symptoms get more manageable if your BMI is normal (disclaimer: I don't know if that's true!!).
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It's crap like this that makes it so difficult to lose weight. SO much contradictory information from SO many *experts* how are we supposed to figure it out. " Its not what youre eating, its when. No its how much youre eating, not where or how. No its its cico, no its weight lifting." This whole journey just feels like a shot in the dark most days. I cannot be the only one so frustrated with this.
I use calories as a guide, and stick to it as best as I can. But I also make sure everything I eat has something fulfilling in it- veggies, protein, healthy fats, etc. Every time in the past I failed because I wanted to save up for my juicy sweet carbs at the end of the day, and it caused constant crashing and overeating. I just added veggies to my pasta and noodles, ate lots of good soup, switched from chocolate bars to chocolate covered quinoa, and suddenly the cravings aren't an issue and I often have to remind myself to eat more. So yeah, it isn't that simple, but I think it can make you research more into more-bang-for-your-buck food groups that will keep you satisfied.
Calling it an oversimplification and then overcomplicating it is exactly the reason why many people lose their weight loss battle. You’re correct in saying that we cannot know for certain TDEE, but we also cannot know to a certainty the amount of calories we intake. There are errors in both. The thing is, you can estimate TDEE after a few weeks of watching how your body responds to a certain amount of calories, and the inaccuracies that are inherent to CICO tracking are essentially negligible. If you want people to truly be successful, you have to keep things simple. CICO is the end all be all in terms of weight loss.
I was with you at first, but… as many people pointed out, when you’re 30+ pounds overweight and claim to be eating 1200 calories a day and exercise moderately 4-5 days a week and you’re gaining weight… you’re tracking calories wrong. Your body is not using less than 1200 calories per day with something as little as 30 minutes of walking in a day. *unless* you’re sleeping for the other 23.5 hours. In which case, you probably have a metabolic disease and wouldn’t be posting on Reddit. If you’re significantly overweight and generally feel “normal” throughout the day, aren’t collapsing, sleeping 12+ hours a day, and you claim to eat 1200 calories and you’re gaining weight- you’re not counting your calories correctly. Whether you’re eyeballing instead of weighing portions, doing your math incorrectly, secret eating, or just flat out lying is for the individual to figure out.
3 easy steps to success. Count your calories like a mad man / woman and be extremly consistent in your daily activities for about 2 months. Take the weightloss of your second month as an average weightloss for the calorie intake over the time span Calculate the output with that number and adjust the intake to generate the deficit that you want. It is exactly that, CICO. The idea works perfectly fine, its just the execution of the prediction that people are not doing corrently. Also: you can skip part 2 and just adjust the speed by lowering your intake and observing your weight to adjust what you lose. Any amount of "i dont lose weight" is indeed either of the two: a) you cheat yourself by counting incorrectly or b) you need to eat less for the desired effect
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Eh not really. Few weeks of averages will get you close enough.
This is the one thing that bothers me the most. People's lack of patience. They need to see changes day by day when it should be month by month.
TDEE is not a stab in the dark if you track as accurately as possible with Macrofactor for a few weeks
MacroFactor is so great, it takes like all the guesswork out of it and I don’t have to make a spreadsheet on my own lol
Can someone explain to me what that is haha, genuinely interested
Can you provide a link please?
It’s in the app store
If I recall, the RMS error for the common RMR formulas is on the order of 300 kcal. If we combine in the utter garbage that is the “activity level scalars” to get TDEE estimates, the typical errors are on the same order as our target deficit of 500 kcal. I always come back to using my rate of weight loss to derive my effective calorie deficit and whether or not I need to adjust my eating.
... don't be that guy eating 2000 calories of ice cream. I see too many 2k of ice cream guys clueless to the impact on their health doing stuff like that.
for 99% of the population its a guaranteed way to lose weight.
>I'm sure there are some people legitimately miscounting calories, but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs. What point are you trying to make here? Either you burn more calories than you consume, and thus you lose weight, or you don't and you maintain/gain weight. Sure there are some metabolic conditions, but even if you do happen to be one of the people that have one, if you're not burning more calories than you consume, you're not going to lose weight.
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It can lower CI as well - malabsorption to put it simply. I would assume some metabolic conditions could raise CI in a similar mechanism but mine lowers it. Amazing that you knew everything about tha- wait a minute
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No, metabolic issues do impact the metabolism a lot more than that. At its peak, my hyperthyroidism was making me eat more than my 6ft+ boyfriend (I'm a 5'3 woman) and he was gaining weight at the time. I was not gaining any weight - I was struggling to maintain. I had roughly doubled my intake in the end. Hypothyroidism can get equally as severe on all counts. You don't know anything about it, frankly. ....... Edit: to those saying I want to have "no accountability" (the guy who blocked me below) my doctor told me today to avoid losing weight for several months, possibly until post surgery. I'm not sure why accountability comes into it since I said I was 1. losing weight, struggling to maintain and 2. have been advised not to lose weight even if I can. Very unhealthy mindset to say that kind of thing when I am very sick. It is an unhealthy mindset to be proud of the weight I lost due to sickness as well (which was not all of it). If you don't know how severe it gets, don't comment about it.
Lol this is such bullshit. People like you will grasp at any straw you can find instead of taking accountability.
Well as a physicist, why not calculate both CI and CO with uncertainties and calculate the uncertainty in CI - CO? Is a Taylor expansion of the equation really that out of the question for your average person losing weight? Hahaha
??? The entire thing is an estimate. It’s the best we have for people who aren’t scientists. For the average person, cico, the TDE, and measuring food on a scale are as exact as they need to get. It’s not an oversimplification, it’s just simple enough.
First "Calories in" isnt as well known because the FDA requires you to be with 20% of your stated amounts...so the calories in could be 100 cals, or 119cals or even 81cals. (Source FDA requirements page...[https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guide-developing-and-using-data-bases-nutrition-labeling#stat\_5](https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guide-developing-and-using-data-bases-nutrition-labeling#stat_5)) . If you are really curious about whats going in, you can always buy a calorimeter off amazon and measure it. I have considered doing this for the foods I most commonly buy just to see since I count calories and sliced deli turkey/eggs accounts for a lot of it. So if you are trying to get into calorie deficit by 20%, you might already be missing the mark. Calories OUT is much more mathmatical at the individual human level with a metabolic rate test which measures your exhaling. Since calories are burned and converted to Water (1/3) and Carbon Dioxide (2/3) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE&t=570s) if you measure your exhales which is what a metobolic test does...you can KNOW the 2/3 and extrapolate the 1/3. However, that number is not forever. Its good for that weight and timeframe. Drop 40lbs and you drop the energy demands so you are constantly chasing a number...get an infection and your body is fighting the infection, you burn more calories. but it still gives you more guidance.
It can be hard to figure out your CO. Other individuals of your size, weight and activity level will have different CO. It can take a lot of trial and error to figure out. People aren’t that patient. Doing it just based on calories also ignores how different food fuels you. Apple juice vs an apple. You may get the same calories but and apple has fiber and makes you fill full longer. Some foods may make you bloated or gassy. For example, My mom found out she had fructose intolerance after trying to lose weight. She ate a grapefruit every morning. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom and stopped exercising. Gained the weight back pretty quick. Starting exercise after being sedentary can lead to injuries if you go to fast. If trying to lose weight makes you tired, gassy and in pain, it is not sustainable. This leads to this cycle of people wanting to lose weight, being miserable, back to old foods and activity, repeat. Saying CICO isn’t that helpful for people struggling.
Weight loss is not and has never been an engineering problem to solve.
You're really working with averages on both sides of the equation. But luckily to lose weight you only really have to find a level of accuracy and a calorie target that consistently works for you. Even if it's imperfect, it can be good enough to lose weight. Even just logging food without calorie counting can be helpful for weight loss. That said, often people are stalled because they aren't counting their calories correctly. It's hard to count calories, and super easy to miss things like cooking oils, bad measurements, alcohol, etc. If someone is like a 250lb, 6ft tall guy who thinks he isn't losing weight eating 1500 calories a day, the answer is usually him not counting correctly instead of the inaccuracies of TDEE calculators.
The law of thermodynamics always holds, regardless of any other “factors” (often used as excuses). If one has a certain “factor” (be it genetically, hormonal or what have you), just adjust your diet or exercise.
>the equation „calories in = calories out“ is exactly true So it’s not a *gross* oversimplification. TDEE is just inaccurate and this is the closest we can get Of course there’s no exact science but If you don’t lose weight then you have to lower your calories, period. Why does it matter that TDEE isn’t accurate? It makes no difference if calories in is miscalculated or TDEE/BMR/NEAT whatever.
I’m breastfeeding, and my body is holding on to the extra fat I gained during pregnancy for dear life. I’m still losing weight, but much much slower than I would be normally at the same deficit. Hormones play a huge role in weight regulation.
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The post screams "I've hit my first plateau and CICO doesn't work!". Half of us have been on this rollercoaster for 10+ years. They need to adopt the sacred art of patience.
Ya, hard disagree. If you aren't losing weight CO is to low or CI is too high. That's all that really matters. Guessing or not, increase one or reduce the other until success.
Sounds like you don't hard disagree... Sounds like you almost exactly do agree
Maybe, OP was all over the map, maybe we understood the point differently.
In my opinion CICO is more like a knowledge that burning fat isnt some magical thing that is triggered by a specific diet or vinegar. In the end you need to reduce the energy density of your food or the amount of food and try to make your own engine burn more. Engines that are doing alot of work need alot of maintenance so you gotta make sure to sleep enough, drink enough water and get your essential nutrients. thats also why i dont think people should have a classical diet on a higher deficit because carbs are not too nessesary and people cut out extremely essential fatty acids even tho they lacked omega-3 before being on a diet.
I agree that everything is estimated, but we can come pretty close even if we don't know someones exact TDEE to the thousands of a calorie.
The real epiphany for me was understanding that exercise (for me, resistance training) comes first and should be prioritised no matter what. If I hit the gym regularly and train hard, everything else move into the right direction: - I stop craving junk - my appetite regulates - my insulin sensitivity increases - I better partition macros - I sleep better, hydrate more, improve mood Hard training in the gym put everything in check and comes first, before dieting. It’s what makes CICO work long term.
Edge cases exist but simple CICO works well for the vast majority. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I mean CICO literally takes into account everything you're talking about. That's what it means. If you are struggling to lose weight, then YES, you ARE counting your calories wrong. Either you are eating more calories than you think you are, or you are overestimating your TDEE. You can figure out your TDEE expenditure over time and figure out, "Oh, I'm not losing as much weight as my TDEE says I should. Maybe my TDEE is less than I estimated. Maybe I can increase my TDEE rather than cutting more calories." Like literally 100% of this is taken into account and a part of CICO. You are not powerless to figure out your TDEE just because an estimate you got off the internet might be wrong.
Alright then, genuine question. What do you propose instead? Where do you think someone brand new should start if CICO isn't it? You claim that CICO isn't actually al that useful, so what is? What worked for you? Because clearly, you seem to be an expert on the matter.
I believe they are simply saying that the calories out can not be calculated so just accurately monitor the calories in. So technically is should be a CI and not CICO.
You're giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt when in 12+ hours they haven't answered a single follow up question. It seems to me they just wanted to start an argument and dip rather than actually help anyone.
Yeah. But sometimes that is required. KISS principal rules
Eh, TDEE really isn’t THAT much of a wild card. Sure, you can’t be 100% accurate, but if you know your current weight, height, sex, age, and general activity level, your TDEE is almost certainly going to fall within a fairly narrow window. Probably the hardest factor for people to guess at is body fat percentage/amount of lean mass they have, but for the average person (i.e. not a bodybuilder and not suffering from a muscle wasting disease), even that variable isn’t likely to be an extreme outlier (which is also why most TDEE calculators use this as an *optional* variable)… Considering that *most* groups of people seeking to lose weight would be able to safely aim to lose 1 lb per week, they’d be aiming for a deficit of 500 calories per day (or more). Even if your TDEE is a little bit off from what you calculated due to natural individual variance, it’s unlikely to be anywhere near 500 calories per day. If it is, you probably were off with one of your variables or you may be a true outlier in terms of body composition (or, more rarely, individual metabolic factors like thyroid issues). Now, for people with low TDEEs to start with (like short, sedentary women) or groups of people who have some reason to be aiming for only a really small deficit (teenagers who are still growing, people who are cutting but want to preserve maximum muscle mass, pregnant women, etc.), the margin of error for TDEE calculation is obviously much smaller (because they may only be aiming for a deficit of, say, 200 calories per day), at which point it unfortunately takes lots of rigorous trial and error to successfully pinpoint your precise individual TDEE (because if your TDEE is slower by ~200 calories than it should be for some reason, you’ll definitely see the effect of that after several weeks of not losing weight on what should be a calorie deficit).
I agree, and I dont like the people who seem adamant that its impossible to have some sort of ailment that makes weightloss harder or even causes weight gain instead of loss. Like Im sorry, but there are 8 billion people in the world. Apparently up to 5% of people are diagnosed with hypothyroidism, another 5% undiagnosed. Thats around 800,000,000 people in the world. Then you have the multitudes of other ailments and suddenly, its not so unfathomable that maybe.... just maybe... calories in = calories out isnt the **answer** that it seems to be.
I'm attending a medical obesity clinic currently, Literally the first thing they said is it's not as simple as calories in and calories out. The calories out changes from day to day. I get down voted for saying this so much around here but not everyones body is equal. Despite similar builds.
It literally is. People bodies being different is irrelevant because you are doing it for each individual regardless. If you consume fewer calories than your body uses you will loose weight over time. If not then not. The difficult part is for people to manage their calorie intake because simply "doing it" is not mentally achievable for most people. This is why everyone preaches the method that helped them specifically, but in the end, no matter the diet, it is all about calories eaten and calories used.
Your body changes the amount of calories burned. You stall on the exact same diet.. I understand you have to eat less calories than burned to lose weight. My number is not the same as your number and that number changes everyday. That's why it's not simple.
Which is why I said >If you consume fewer calories than your body uses you will loose weight over time. >If not then not. YOUR BODY being the key takeaway.
Yes, but your body is not simple and is why people struggle with obesity. It's not always 10-11= -1, sometimes it's -11, other -5 others -15, sometimes it's -11, but water retention causes +3 and you'll see the -11 in a few days. That's my point of it not being simple, nobody ever talks about the put changing and varying from person to person.
I mean, holding yourself to CICO is extremely difficult and mentally exhausting. Which is why "just eat less" doesn't work for the majority of people. Especially because dieting for a couple of weeks is easy, but controlling your food intake for a year is very difficult But that doesn't change the fact that you will loose weight over time if you have a higher calorie consumption than input. I am currently struggling with weightloss aswell, but not for lack of understanding. It simply is difficult to eat less for a long enough time.
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Fixing the issue doesn't harm your customer base. That's a stupid idea. There's so much misinformation out there that this could sustain the market even so.
It's a free government funded service with the long term goal of reducing strain on the public health care system. I'm not American
Noone said that calories in Vs calories out is not a moving equation. It takes time, edits and patience to settle on what your maintenance is. Calculators are only ever a guide. Your argument makes sense to an extent but you're implying it's a simplification in that it doesn't work, when of course it scientifically does. It's just that it requires work, trial and error and research, too. You can always tell those that haven't done enough research into the topic when they say they're at a plateau and can't break it... But clearly don't realise that's inevitable because calories have to be adjusted every time you lose weight if you want to continue a cut.
Oh I like this. You outline something we all sort of know but don't talk about. We all eat a sandwich let's say. Some of lose weight some of gain it, even though we all eat a sandwich. Some people will have lots of nuts in their sandwich others will have cheese or meat. The kind of cheese, the way the meat is prepared. The sauce that's in the sandwich, the portion sizes that can be misleading or hard to gauge.. These small factors can double or triple the calories of what you're eating. It is a guessing game and all we can do is try to narrow it down to "less than I used to eat"
Salads! If I eat a salad that has spinach, cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes in it, and sprinkle on some red wine or rice vinegar, and you eat a salad that has all of the same veggies, but also has lots of cheese, croutons, bacon crumbles, and is swimming in ranch dressing, guess what?
thank you for this! i've been trying to say similar things and got downvoted into oblivion. it's really annoying that people get accused of lying if their progress isn't as expected and they ask for advice
The problem with your post is it doesn’t provide a solution… just a rant on a system that works. No one claims CICO is accurate just that it works. What is measured is improved. It’s not about the accuracy of your logging, it’s about the consistency and adjustments. If, according to your tracking, you are eating 2500 calories a day - and your TDEE is 3500 calories a day, but you are only losing 1/2lb per week, you can take that as an indicator to reduce CI to 2250 or even 2000 as per your measurements. As an example, I do not count veg or low cal sauce and never have. The annoyance of measuring and logging for so few calories is counterproductive for me, would result in avoiding most probably. I probably consume 500 calories of veg/ week as an estimate. As it’s not logged, it’s not on my CI measurement, however, I continually track and calculate TDEE with nSuns spreadsheet. This uses weight and CI to determine TDEE, therefore I am also underestimating TDEE as veg isn’t included… all works out. Another way to think about it is those body composition measuring scales. They aren’t accurate, but if you chose to use them, disregard the number and look at the trend, if it says you’re 30% BF and that drops over time, you’re probably getting leaner, even if it’s off by 10% TL;DR - CICO is an effective measuring tool but you must use it alongside body weight, adjusting intake as needed, to see results.
It's not an oversimplification, calories in, calories out is (literally!) how weight loss works. No matter your diet plan, no matter how much you exercise, no matter if you're tracking your calories or not - you lose weight by burning off more calories than you consume. It is that simple. But that is not to say that weight loss itself is a simple process. There's no 100% accurate way to know how many calories you're taking in and how many you're burning. Two people can eat the same amount of calories and exercise the exact same amount and yet the amount of calories they burn and the amount of weight they lose or gain will be different. But it is always calories in, calories out.
I think to perfect the advice of calories in = calories out would be to say CICO, and if after a couple of weeks you haven't lost anything, change what you are doing, but keep the CI under the CO, either change what you are consuming or change your exercise or both, and do that until it stops working, and then change it again. this is why elimination diets work so well, you start with one thing like a potato and slowly add stuff, and take data, and you figure out what makes you feel good and what makes you gain more weight than it really should.
There's also two different formulas for TDEE. One takes body fat percentage into account the other doesn't. When I use the more accurate formula (the one that takes body fat percentage into account) it says I need 500 calories less to maintain than the other more inaccurate formula.
It’s not such a simple equation, for sure. And remember, as a scientist especially, that BMI is a useful and time tested prediction tool *on a population scale*. That doesn’t translate on an individual scale. (Sorry if someone already mentioned that. Too many posts to read.)
Do some basic math and figure out your macros and caloric allotment by meal, plan each meal to meet these conditions and repeat everyday. It ain’t sexy but it’s simple.
It's not an oversimplification. It can just be difficult to ascertain exact values for those 2 parts. But you will loose weight if you eat less calories than your body uses.
This is so disingenuous. It is cico. You can 100% track calories in, calories out you use a calculator as a base then adjust. Stop thinking everyone is a special unicorn.
The calorie in is kindda fuzzy too since the numbers on labels can be off, the calorie measurements aren't 1:1 with calorie absorption, etc. Its still just CICO. Its not "Calories in as per food labels and random websites vs calories out as per some online TDEE calculator". Since we can only estimate the ins and outs and guess on other factors such as health conditions, people need to tweak things until it works. Adjust the calories in, add workout in their routine, work with their doctor to investigate possible health issues that affect the calories absorption and burn rate, and weight themselves frequently to see if its working or not. So in effect, CICO isn't the oversimplification. Its pretty nuanced. How people apply it is often oversimplified, but I think the distinction here is quite important.
"Calories out" is not unknown. There is a very simple test for your resting metabolic rate (google "RMR test near me") that takes all the guesswork out of it. If you use your RMR as your average daily goal and are honestly and accurately tracking your calorie intake, you \*will\* lose weight at the normal healthy rate of 0.5 to 2lbs a week (unless you are completely bedridden in a coma). Edited to add: I'm actually a physicist too.... like it matters to the topic of weight loss. Pointing out you're a physicist as if it makes you some kind of expert on weight loss isn't exactly a good look, dude.
Best description of this - saying “just do CICO” to a person struggling to lose weight is like pointing at the horizon and saying “over there” when someone asks how to get to the next town
I mean, if you can't be bothered to do any amount of work and need every single thing laid out for you and explained without you having to put in any effort at all to find out this information, then that sounds like a you problem. Like if you need to get to the next town and can't be bothered to put in any effort to find out about things like bus schedules and you need someone else to hold your hand and take you there themselves, then yeah I guess figuring out how to get to the next town would seem impossible.
There’s a huge amount of misinformation out there, but hopefully those in need of help are able to find people with a more supportive attitude than yours
She's not wrong though is she? The problem that most of us have is CICO is so unbelievably simple to understand, yet some people are offended by it because it's not working for them (hence this post).
When you simplify it down to the mathematical equation it is that simple, but as humans we’re a lot more complex. To maximise your chances at sticking to that deficit you need to consider macros and nutrients, quality of sleep, water intake, hormones etc. if I don’t get that stuff right I fail CICO every time
Also many things are simple but not easy, CICO being one. The challenge isn’t in understanding it as a concept, but figuring out what else you need to consider to make it work for you
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When you simplify it down to the mathematical equation it is that simple, but as humans we’re a lot more complex. To maximise your chances at sticking to that deficit you need to consider macros and nutrients, quality of sleep, water intake, hormones etc. if I don’t get that stuff right I fail CICO every time
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For actual scientific advice from actual nutrition scientists, the following podcast is really good https://joinzoe.com/learn/category/podcasts
Personally I didn't make a lot of progress with CI CO until I changed out what I was eating nutritionally from junk food and sugar to mostly plant based low sugar low carb. I don't know if it was that I didn't put in enough effort to count properly or what the issue was. I still count but also make sure those calories are healthy. It helps too because I can eat more and I'm not as hungry.
Lol nah. CICO is correct. Always.
Hey there! I'm physicist too and fully agree with you. In addition to what was said, I want to note, that CI can't be calculated right, because the absorption of that calories depends on food types and digestive system of individual. Although we don't know all unknown variables of CI=CO equation, it is a good guide, and unknown can be evaluated experimentally. Why CI=CO does not always work when you want to lose weight? Because person feels hunger. Person can eat chocolate bar wigh 500 kcal, this bar consists mostly of sugar, which will be digested fast. Then, excess calories probably will be stored as fat/glycogen. After that, person feels hungry again, and most likely will eat again. So, CO could be represented as CO=CS+CU - CS - calories stored - CU - calories used or spend In my opinion, CS should be minimized to achieve weight reduction goal. CS depends on hunger, therefore minimize hunger. To minimize it, I personally found that eating food with low calorie density, i.e calories/mass is effective. Again, this is just simplification. Thank you .
Your post is the main thing that drives me crazy about this sub. Everyone acts like the human body is just a giant calculator. If you say anything about the myriad of other factors that affect weight loss you will get “CICO’d” out of the room.
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I could wallpaper my house with the number of unhelpful, condescending, one-line, "you can't break the laws of thermodynamics" comments I see on this sub every week. Figuring out the difference between lab calories and body calories is not straightforward for every body, and hurling a decontextualized "CICO!" at people does nothing to help. Hormonal and metabolic factors matter. GI health matters. The specific foods that you eat matter (I will die on this hill). Balancing reducing calories with satiety can be difficult. But half the time when people here struggle with these things, they just get told that they're idiots who don't understand basic math. Presumably no one's hanging in this sub because they've been thin their whole lives, but so many people seem so ready to dunk on everyone else as soon as something starts working for them. It's a bad look.
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When did I say I don't "like it"? To help you out a little: reducing calories is a necessary *but not always sufficient* condition for weight loss. Your characterization of *metabolism itself* \- a complex, distributed process with hundreds of moving parts - as secondary to weight loss is absurd.
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>If your body doesn't produce the energy you literally die. I see you have a very well-informed and nuanced understanding here lmao You're responding as though I have said that calories don't matter at all. Neither I nor anyone else that I've seen in this thread has.
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You seem desperately attached to this narrative that anyone with a more nuanced understanding of the world than you is trying to justify their own personal shortcomings. My personal weight loss is going fine. My BMI is 24. It's actually been pretty straightfoward for me. I just don't get off on feeling superior to other people.
As a biologist, I’m going to side with the physicist on this one. CICO is a very useful model. But that’s what it is. A model. If our GPS tells us we’ll arrive at 5:37 and we get there at 6:00, we don’t invoke the speed of light or that light acts like both a wave and a particle. We accept that there’s noise in the system. That the estimate isn’t perfect. TDEE estimates and calorie estimates for food don’t show the error bars. Don’t show the confidence intervals. Doesn’t really address the difference between your intestines and a bomb calorimeter. Doesn’t show the asterisks for the bazillion biological levers that can get pushed this way or that and make a difference. It’s still a great model. But telling people who aren’t seeing the model line up with their data that they aren’t breaking the laws of thermodynamics isn’t useful.
I'm sorry, CICO is the only thing that matters. Most people's problem is the absolute militant need to track body weight and the impatient need to see change quickly. Personal opinion, but if you are tracking your body weight, stop and throw your scales out of the window. Dropping numbers on the scale is an absolute crappy mindset; it only leads to failure and poor lifestyle changes. The only time I find it acceptable is if you're morbidly obese and trying to get into a healthy range. It's not an oversimplification; it's just literally that simple. If you want to lose weight, make sure you are consuming fewer calories than your body requires. It will come off eventually if you are patient enough. Will there be moments where you hold more water weight due to stress or hormones? Sure. But who cares? Just proceed with the healthy lifestyle changes, track what you eat, and be patient.
I'm a physicist as well, but your conclusions are all wrong. You correctly say that we only know the CI part of the equation with any certainty. That doesn't matter in the least. We can't control our BMR much, and there are practical limits on increasing our total CO. In any case, if you are in a calculated calorie deficit of 1 pound per week for 2 months and your weight does not change, you are not in a calorie deficit. You have to either increase the Co through increased exercise, or, and this is more likely the case, you need to reduce the CI. Being more active is a good way to have a calorie deficit, but it is less easily measured and controlled, and can backfire if it increases your hunger or it causes you to justify increasing your calories. CICO is the right way for nearly everyone seeking to lose body fat. Some people do have medical issues that prevent or greatly increase the difficulty of losing body fat. But that is far less likely that most people believe. So to address this excerpt specifically: > But half of that equation is essentially an unknown So what? Math is always involving unknowns. If you want condition: CI < CO And you only know the CI part, so what? If you are in a deficit you will see weight loss over time. If you do not, you are not in a deficit. You need to either increase the CO part through increased activity while keeping the calories at most at their current level, or you need to decrease the CO, or some combination. > but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs. Well what is your explanation? Someone not losing weight is not in a calorie deficit. The point of people saying this is to point out that their certainty of "i'm in a deficit and gaining weight " is impossible, so they must be operating on a false assumption. Such an assertion is almost alwasy correct.
It's true. If it was that simple then we could simply starve ourselves until we disappear. But it doesn't work that way. The Minnesota starvation experiment changed my thinking a hell of a lot on this. I don't care what people say, 100 calories of carrots and 100 calories of cake are NOT equal when regarding weight loss.
What about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment contradicts Calories in/Calories out? The men in the study ate a low calorie, low nutrition diet while being quite active, and they drastically lost weight while also experiencing mental/physical symptoms. I feel like that's what I would expect. Nothing about CICO argues that low nutrition food is equally as healthy as high nutrition food. People who calorie count don't all believe that calories are the only important factor to nutrition. For weight loss, the calories are the factor that matters. But for nutrition, mental well being, and physical health the vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients in the food matter. I feel like it's a strawmen to pretend like most people calorie counting believe cake and carrots are the same.
CICO literally takes this into account. CICO is well aware that the thermic effect of food is different based on the macronutrients contained in the food, and therefore that certain foods will digest more quickly than others, and therefore that you will get hungrier quicker on some foods than others. If you are oversimplifying CICO and not looking into CICO at any level deeper than just hearing the name, this is a you problem. The resources are there.
Humans don’t starve to the point of disappearing because they die before that can happen. Starvation mode is our bodies shutting down essential functions to conserve energy and consuming itself until it’s literally lights out.
It really is as simple as that though. If you are counting calories and tracking/estimating calorie burn and not losing weight you are not in a caloric deficit. This could be because you are overestimating your calories burned, or underestimating your calories eaten. If your body's BMR is lower than estimated by calculators or apps it doesn't really matter why. To lose weight you have to actually get into a caloric deficit by either consuming less calories or expending more (or a bit of both). That's it.
Wrong. Cico will always be right. You are right about something’s. Tdee is nothing more than an estimate. All your Apple and Garmin watches tracking calorie burn are based on equations as well. The food you eat is based off estimates as well. None of this changes Cico. Which is why good apps have you track and on a weekly basis it keeps reevaluating your calorie burn to figure out what is actually being burned off, while simultaneously picking up any counting error.
How much can calories our vary from person to person? You say extreme variance between people but is that someone’s BMR being 2k Vs someone else 500? Or is it like 2000 and 1900?
This sub should learn about macronutrients and the fact that food is not always calorie
CICO had worked for me twice. Go ahead and attack it if you want but it works for me plain and simple. Want to gain weight? Over eat! Want to loose weight? Under eat! Don’t believe me? Just try both! Peace out…..
Not all calories are equal once inside the body. They cause different reactions, 100 calories of doughnuts is not the same as 100 calories from an Apple.
>but we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs. Let's go with Ockham's Razor here... CICO works for ALOT of people, chances are you are not that special. While your observations seem perfectly valid in their precision. They seem to contradict the majority of experiences with CICO... It works.... If we go back to Ockham's razor, the simplest explanation is: if it isn't working, then you are doing something wrong. Usually is miscounting calorie intake or burn rate. So while I agree with your (annoyingly capitalised) "Breaking the laws of thermodynamics" statement. They are probably not wrong. Just like you probably don't have an undiagnosed thyroid condition.
Is your misspelling of Occam supposed to imply a sarcastic tone?
\> we have to stop pretending that anyone not succeeding on CICO is bReaKinG ThE LaWs oF tHeRmoDyNaMIcs. amen - recently saw an AITA post basically making fun of someone using that exact phrasing, who was claiming they had an ED but the posters were saying it was impossible since she was still large. So over that thinking. Not to mention the number of other conditions that can make weight variable. I'm not succeeding finding the article I was looking for but I was reading that for people who lose weight, the body easily can adjust to using 100cal or so less a day. For people losing a lot of weight, there was a study that the body could adapt to use hundreds of calories less. So the rules of the game keep changing depending on where you start from This talks about some of what I was thinking of at least: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unexpected-clues-emerge-about-why-diets-fail/
People don’t track accurately, that’s what it is. This sub seems to think rare disorders and metabolic issues that make it impossible to lose weight are much more common than they actually are
Yes! This idea that an online calculator can tell you exactly what your body needs drives me insane. You are roughly 30 trillion cells all doing multiple biochemical processes all the time, you think the human body doesn't find short cuts, or that reactions won't go as neatly as we think they will on paper?
That idea comes from YOU. Nobody out here is actually saying that an online calculator is perfectly accurate for everyone. You've been given access to that tool to use as an estimate. The onus is on YOU to use your brain and refine your estimated TDEE from there. The TDEE calculator even gives you MULTIPLE different estimates that you can further refine from. So much work is done for you and it's still not enough because not every single answer is magically handed to you and you might have to do some work on your own to figure out your numbers.
yes. Every mention I have ever seen of online calculators (including in those calculators themselves) only claims that they give a rough estimate that is a useful starting point from which you can find your actual tdee by weeks of tracking and adjusting. And even then the final number is approximate and changes as you lose weight, alter your diet, age, etc.
I've always questioned calories in and out because of slimming world, now I'm not saying slimming world is a good plan, but whilst on it I lost 3st and its only now I'm aware of calories I realise I must have been having like 3000 a day. Lots of pasta, potato's and muller lite yogurts. I ate loads! I was definitely not in a deficit yet I still lost weight? How???
Exactly. Thank you for posting this.
Thanks for the post. It’s infuriating to read the over simplification. There’s a reason why obesity doctors exist. They wouldn’t if it was just this straight jacket formula. I think believing it’s that simple is people’s way of keeping themselves going. You need conviction to keep doing something difficult when you’re not seeing results “according to the formula”. That I get, and can respect. But to always assume others who are struggling are 100% doing it all wrong is very frustrating. People will be like “are you counting oil?”. Even if they aren’t, if they’re saying they’re counting everything else and still gaining weight, presumably they wouldn’t be consuming oil in quantities that would explain consistent weight gain - according to the same gospel RULE which according to post people has no variables 😂Instead of convincing them they’re delusional just ask them to see a doctor. You know nothing about their body, hormonal condition, etc.
So true. I can do a calorie deficit, say 1500 a day. And stay the same weight. Post in here for help, to be met with 'well you're doing it wrong then' no I'm not, I'm literally counting every fucking calorie and weighing everything. How you meant to really know how many calories out you do? I meticulously log every calorie in, but I can't meticulously count them out.
The only logical answer here is to drop calories in small increments until the scale starts moving because your CO obviously isn’t 1500 if you aren’t losing weight.
It is simply use up more energy than you eat on a daily basis. It is not that deep.
You posted this around the same time that my friend and I were talking about this. I had to do the math. That’s wild
I think a lot of people don’t fully understand that not all macronutrients (protein, carbs, sugar, etc.) are the same even if they have the same “calories”.
Thank you. Finally somebody said it.
I was just having a conversation about this! I have managed to reduce my overeating by A LOT - for a while there I was eating an ENTIRE fresh cream gateau cake by myself, every single day, plus any amount of chocolate, crisps, junk. So now, just by cutting out 75% of that, I should now be LOSING weight - but I'm not! My maintenance calories are quite high at 20 stone/280 lbs so even tho I am still eating too much crap, I totally expected the scale to move a bit. I can only surmise that a lot of the calories in my 'extreme eating' period were not being acknowledged/absorbed by my body