The surrounding discussion is an interesting hypothetical. The problem occurs when people use unsettled science like "not all calories are created equal" to change their lifestyle (e.g. "all X diet"), then fail at making substantial change because they made it too complicated.
You can do very well believing "a calorie is a calorie" even if it is technically inaccurate, and you can do very badly believing "not all calories are created equal" even if it is technically true on some level.
Effective weight loss is simple (note I didn't say "easy"):
- Calculate your TDEE. TDEE is ((RMR + TEF + NEAT) * Physical Activity Level).
- Eat fewer calories than your TDEE in order to lose body fat or eat more to gain body fat.
- Most of the population are Sedentary or Moderately active. Many also overestimate their PAL by one level (i.e. you aren't "Vigorously" because you hit the gym twice this week for 20 minutes, you're Moderately).
- Exercise to improve overall health (mental, sleep, immune system, etc). Don't "double count" exercise calories, just set your PAL level and that's it.
- Don't eat less than 1500 / 1300 calories for men / women respectively and try to get some nutrients.
Ignore everything else, it is just adding complexity. Weight loss should be "Simple but hard." "Complex but easy" doesn't exist unfortunately, at least not in the medium to long term. Instead, you'll just burn out faster. So K.I.S.S., make it boring, make it a habit, eat whatever you want below your TDEE.
PS - Starting new exercise (or periods in women) can cause short term water weight increases in the order of 1-6 lbs. This is caused by inflammation. It is completely normal and will go away on its own. Just be patient.
I haven't done much reading on this subject in a while, but I recall from Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that the issue is not that CICO is somehow flawed, but rather that there are meta-metabolic effects (if that makes sense) from the food we eat that ends up changing the factors in the CICO equation. In other words, none of the variables are static, and they in fact depend upon the nature of calories eaten.
The canonical example: because high levels of glucose in the blood can be fatally toxic, the body must spike insulin levels after a (simple) carbohydrate-rich meal in order to get rid of it quickly. One effect of insulin is an increase in fat synthesis and storage of triglycerides in fat cells. A diet rich in simple carbohydrates can result in chronically elevated insulin levels, which means that the body is constantly stashing calories away in fat cells.
The point is that the "caloric equation" that you refer to is a grossly oversimplified model of human metabolism that has led to what might be called Goodhart's Law of dietary advice.
The consequence of that is that morbidly obese people are literally starving while eating thousands of carb-laden calories a day over their base needs, their fat stealing the blood sugar from their organs and muscles when their organs become insulin resistant.
There's a bit of science coming out about that process and identifying methods to break this cycle is big business, with semaglutide injections, gastric bypass surgeries, and low-carb diets being just some of the first successful methods found to break the cycle.
Differential equations are a bugger. You get four of them, one for each mechanism group trying to adjust your weight up or down by changing intake or expenditure. Some are physiological, some psychological. If they get out of whack, you get weight gains or losses. But this is non-trivial non-linear stuff that’s pretty much impossible to keep track of even if you have the right memtal models.
All of this is true, but of course Gary himself advises a low carb high fat diet which has its own problems. So a more complete version of the above without straying too far in the other direction would be something like CICO + a balanced diet that seeks to hit most macro and micronutrients as well. For anyone interested, Stan Efferding's Vertical Diet is by far the best guide I've seen personally to putting together a nutrition program that seeks to hit these goals. (I'm not getting any money for saying that, of course.)
- the amount of total energy your body burns throughout a day (fun fact, just by living you burn calories)
RMR = resting metabolic rate
- calories your body burns in a day just being a body (pumping blood, thinking, etc)
TEF = thermic effect of feeding
- it takes energy to digest food
NEAT = non-exercise activity thermogenesis
- non-exercise is just differentiating between things a person intentionally does as exercise--like walking to work vs going on the treadmill at a gym.
Here's one link in a sea of many that talks about these concepts [0].
TDEE = Total daily energy expenditure. How many calories you burn in a day.
RMR = Resting metabolic rate (aka basal metabolic rate). How many calories your body burns just to sustain itself. If you were in a coma this is roughly how much you'd burn.
TEF = Thermic effect of food. Your body burns a small amount of calories just digesting your food.
EAT = Exercise activity thermogenesis. How many calories you burn while exercising.
NEAT = Non-exercise activity thermogenesis. How much you burn on top of your RMR but isn't exercise. For example, walking around a retail store burns calories even if it isn't categorized as exercise.
These are the four components of your metabolism (TDEE).
If your goal is fat loss, I wouldn't bother too much with trying to calculate all of those.
The process is simple: Go to an online TDEE calculator. Put in the numbers, get an expected TDEE (total daily energy expenditure, measured in calories). Then eat those amount of calories, minus 300. If after two weeks you haven't lost weight, do 200 calories less. Repeat until you are consistently losing weight. You might have to periodically lower your calories again, even if everything was working before.
Stronger By Science has had a recent series of articles on these topics, I would recommend starting there. The last one was just posted today and I haven't dug too deep.
Make an experimental study where you put people with high levels of stress hormones in one group and people with low levels of stress hormones in the other group. Have both calculate TDEE and eat equally fewer calories than their TDEE, and have both conduct the same amount of exercise. After a few months collect data and compare the two groups (this would measure the effect stress has on fat uptake, metabolism, and more).
Second experiment we can do is the exact one above but rather than having two groups with different levels of stress, have one group that are children to parents who experienced starvation during pregnancy (the dutch hunger winter study). A third group could be people that got raised in low calorie environment but that now eat the same diet high calorie diet as the control (an other study done on indigenous island populations that got introduced to a western diet).
We can also make a study that looks on exercise only. Have one group doing an activity which they really enjoy and love. The second group do the exact same amount of exercise and burn the exact same amount of exercise calories, but are forced to do something which they hate every second of. This study will be somewhat similar to the first one that covers stress, but will illustrate the health effect involuntarily exercise vs voluntarily exercise for the same amount of burned calories.
My own Effective weight loss guide is:
- Reduce stress.
- Find an physical activity that you enjoy and don't stop until you find one. Do not force yourself to do a specific type of exercise if you are constantly thinking about when it is going to end.
- Look to reducing calorie uptake, through by doing the two things above this will come somewhat natural.
Note I didn't say "easy". Stress has a massive effect on insulin production and even what specific parts of the body that takes up the energy. Stress is a significant factor in determining if that extra amount of calories is going to the brain in order to allow higher focus, or into fat cells in order to address the crisis that those stress hormones are indicating. Should the body focus on sexual reproduction and growth, or prepare for that starvation which is looming? It all depend.
Maybe the ordering above is a bit wrong. Start by finding some physical activity that one likes and want to continue doing that. If you find going to the gym as being meditative then do that, but if it gives you stress then continue looking. Once you found something, try make it into a routine and let it become a thing where you go to reduce stress.
Good advice, and keep in mind that calculating TDEE is complicated and often unintuitive, in particular:
"a long-term increase in activity does not directly translate into an increase in total energy expenditure (TEE) because other components of TEE may decrease in response" [0]
However, this is all happening in the margins - overconsumption of even a couple hundred extra calories a day (that's like, two to four Oreos) will result in packing on a dozen or so pounds per year, regardless of activity level.
But I'm not a scientist, so feel free to correct me.
Due to metabolic adaptation I’m not sure just keeping above 1500kcal is the best approach. From what I gather it’s still not a fully understood phenomenon but my hypothesis is that people overweight due to metabolic problems (insulin resistance) have problems satisfying their TDEE from stored fat, so the body is forced to respond by lowering TDEE.
It’s probably rather easy to keep insulin levels up even with just 1500kcal depending on how and when you eat. So you could end up just making the problem worse.
My personal approach is to ignore the calories completely instead going for a lax IF: Eat only if, and when, hungry (actual hunger), eat only the “good” foods. Or taken together “eat only when it’s worth it”.
I do think many people would get pretty far with less sugar (to keep things simple, count wheat as sugar) and more fiber though.
This is fine until you get serious about the exercise. Which happens very gradually. Then you’ll find that you easily “bonk” during high-intensity long workouts having exhausted your internal glycogen reserves. At this point (and I’m here) you have to figure out how to supply your body with sufficient calories balanced in a way that’s supportive of your development without gaining weight. I am yet to figure this out. Eating 4000 kcal of balanced food given the limitations our boys has in terms of glucose and protein absorption isn’t easy and my body appears to be especially reluctant to replenish liver glycogen instead of storing fat.
I am 178cm tall, and now 65kg, I can easily eat 4KCal several days in a row and not only not gain weight but loose it. It depends on many things, and to just name CICO is absurd. Do you know how calories are measured out of food? Do you then think the body burn the food the same way they burn food? I don't think you know what you are talking about. It's all about hormones, which is related to your environment (inner and outer). How you think, what you put in your body (not only food), how you move, how toxic is your place, the weather, etc
That's the way the body is supposed to work. When you take in too many calories, you body should fill its fat reserves and your muscle and organ glycogen stores, and then ramp up your energy output to burn off the rest, and any that it can't burn off should be shunted out of the body (you can excrete excess blood sugar in urine, for instance).
For obese people, what happens is the body muscles and organs become insulin resistant, but your fat does not, so your body fat is well fed before the rest of your body (other than your vital organs).
From there, there is no excess energy in your muscles and organs as they're getting just enough to function and sometimes not even that much, so your body makes more fat cells to store as much excess blood sugar as possible and then finally your kidneys filter and excrete the excess sugars remaining.
This process is a perfect storm for diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and preferentially gaining fat while being tired and hungry all of the time, and the only way to break it is to cut carbs so that your blood sugar doesn't spike and then to exercise to deplete your muscle glycogen stores so that when your blood sugar does spike it goes to your muscles first, and then do that consistently for the rest of your life if you were in the group affected by this.
I really like how you explained that. I haven't though about it in the terms of that fat tissue is not getting insuline resistance. Thanks for sharing your point, it broadens mine.
Yeah, so I just wanted to point that out, to show that the theory behing CICO doesnt work out. It's not calories in vs calories out, it's a whole holistic approach to health. If you keep carbs up, there is no way down, no matter how many calories in vs calories out.
In my personal experience, consuming a deficit below TDEE without concerning macros isn't enough to consistently achieve my weight loss goals.
I track everything using myfitnesspal and there's a strong correlation in my weightless during periods where I make an effort to consume around 30% of calories from protein. During less strict periods, my protein intake is usually around 20%. While my calories consumed remains the same, the higher protein diet is far more effective for weight/fatloss.
Indeed, there are some studies coming out pointing out that the hunger mechanism may be more related to a minimum-protein intake than we preoviously thought. Which means, you may stay hungry as long as a minimum protein intake is satisfied. I don't think there is one way out of the problem, but this seems to be a good one also
I agree. The caloric intake models are often terrible for groups like stress eaters. Eventually IMO there will be equally bad, but also subjectively-useful methods for treating things like overwork and boundaries-crossed situations as numeric models which can be examined alongside caloric intake models. Like a TDEE which better incorporates what we'd now consider subjective psychological stress.
I mostly use set a calorie goal, eat the same types of healthy foods and adjust it up or down a bit based on my weight change rate aka hackers diet style trailing average and such. It’s simple and not too stressful once you get a good menu of food and exercise system in place.
It can work really well for sure. I lost 50 pounds that way after using other methods for the first 50 pounds. That was about 5 years ago. I still remember how frustrating some of the TDEE models were when I was testing them out. Somehow a 500 calorie bonus budget could appear in there and throw you off for a few days.
- Why multiply by physical activity level? Shouldn't it be TDEE = BMR + TEF + NEAT + EAT?
- Calorie density is the only thing I'd add to your recommendations. As they say, you can't out-exercise a bad diet.
I've lost 40 pounds by basically using your recommendations plus the above tweaks. It really is that simple. However, there are people out there who make a lot of money complicating it.
> Calorie density is the only thing I'd add to your recommendations.
I've seen more people successfully lose weight by NOT changing WHAT they eat than I have completely upending their diets and burning out. Then they return to their original diets and gaining it all back.
As long as you eat below your TDEE, you can eat whatever you want. If you want to only eat microwave mini-pizza, you do you. You can still lose weight that way even if it is objectively not healthy.
Volume eating may be a useful tool, but that's all it is, a tool. You cannot rely on volume to stay on the path.
There are many options between upending your diet and only eating microwave pizza. As with most things I think the middle path is best.
On my journey I found it very helpful to find alternative ways of doing things that would allow me to eat more of my favorite foods while staying under my calorie limit.
your first step is complicated. Its pretty simple to "cut out anything with sugar in the top 5 ingredients" and win with a large majority of the population. Remove potatoes, rice, and bread, and you'll win with a super majority. That's pretty simple.
> Remove potatoes, rice, and bread, and you'll win with a super majority.
My problem with simplistic "rule of thumb" advice like this is that people will still eat a bunch of "healthy whole foods" like peanut butter and wonder why they aren't losing weight. Also, potatoes are practically a superfood - full of vitamins and minerals - and people should eat them (in moderation), not completely avoid them.
Knowing and tallying the caloric content of all the foods you're eating, either directly (by weighing your food) or indirectly (through a proxy like Weight Watchers points) seems to yield the best results.
Yes, this requires more effort than just "don't eat white bread."
cooked potatoes have a high glycemic index. So does white rice.
This is where the details matter. Your body has an innate ability to know when it needs more food. You get hungry. If you eat a bunch of foods with a high glycemic response, it will be absorbed quickly, trigger an insulin response, which captures as much of the blood sugar as possible and stores it to fat. After this is complete, your stomach is empty and your body tells you you're hungry. If you count calories, then you realize you can't eat MORE, so you go hungry. This tends to end badly (i.e. Snickers Hangry commercials). However, if you eat low glycemic response foods, they tend to hang around your digestive tract longer, not trigger a large insulin response, and feed your body's caloric needs as the day goes on. Further, when eating typical low glycemic response foods, you'll typically lose interest in eating before you're stuffed. Overeating a bowl of pasta is fairly easy, where as overeating prime rib becomes more difficult (until you introduce the baked potato and BAM you're back in carb land overeating).
There is quite a bit of glossing over even finer details here. This assumes every single calorie is digested (doesn't pass through), that every calorie digested is consumed by cellular activity (not removed by your kidneys).
Just like any model, its not exact.
If you cut out breads, rice, potatoes, and anything with sugar in the top 5 ingredients, and eat when you're hungry (not because its 12pm!) and stop when you lose interest, you'll likely lose weight (assuming you had issues before). This obviously doesn't apply to people with broken control systems like diabetes.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. A follow up question formed from my own experience: if i eat a very low glycemic index based food (sardines) and compare that to a high one (oats with millk), calorie for calorie, the latter keeps me full a lot longer and also keeps the hunger down for much longer.
Based on your explanation I would have assumed the opposite though? I tried this first thing in the morning, and it didn't matter if i ate 300 or 500 calories.
Same goes for lunch. Salmon with spinach is a lot less filling/quicker hunger response compared to less salmon but with rice instead of spinach.
I don't eat sardines so I can't offer any suggestions there. I do know that it can take some time to transition. my best recommendation when starting is to not count calories the first week. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not. The full transition is 21-30 days usually. But after you transition, its great.
Starchy carbohydrates are the biggest calorie source in most people's diets if they aren't bingeing on sugar or junk food.
Most people can't eat 1000 calories of steak or chicken (that's close to a pound of meat). 1000 calories of non-starch vegetables is a vast quantity.
You need to hold about 300 calories per day below your metabolic rate to lose weight at about a pound per week--that's about one potato or one cup of rice or two slices of bread. That's relatively straightforward to remove from your diet.
The easiest way to get rid of calories is to remove anything carbohydrate heavy.
Compared to other vegetables they're pretty calorie dense, especially given how big a portion people typically eat to feel full. They're often fried in a lot of oil as well.
If you're trying to diet you can basically choose between just boiled potatoes or a mix of other vegetables that can be cooked in a light amount of oil/spices.
> You can do very well believing "a calorie is a calorie" even if it is technically inaccurate
I used to think that, but now I'm not so sure.
In 2017 I spent a lot of effort counting calories (using an app to help keep track). To hit my target (losing a half pound per week), I mostly ate smaller portions and occasionally skipped meals; I didn't really change what I ate, just the amount of it. I rarely hit my target of 0.5lbs per week (often it was half that), losing barely 10lbs over 6 months. (Unfortunately, I gained all of it back in 2018.)
In 2020, once the pandemic hit and restaurants closed, my gf and I started cooking a lot more often than we had previously. So the meals were very different from the restaurant meals we'd usually eat. Our usual meals would be some sort of protein (chicken, steak, pork, lamb), with a vegetable side (usually something potato-based or pasta, though often greens as well). We also started intermittent fasting, and would only eat between roughly noon and 6pm. I lost 15lbs in 4 months (a little over a pound per week, on average).
Exercise-wise it was counter-intuitive as well. In 2017 I was running quite a bit, perhaps 8-10 miles per week. In 2020 my running buddy and I weren't meeting up (pandemic) for a while, so I was hardly running at all, maybe averaging just 2-4 miles per week.
Yet somehow my weight loss in 2020 was much faster and easier than in 2017. The main differences were drastic diet changes and intermittent fasting (and, paradoxically, exercising less). This year I've gained back around 8-10lbs of the 15lbs I lost last year. I'm still (mostly) doing the intermittent fasting, but we're going out to restaurants again, and we've been cooking less often, and sometimes even getting takeout/delivery at home when we're lazy, something we weren't doing all that often during the most isolated parts of the pandemic.
This is of course just my anecdotal experience, and there are a few variables that changed (the intermittent fasting may have played a larger role than I expected), so I certainly can't point to just the one thing here (changing macronutrient consumption vs. just eating less). But this is also making me realize that this is just a complicated topic, and while "weight gain/loss = calories in - calories out" might be a good starting point, I don't think it's sufficient to build a weight loss plan on.
Regardless of the weight loss plan, the most important thing is coming up with a diet that you're happy with and can stick to after you've hit your weight goals. While I haven't gained all the weight back that I lost during the pandemic, I do feel heavier than I'd like to be, and I find it very demotivating that it was so easy to erase much of the progress I made last year.
Fasting and what OP said are mutually exclusive. OP was touting the typical 500 calorie deficit max advice which is rule of thumb meant to keep people prepared for a longer term change, instead of an immediate fix.
The problem with a huge amount of diet advice is that it’s psychological, not biological.
Crash dieting is typically the quick reversal of a diet. For instance I eat 500 kcal/day for a week, then then the following month I go back to eating a 500 kcal surplus and more than offset my losses.
I would not consider 1200 over 3 days (400/day) to be a fast. I would consider 1200 in a month (40/day) to be a fast (I also think that is far to aggressive).
Has the term "crash diet" ever really been raised to any kind of status that is attached to objective measurement? That would be interesting if so.
If a crash diet description involves averaging, especially in the 1200 zone and over several weeks, to me that's less of a crash diet and more of an emergent norm that ought to be figured out quickly. Is this person reading /r/1200isplenty, or are they completely depressed, or what? The details are interesting and relevant.
If I had to model-ize crash dieting I'd start with something like a caloric deficit > 20% below TDEE, attempted multiple times, combined with the outcome of not meeting or maintaining target weight goals.
To me it could be. I've seen disordered eating in my family (and have done it myself). to me, it's not a good idea, and anectdata on something like my health isn't what I suggest when people are looking for advice.
Running right into "don't eat for a couple of days" is a lot more extreme than, "take a good look at your diet and make small adjustments, over time". I know it's not sexy or provocative, but it does work.
And that's why I preempted my post with, "talk to an expert" rather than dismissing the whole idea. ie: don't trust some random person on an VC tech forum.
Extended fasting is widely prevalent in many cultures, but I wouldn't consider those parts of the world as having eating disorders. Starvation in a bigger sense is a prolonged deficiency in nutrients and energy needs. Fasting doesn't have to be a set number of hours/days either. You fast every time you go to sleep.
Starvation mode is something most people do not understand. I can’t count the number of morbidly obese people I’ve heard tell me they need to eat 6 small meals per day so their metabolism doesn’t shift into starvation mode and they stop losing weight.
The few studies we have on actual starvation suggest that the body’s BMR does not change substantially until > 10 days without food.
Fasting and low carb diets have very similar effects, principally keeping insulin levels very reduced.
Most of the comments so far are missing the point. The paper points out that the energy available from food, for doing work, creating fat, or any other process, is not, and can not be, equal to the energy content of the food: it is reduced by thermogenesis. Because the reaction pathways are different for different types of food, a calorie of protein does not provide the same usable amount of energy as a calorie of lipid, for example. A greater portion of the protein calorie goes to waste heat.
However, from their Figure 2, you can see that the effect of even large changes in dietary composition have a small effect on the energy available from food. You can drastically reduce your carbohydrate consumption, while maintaining your 2000 calorie intake, and that amounts to only about a 100 calorie reduction in available energy.
The conclusion: to a reasonable degree of accuracy it really is CICO. To lose weight, eat fewer calories.
This is similar to lumens vs power. What we care about is a calorie normalized by the ability of the body to get usable energy out of it. Lightbulbs (lumens) are measured in useful (perceived) light created.
Absolutely hyperbolic title. Sure, "A calorie cannot exceed a calorie" is more correct, but it's less punchy so nobody uses it. The point is that you can't get free energy from nowhere. It's very well illustrated by DNP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol
To many, the point of "a calorie is a calorie" is not that you can't get free energy from nowhere, it's that that diet / food selection is meaningless as food containing one calorie of potential will always evolve to one calorie's worth of metabolic energy through some metabolic process or another - as in the abstract, that two "isocaloric" diets will always produce the same results. The idea of the paper is to dispel this notion.
> it is important to understand exactly what it is meant by "a calorie is a calorie." The most common meaning is that is it impossible for two isocaloric diets to lead to different weight loss.
I think that is hyperbolic - I've never heard that all isocaloric diets are guaranteed to result in the exact same weightloss. The point of "a calorie is a calorie" is that you need to reduce calories to lose weight.
From the chart in the article, going from a 10% carb diet to a 50% carb diet (which is a huge change) only results in a effective caloric difference of ~130. It is _much_ simpler and more effective to just skip a 100 cal snack than it is to cut all carbs out of your diet.
A more recent study [1] showed it to be around 209-278 calories per day, and 308-478 calories per day in people who had high insulin secretion. The study also showed that a hormone that increases hunger decreased significantly on the low carbohydrate diet.
I'm currently on a lazy keto diet and am down 33 pounds. I know it's only one data point, but it definitely seems easier than other diets I've tried.
Yes, this is the argument that Gary Taubes (and others) have been making for at least 15 years: "calories in, calories out" fails not because it is wrong, but because it is not powerful enough to account for empirical observations of human metabolism. The most glaring example of which is insulin resistance from high sugar diets, which causes the body to constantly stash away calories into fat cells.
One thing I've recently been thinking a lot about is how much of those calories the bacteria in your stomach may or may not use and how that translates for different people and how the chemistry in your guts can use said energy.
The real argument against sugar (or dietary advice that treats sugar just like any other calorie) is not that "calories in, calories out" is severely flawed but rather that the body is not a static heat engine (duh) and in fact changes its own metabolic optimization in response to the kind of food we eat. High sugar diets can lead to chronically elevated insulin levels, which (basically) causes the body to lock too much energy away in fat cells, leading to increased sensations of hunger for the same caloric intake.
The article is saying that weight loss can happen without reducing calories, and no weight loss can occur while reducing calorie. Skipping the 100 call snack is not equivalent
This is a common motte & bailey argument. If you press in on "are all foods really the same?", you get "Oh, no, of course there are differences", but as soon as you're not pressing we end up right back at "you just have to cut your calories because all calories are exactly the same and it doesn't matter where they come from".
Ironically, you demonstrate this in your last paragraph. If all calories are the same, yeah, just cut 100 out some other way. But if they have different effects on hormones, satiety, any number of other systems, then it may not be "simpler and more effective" to "just" drop 100 calories as a snack. You may need to actually change what you eat.
I lost weight on a high carb diet and I have lost weight on a low carb diet. Day 2 they felt different, but by day 200 the body adjusts and you get hungry either way.
To simplify the body approximates the food in your diet, but also measures the amount of fat you have. A great many things trick the first, but the second doesn’t care what or when you eat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039924/
That's just in your head not something that is universally true for everyone.
In my experience all large quantities of food increase hunger because you get your body used it. With carbs it's just easier to eat more in a smaller amount of space.
You would be surprised how many otherwise serious people have advanced to me the notion that you can get more than a calorie from a calorie of food, mostly in service of the notion that weight loss is impossible and you shouldn't try.
> it's that that diet / food selection is meaningless as food containing one calorie of potential will always evolve to one calorie's worth of metabolic energy through some metabolic process or another
Maybe that's true evolutionarily over tens of millions of years, but it's definitely not true that cellulose calories are remotely equivalent to fat calories -- not unless you're already a ruminant, anyway. Similar issues may present themselves with other types of calories. Just because in theory we could evolve to optimally use all potential sources of energy in food doesn't mean that we actually have yet.
The point of the article is that this is not true.
Chemically, a calorie is a calorie. But one calorie of fat is metabolically different from the equivalent caloric value of protein, because food is not processed by the body the same way that a calorie is measured.
It doesn't matter. If I eat nothing but 500 calories of Twinkies/cake/pure sugar (as measured on the label) every single day, I guarantee I will lose weight.
Literally no amount of hand wringing will change that fact
The debate around "A calorie is a calorie" relates to the whole "calories in vs calories out" concept for weight loss/gain.
Examples like yours focus heavily on the "calories in", but forget to consider the "calories out" aspect. What I mean there is, when someone says that the body processes different macronutriets differently, a lot of that has to do with how it affects "calories out"
If you eat 500 calories of a food that your body will only process a small amount of, and expel the other 450 calories as waste, that 450 is part of the "calories out". That's only a net "calories in" of 50.
On the other hand, if you eat 500 calories of a food that your body chooses to process/store most of, that's 400 calories in, and only 100 calories out.
The calories out part of the equation isn't just the energy you expend per day through movement/metabolic processes/etc, it's also the calories that are expelled as waste because the body didn't store that macronutrient.
I used an exaggerated ratio to drive the point home. To clarify, I'm not talking as much about absorption, more-so about things like how a macronutrient affects insulin sensitivity.
Carbohydrates decrease insulin sensitivity more than protein and unsaturated fats would. Decreased insulin sensitivity means increased insulin resistance.
"Having insulin resistance means that the walls of the cells within the body that need to take in glucose for energy, have a much-lowered sensitivity to insulin. This makes it harder for the cells to receive the necessary glucose through the cell wall.
That glucose then remains in the bloodstream, resulting in high blood sugar levels, which the liver then has to manage. When this excess sugar reaches the liver, it is converted to fat. The fat cells leave the liver via the bloodstream and cause weight gain. If left unmanaged this can lead to obesity."
It is shocking to me how few people are aware of this. I read Good Calories, Bad Calories almost 15 years ago and the idea that macronutrients have a meta-metabolic effect (i.e. on insulin sensitivity) now seems so trivially obvious that you wonder how it was ignored for so long. And yet people are still repeating the CICO mantra as though we are still in the dark ages.
But the amount matters in your exaggerated ratio and far less in real life. Can you share a source on how much is actually burned with some foods? Because if you're burning 30 calories digesting a 1000 calorie meal, then just eating 2 less fries with your Big Mac meal will be a better use of your time.
So a correct formulation would be ci * e = co where e is efficiency. This article is arguing that there are many possible values for e and you can influence e with your calorie sources. My point is that most of why CICO matters is that e is never greater than 1.
Bodyfat is a storage medium. There are time delays, which complicate energy balance and weight loss in practice.
Also, some calorie-deficient diets result in a higher average degree of hunger than others with equal caloric input. Some high carb diets produce insulin spikes and subsequent hypoglycemia and hunger pangs.
And some calorie-deficient diets result in different muscle/fat loss ratios than others.
Finally, not all exercise activities have the same effect on body composition. Long slow distance promotes a lean body, but it's not for everyone.
The value of e is a sideshow, and the entire CICO equation is a sideshow: an equation is a grossly oversimplified model. Humans are not static heat engines. The macronutrient composition of the food we eat changes the metabolic environment. This is the first axiom to accept, before you can even begin to talk about optimizing an equation.
You're not wrong, per se, but to a very reasonable approximation, that doesn't matter. CICO is much closer to being "true" than not.
If someone wants to lose weight, a simple (though not necessarily easy to execute) plan is to calculate their rough current TDEE, then eat those amount of calories minus 300 or so, and if they're not losing weight, do 200 calories less than that. Rinse and repeat.
If someone follows the above protocol, and we take as a given they stick to it, do you agree that they'd lose weight?
In practice, other diets can be easier to adhere to, for various reasons:
1. Eating at a caloric deficit makes you hungry, which makes it harder to not overeat.
2. People are bad at counting calories, so might get wrong numbers.
3. It's not fun to count calories, so people might not do it.
In many ways, something like keto that works for a lot of people without the annoyance of counting calories, can be much better for many people.
But in terms of the underlying mechanics, it's still a calorie deficit that is producing those results, which might give more flexibility to people who do want to count calories. (E.g. for me, counting calories was way better than any other "diet" I tried - I could keep eating what I wanted, so was able to be very flexible with my "diet" while still losing weight).
Yes, and a simple protocol for curing alcoholism is to moderate one’s drinking. Advice based on the tautology that reduced caloric intake (all else held equal) leads to weight loss is simple, correct, and obviously ineffective on large numbers of people. The problem is not the people, it is the advice.
I disagree. It's not complete advice, just as telling an alcoholic to drink less isn't the complete answer. But vaguely denying the idea that what we're aiming for is to drink less alcohol does more harm than good.
You may not realize the influence the "alternative" advice has. For many years I was confused on this, thinking that it's not as simple as CICO, that fasting and/or reducing carbs somehow did something special, etc.
In the last year, I started taking weight loss more seriously, I bought into CICO, started calorie counting, and lost a bunch of weight (though to be clear, I wasnt obese, just a bit overweight).
And since then, I've often thought to myself that maybe I'm misremembering exactly what I thought before, that surely I didn't really think that CICO isn't true. But I've had the opportunity since to talk to many people about this, most of them adamant that I couldn't have lost weight without giving up carbs, or that they could lose weight just by reducing carbs without any thought to total calories, or other other such things.
And this alternative cute of "the experts in this field are wrong, only I an outsider can see the obvious truth that somehow vaguely you don't need to worry about calories at all" causes real harm, both to what People do, and to how they think.
If someone wants to lose weight and is willing to actually put in some effort, imo the best thing to do is to count calories, reduce intake, and find out what set of foods Keeps you full and happy within that caloric window (quite possibly keto being the best option for a lot of people).
The problem is it's very poorly understood, even by medical professionals.
I had this very argument with an MD who was trying to tell me that if you operate at a sustained caloric deficit you'll eventually stop losing weight.
On some level, CICO must be true. Famine is a thing. If you consume a very small but still nonzero amount of calories you will eventually die. So it's not correct to say that "CICO is BS" or anything similar.
Whether CICO is an effective way of sustainable weight loss is another conversation.
>I had this very argument with an MD who was trying to tell me that if you operate at a sustained caloric deficit you'll eventually stop losing weight.
Depending on the definition of "sustained" (I assume the MD meant sustained absolute calories per day, not sustained calories below metabolism) it could be true, because as your body shrinks it reduces its metabolism partly because there is simply less of it.
> I had this very argument with an MD who was trying to tell me that if you operate at a sustained caloric deficit you'll eventually stop losing weight.
It can be true. Your body tries to maintain homeostasis and can adjust your base metabolic rate. Just like if you hyperventilate, your blood pH will be maintained by buffering until you exceed the buffering capacity (co2).
If you drop your calories low enough, of course, you will continue to lose weight.
> So it's not correct to say that "CICO is BS" or anything similar.
It is BS if you are able to show different amounts of calorie utilization under different diets. I didn't realize the difference was close to 300 Calories though.
It's like in medieval times when someone had a toothache, the tooth was pulled. Because a tooth that is not there can't cause pain. It's physically sound! But then someone said: yeah sure, except perhaps we can be smarter about it.
it's certainly true though that as your weight decreases the amount of energy it burns also decreases, and there can be additional backlash in terms of the body severely reducing the metabolism (and the resulting lethargy/etc can complicate efforts to exercise/etc). Furthermore metabolism varies in general by age, gender, and genetics in general.
and on the flip side, the amount of energy you absorb varies by the type of molecule the body is metabolizing, and also the leading indicators are that the gut microbiome plays a huge amount in determining how much energy the body absorbs. Two people can absorb several hundred calories' difference from eating the same diet and the same quantity, and over a scale of a week+ that turns into pounds gained or lost.
"CICO" is a massive oversimplification of an incredibly complex set of chemical processes. Like yes obviously your body cannot violate the laws of thermodynamics but we've just agreed that two different people will neither take in nor burn out the same amount of calories from doing the exact same things! Again, two people could eat the exact same things in the same amounts and exercise the same amount, and potentially gain a pound every week while another person holds weight.
And the problem is that this oversimplified advice gets translated into oversimplified medical recommendations/etc, and an incredible amount of moral opprobium. Fat people are an easily visible target and are systematically discriminated against - they are paid less, they have worse interpersonal outcomes, and they receive worse medical care. The first answer of a doctor to a fat person is always "lose weight" - I have a relative whose complaints were ignored until she finally had a volleyball sized ovarian tumor removed in a hysterectomy - and that goes doubly for women in general, whose medical complaints are downplayed/ignored in general.
And - not that it matters - but fat people have lower lifetime health spending. They're not "costing you" anything, not that that is ever a good reason to abuse a group of people, but our healthcare spending is hugely back-loaded towards end-of-life care, the third knee replacement and the two weeks in the hospital with congestive lung failure, all tend to be avoided by fat people. They die early and don't incur those expenses.
On a personal level, "what can I do to improve my own health", yes, the answer is correct that for your own personal metabolism the only thing you can do is to reduce your caloric intake. But everything past that, we're gradually realizing it's been horribly oversimplified by this idea that humans are the same as a blast calorimeter. It certainly doesn't apply on population-wide scales, there have pretty obviously been dietary shifts (massive increases in consumption of HFCS and other processed sugars) and potentially microbiome or hormonal shifts due to chemical exposure that have compounded these issues and exacerbated the decrease in activity. And that is certainly obscured (and attempts to study and remediate it stymied) by the "just eat less than you burn bro!" that is so popular.
As a layman I'm wondering whether CICO, as a grossly simplified model, is more useful when a person is very overweight/obese than when they are closer to normal weight.
When you want/need to loose, say, >40 pounds it would be plausible that an error of 200-300 calories doesn't matter as much because most likely your excess intake is beyond that.
Your health would improve considerably by following the simple but inaccurate model instead of doing nothing.
As your weight goes down CICO becomes less and less useful and you need to switch to a more accurate model.
I'm not an expert and can only talk from personal experience (aka unscientific anecdotes) of me and my social circle.
I still wanna know what my body was doing with the extra ~2,000 calories/day I was feeding it from ages 14-22, a period in which I put on only a little height and, by the last half, only gained maybe a pound or two per year.
... also I'd like to know how to get it to start doing that again. (yeah, yeah, I'm sure the answer is "take T and HGH, they're basically magic, aside from all the other health problems they give you")
I didn’t have much time to read but I also concur the law of thermodynamics is not being violated, the only point that is valid here is that macronutrient composition can change your metabolism and thus BMR, if I understand their point (which is a bit conflated by the hyperbole)
I recently started tracking my daily calorie intake with Noom, and I was very surprised at how easy it is to get to 2000 calories if the diet doesn't consist of low calorie dense foods. I'm now focusing more on eating foods that are have a higher water content and foods that have a good fiber content. If I am still hungry after eating those foods, then I go for something else. I also don't refrain from sweets of simple carbs, but I do try to make mindful decisions about how often to consume them.
The problem isn't metabolic or thermodynamic or anything like that.
The problem is measurement.
We cannot actually measure calories in or out in a direct way. If I eat an apple, I know that X grams of apple will be about Y calories. Usually. For typical apples. I cannot actually measure the apple I ate. It's a destructive process. Both the measuring and the eating.
Similarly, I cannot measure the caloric expenditure of everything I expel. Either through breath, sweat, heat, waste, etc. It's difficult. We have approximations.
And it's hard to get that information because we're always breathing, drinking, eating, sweating, urinating, defecating, etc. So if were to weigh myself right now, fast for the entire day, then come back in 24 hours and weigh myself again, I'd still only have an approximation of how many calories I expended in that time.
When we talk about how things are "processed" what we are really doing is talking about whether or not they are processed. A calorie that gets expelled through waste is not really a calorie consumed. It just passed through you.
Look back to Olestra. It was marketed as a sort of 0 calorie oil because it wasn't processed by the body. It would pass right through you. Which kind of was the problem with it.
But there are other ways to cause your body to reject calories ingested. It's the mechanism behind bulimia. You can cause yourself to vomit or take laxatives to cause yourself to defecate. Whereas anorexia modifies the CI part of things.
End of the day, you find out roughly how many calories you burn a day and then eat roughly that many calories a day, you'll hover in your current weight range. Want to lose weight? Eat less than that. Gain? Eat more than that.
The debate around "A calorie is a calorie" relates to the whole "calories in vs calories out" concept for weight loss/gain.
Examples like "500 calories of twinkies and 500 calories of lettuce are equivalent" focus heavily on the "calories in", but forget to consider the "calories out" aspect. What I mean there is, when someone says that the body processes different macronutriets differently, a lot of that has to do with how it affects "calories out"
If you eat 500 calories of a food that your body will only process a small amount of, and expel the other 450 calories as waste, that 450 is part of the "calories out". That's only a net "calories in" of 50.
On the other hand, if you eat 500 calories of a food that your body chooses to process/store most of, that's 400 calories in, and only 100 calories out.
To clarify, I'm not talking as much about absorption, more-so about things like how a macronutrient affects insulin sensitivity.
Carbohydrates decrease insulin sensitivity more than protein and unsaturated fats would. Decreased insulin sensitivity means increased insulin resistance.
"Having insulin resistance means that the walls of the cells within the body that need to take in glucose for energy, have a much-lowered sensitivity to insulin. This makes it harder for the cells to receive the necessary glucose through the cell wall.
That glucose then remains in the bloodstream, resulting in high blood sugar levels, which the liver then has to manage. When this excess sugar reaches the liver, it is converted to fat. The fat cells leave the liver via the bloodstream and cause weight gain. If left unmanaged this can lead to obesity."
The calories out part of the equation isn't just the energy you expend per day through movement/metabolic processes/etc, it's also the calories that are expelled as waste because the body didn't store that macronutrient.
> If a "calorie is a calorie" were true, nobody would pay extra for high test gasoline.
The total output of an engine has to come from the stoichiometry of the fuel, regardless of its anti-knock properties. The total output is the work obtained plus heat, plus whatever energy remains in any incomplete combustion products that are exhausted. Inefficiency caused by knocking means we get less work, but that has to be accompanied by more heat. If we are only measuring heat, or only work, we are doing it wrong. One way is to simply reduce one to the other: make the engine do some work against friction which wastes all of it as heat, and put that whole thing in a closed system (the calorimeter). It cannot be that you get more or less heat out of it if you burn the same amount of gasoline, and obtain the same exhaust products.
The conservation of energy principle is inviolable. If we capture and measure all of the inputs and outputs of an organism (heat, work and solid/liquid/gaseous matter), then any discrepancy between the energy content of two means it is losing energy from its energy stores, or else accumulating it.
The main fallacies in fat control are not violations of thermodynamic principles per se but rather these:
(1) it's easy to simultaneously control the work/heat output and/or the input to obtain an arbitrary desired caloric deficit.
(2) a caloric deficit will always be covered by releasing and burning fat in preference to anything else.
A cup of gasoline has ~2,000 calories. Assuming you don't die from drinking it, this trivially and obviously would not have the same impact as eating 2 McDonald's McDoubles.
But it does have the same calories. So, it turns out, calories are kinda useless if your body can't break down what they're contained in. You'd poop it out, calories intact (or breathe it out, pee it out, or in the case of gasoline, probably just die).
Even pulling back into things which are wholly edible: ever heard of the meat sweats? They can occur because your body has to expend a lot of energy in breaking apart proteins commonly found in meats; more-so than while digesting other foods. In other words, if you eat 400 calories of meat, but it takes an investment of 30 calories to digest it, how does that compare to 400 calories of tomatoes?
What about lactose intolerance? The inability to digest, and gain nutrients, from milk products. One person drinks 200 calories of milk and gets lots of nutrients; another shits their pants and is now dehydrated.
It seems trivially obvious to me that anyone who says "a calorie is a calorie" is trying to sell you something. Though, I suppose, the people who say "my diet will work for you, buy my special food plan" are saying the opposite, but are also trying to sell you something.
I honestly thought that the quoted "Calories" on food packages were a measure of typical bio-available energy, and not simply a measure of the total theoretical oxidation energy.
Its kind of in-between. The number reported is the additive oxidation energy of the generally bio-available components in the food. But, of course, no one's body is as efficient as "burning a twinkie in a cleansing fire", so its definitely more on the side you're saying than the other even if the calculations do cut out some components which aren't all that bio-available.
Especially since it does significantly differ for each individual. Lactose intolerance is an obvious example. Something like 70% of adults around the world are lactose intolerant, which would absolutely impact how well they (well, "we" lol) absorb energy from food with lactose in it. But, the rates specifically in the US are closer to like 10%. It definitely doesn't reduce the total availability of energy in the food to zero, but its still strange to think about countries like some in east Asia, where rates can reach as high as 90%, not taking it into account when reporting things like calories, vitamins, minerals, etc in, say, dairy cheese.
There are plenty of other examples, like gluten intolerance/celiac, some food allergy reactions, reduction in gut flora, plenty of other intestinal disorders...
In other words, the reported numbers try to communicate something like, what kind of nutrition could a typical, healthy adult get from consuming this. Unfortunately, no one is typical. [1] But its not obvious (to me) how this could be meaningfully improved.
I can stick my fist in my mouth, but no one would say I've consumed 100 (?) calories of fist.
Also, 400 calories of steak is roughly 6oz.
400 calories of tomatoes is about 20 tomatoes. Or about 80oz.
It's better to say that every calorie taken in is a calorie that must be accounted for. So if you're lactose intolerant and drink a cup of milk, we can account for that milk when you blow it out of your ass in a bit.
An excellently fascinating diversion (page 47): it appears to be about 1.5 cups, and the cause of death actually can be asphyxiation due to fume inhalation even during ingestion.
Sure, the body loses some energy processing calories (TEF, thermic effect of food). But it's very efficient.
The larger flaw behind "CICO" reasoning is that it often ignores volume, hunger, and mood effects. 1200 calories of spinach will make you gain about as much as 1200 calories of sugar. But the former is basically impossible to eat: spinach comes to 23 calories per 100g, so you would have to eat ~5.017kg, or ~11lbs, to eat 1200 calories (sugar is 0.3kg or 0.6lb). When people say things like "500 calories of spinach = 500 calories of chocolate", well technically they're correct, but it's unfair because nobody is eating 500 calories of spinach.
And yes, spinach is an extreme example. You can gain weight on healthy "low calorie" foods like chicken and apples. But you'll be stuffed. Most people, when trying to lose weight on processed foods, will constantly battle hunger and low energy. But when they eat unprocessed foods, they have much less hunger and feel better. Even when people say "I'm eating healthy but not losing weight", usually most of the foods they're eating are still high calorie (e.g. cheese and nuts).
Here, we propose that a misunderstanding of the second law accounts for the controversy about the role of macronutrient effect on weight loss and we review some aspects of elementary thermodynamics. We use data in the literature to show that thermogenesis is sufficient to predict metabolic advantage. Whereas homeostasis ensures balance under many conditions, as a general principle, "a calorie is a calorie" violates the /second/ law of thermodynamics.
Giles Yeo is a great source of popular information along the lines of this topic. I recommend his books, but here is a recent youtube from his talk at The Royal Institution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQJ0Z0DRumg
the calorie is a very bad metric for human energy consumption and nutrition in general.
First, it completely ignores other nutrients like minerals, vitamins, prebiotic fibers, etc.
Second, to measure the caloric value of something, you'll need to burn it and calculate the amount of heat generated. This is not how the human body digests food.
Many types of substances can't be digested (like fibers) but generate a substantial amount of heat.
Bits and pieces of nuts and seeds can go undigested through to a large extent, depends on the size of the pieces that were swallowed, and so the body absorbs only parts of the fats, carbs and proteins in those types of foods (although nuts are very calorie dense)
We really need a new measure of energy that's suited for nutrition... The calorie is worthless.
If, as shown in their energy diagram, all food converts to CO2 and H2O, then no foods can cause weight gain because all the carbon will be exhaled and water excreted.
I read this as an indication that numbers out of a calorimeter don't correspond precisely to the bio-available energy.
TL;DR:
“ the first law holds even in irreversible processes – energy is still conserved – the second law says that something is lost, something is unrecoverable
(..)
The efficiency of a machine is dependent on how the machine works and, for a biochemical machine, the nature of the fuel and the processes enlisted by the organism.
(..)
In weight loss diets, of course, inefficiency is desirable and is tied to hormonal levels and enzyme activities.
(..)
The second law of thermodynamics says that variation of efficiency for different metabolic pathways is to be expected. Thus, ironically the dictum that a "calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics, as a matter of principle.”
About the above text: Tried to cut parts from the article to abstract the main points.
The purpose of "a calorie is a calorie" is not to be scientific truth; it is to serve as guidance for people who are trying to lose weight and are falling prey to particular mistakes.
It's like if you're at the gym and a coach is telling someone "sit your butt back, butt back, butt back!" "Sit your butt back" isn't a universal directive for that exercise, much less everything you need to know about it. It's a correction for what that person is currently doing wrong. Six months from now, they might be sitting too far back, and the coach will say, "Don't let your butt go back!"
Or the advice to, "Loosen up; people like it when you just say what's on your mind," versus, "You need to activate the filter between your brain and your mouth." These statements can both be true when directed at the right person in the right context.
The paper takes aim at "a calorie is a calorie" as an objective scientific truth, which makes it trivially wrong, but doesn't address its pragmatic truth as advice. "A calorie is a calorie" is "true" when it is a good corrective for the person it's directed at. It's "false" if the person needs to be paying more attention to the differences, like if you're an athlete trying to fine-tune your diet for performance, or if you somehow never got the message that people need vegetables in their diet.
It might be less true on HN, but in my experience with my family and acquaintances, "a calorie is a calorie" is a widely needed truth. Most people's approach to healthy eating is to sort foods into "good" and "bad" and try to minimize the harm from the "bad" foods, ignoring any potential for harm from the "good" foods. Some people give themselves a pass on the calories from olive oil and avocados because it's a "healthy fat." Other people focus on their intake of cheap processed corporate foods while not worrying about the generous quantities of expensive, local, artisanal bread and cheese and fancy meats they consume. There are even people in my generation who missed the whole last thirty years of carb controversy and mound up huge portions of spaghetti and garlic bread next to a 4oz cut of steak and call that a healthy meal because the only problematic food on the plate is in a tiny portion.
For whatever reason, whether it's because of how nutritional information is presented to the public by experts or because of exploitative marketing from the diet industry or because our brains are wired to see good and bad everywhere, that's how an unfortunately very large number of people approach eating for weight loss, and "a calorie is a calorie" is a good corrective for them, to remind them to pay attention to the quantity of everything they eat, not just the "bad" stuff.
I guess this is like saying "A Joule is a Joule" regarding different types of energy (gravitational potential, nuclear, etc). It may be true in an abstract sense, but the conversion efficiency makes a large impact in a practical sense.
I don't think 300 is anything less than huge. I agree there. But that's for going all the way to a keto diet. In terms of practical impact, I'm thinking of it more in terms of bang for your buck. If you make the kind of change I expect most dieters will make, then you'd only see a small fraction of the 300 delta, which is where I'm coming from.
You can do very well believing "a calorie is a calorie" even if it is technically inaccurate, and you can do very badly believing "not all calories are created equal" even if it is technically true on some level.
Effective weight loss is simple (note I didn't say "easy"):
- Calculate your TDEE. TDEE is ((RMR + TEF + NEAT) * Physical Activity Level).
- Eat fewer calories than your TDEE in order to lose body fat or eat more to gain body fat.
- Most of the population are Sedentary or Moderately active. Many also overestimate their PAL by one level (i.e. you aren't "Vigorously" because you hit the gym twice this week for 20 minutes, you're Moderately).
- Exercise to improve overall health (mental, sleep, immune system, etc). Don't "double count" exercise calories, just set your PAL level and that's it.
- Don't eat less than 1500 / 1300 calories for men / women respectively and try to get some nutrients.
Ignore everything else, it is just adding complexity. Weight loss should be "Simple but hard." "Complex but easy" doesn't exist unfortunately, at least not in the medium to long term. Instead, you'll just burn out faster. So K.I.S.S., make it boring, make it a habit, eat whatever you want below your TDEE.
PS - Starting new exercise (or periods in women) can cause short term water weight increases in the order of 1-6 lbs. This is caused by inflammation. It is completely normal and will go away on its own. Just be patient.