Big agree that CICO is great but limited and based on imperfect info. Some of the studies on the microbiome (gut bacteria) are super wild. For example, if you feed a mouse a high fat diet until it’s obese, then transplant its microbiome into a second, genetically identical mouse, the second mouse will become obese. This can be “cured” by replacing the fat mouse’s microbiome with one from a skinny mouse.
All to say that how hungry you feel, whether you’re able to stick to a low calorie diet, and how effectively you absorb macros (or don’t) is not entirely down to genetics or even behavior, but is influenced by gut bacteria.
Eating unprocessed, high fiber diets keeps gut bacteria happy. You feel full, but your gut bugs end up “eating” more of what when into your mouth, and you end up sh!tting out more of your calories (see link.) “I work hard so my gut bacteria can have a better life” is a saying in my household. (My wife is earning a PhD studying the microbiome, so we have plenty of feces-related sayings.)
CICO works until it doesn’t work. If you put less calories in, your body burns less calories (out). Your hair grows slower, hormone production can tank, reproduction shuts down in women, etc. It’s a cruel joke on dieters.
That said, one can lose weight doing it. I’ve lost 40-50 lbs. from my all time high and have kept it off.
I’ve just found it easier to diet while not training. When training and trying to fuel the training, it’s very challenging to diet for me. On the other hand, when I was in my 20s I could easily drop 5-10 pounds per month just riding and getting in to shape in the spring and then hit race weight by June. And that was without counting calories.
Per gcn video he has no problem using that dated method when it fit his narrative, only to then dismiss it when it helps with clicks.
He called cico bro science, then bro scienced an explanation. Citing people who ate in a deficit and lost weight who then regained for by eating in a surplus didn’t make the point he wanted to make. It doesn’t mean cico is bro science or doesn’t work it. Means people are people.
Just because metabolism can change and because calories are not a perfect unit doesn’t mean that cico doesn’t work. I’ve yet to meet a person who lost weight eating a surplus but followed whatever the fad macro was that month. But myself and everyone else I know who’s lost weight had done so with a deficit.
I think it’s important to note that, short of decapitation, cutting off a leg, or donating an organ, calories in/calories out is the only possible method of weight loss.
That’s not to say it’s easy, or that that you aways are sure what the numbers in or out are. But it works, always.
Which, IMO, it’s important to identify the solid, unchanging, known things in the the equation.
If your body takes in less calories than it expends, you lose non-water weight. That is incontrovertible.
The nuance is in figuring out the most effective methods of doing that, and constructing/executing a plan to consistently make that happen. Because nothing can be measured properly, and the human body is basically a series of moving goalposts.
Calorie Counting is just a method of being in deficit, and doesn’t work for everyone.
CICO is the science. Food labelling may not be a 100% accurate, but in the scheme of an overall diet it’s not going to make or break it. imho the main reason people don’t succeed with calorie counting is underestimation of foods/ consumption rather than food labelling/ how calories are calculated. In that case, some other method of achieving deficit may work better for them.
I watch Diary of a CEO on the trainer sometimes because it’s self improvement fluff, but there are a lot of questionable guests on the show with wild claims, so I’d encourage others to be critical when watching that. The host is generally interested in views and not discernment.
calories in/calories out is still fundamentally true, but most don’t take into consideration the calories out part changes on dietary restrictions, so it’s a bit of a diminishing return. Also, whole foods take more energy to digest, which is another reason those calories aren’t 1:1 with other calories. Specifically fiber isn’t actually digested, but counts as calories, and protein requires some additional energy to process the urea that accompanies it. So therefore, high protein, high fiber diets are better for calories in, than other foods calorie for calorie.
I’m on the train as well that CICO is basically flawed and there’s a lot of other thing one should do to improve his health/weight before counting calories.
And moreover, the best indicator of weight loss / gain is the weight itself measured by a good ol’ scale (once you’re eating mostly plant-based real food)
Weight yourself every morning in the same condition, note it and make a 7days moving average.
Based on the wight trend you can adjust, slighly and progressively, the amount of food you eat.
Yeah, like someone else said further up, food calories are typically measured in bomb calorimeters but our body isn’t a bomb calorimeter. It might be more accurate to say “calories absorbed/calories burned” since like you noted, the actual energy contained in food doesn’t necessarily make it’s way into our bodies.
It’s just a ton of nuance to put into a single simple phrase. CI/CO is much easier to say then to communicate that label calories =/= calories in the food =/= calories that make it in your body, etc etc.
Our bodies aren’t bomb calorimeters, and our body processes calories differently (even at different times), but if you’re aiming for (say) a 500 calorie deficit, those nuances aren’t going to make or break weight loss over sustained period of time.
I kinda feel this is a bit like dismissing BMI as measure, because rugby players/ muscular athlete’s are outliers.
Calorie labelling has a potentially wide error range of up to 25% or thereabouts. I suspect that the more ingredients in each product, the room for error grows.
Then the format of the food makes a significant difference to the energy absorbed - ground almonds are absorbed in the region of 30% more than whole almonds. This is because the structure of the food is simplified - both the processing of the ground almonds and on the flip the lower ability to chew to the same extent means the almonds enter the gut in very different forms - one pulverised with the cell contents released and the other with all sorts of variable fragment sizes. This makes a significant impact on the effect of energy absorbed and an impact on the microbiome.
So I would disagree with your statement in many circumstances. If your diet is fairly consistent and you manage to calibrate it to your energy requirements, iterate closely etc as a few posters have suggested, then you will reduce these error bars. But combine these two factors with a significant variety in foods eaten and the ability to calculate with any accuracy the energy availability of a diet is going to be hard.
Well n=1, even the 25% error in some foods (can be up or down) over a week I still don’t believe is going to make or break a deficit.
Actual underestimation of intake/ over estimation of expenditure (some of the apps are off the wall compared to what my Garmin will show even with the same data inputs) are more likely reasons that people don’t get the results they expect from calorie counting in my view.
