I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out
Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.
Why go to space at all? Just stretch your arms until they form a great circle around the Earth. Where your hands meet, hold a dumbell the mass of your bodice. Once your hands interlock, you can safely lift your feet from Earth's tyrannical force and you will gracefully float like a ring of pure joy.
Without the bodice you would be out of balance while holding the dumbbell. If you're making a ring around the world, you must learn to reason circularly.
98% of people are unable to follow your "simple" idea. Hence, it's not simple by definition.
Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.
People are always going to make these arguments. Yes, I know that there's scientific evidence that your mass effects your weight and that hunger, metabolism, etc. effect your mass. But we have to look at effect sizes. Whatever diet you try, you are only every going to have, at most, a modest effect on your own mass which will indirectly lower your weight.
I challenge people to go out there and start launching chunks of matter on escape trajectories from Earth. Yes it is hard, yes it takes a lot of energy, but you will start reducing the force of gravitational attraction acting on you. These are real results, not just a temporary change.
I'm inclined to agree with the parent comment on this, maybe argue they're being conservative. I'd say closer to 99.999% of people would struggle with this weight-loss plan, and hurling chunks of matter from your backyard to out of earth's orbit doesn't sound simple to me. But I'm not gonna knock an idea before I've tried it.
Have you personally shown people how to do this? Can you link to some testimonials or endorsements from former clients?
After all, anyone can say anything, and even point to lottery winners, but I want to learn from the best what it takes to actually win the lottery. I myself am not a success coach but the other day, someone very successful told me that anyone can succeed at a startup. All they have to do is get their billionaire parents to give them a small loan of 10 million dollars, and let them iterate through and fail a few times. The key is to go back to the family trough and then you can get bailed out multiple times. If your parents are not billionaires then there are ways to fix it. This can work for anyone. He showed that such an approach actually pays off because in the end you make back everything you lost AND you can now afford an amazing car and TV!
His friend said he was “reducing a hard problem to a much harder problem”. But what does his friend know, he is poor by comparison and seems bitter
Easier, but far more selfish. By helping reduce the Earth's mass, you not only help reduce your own weight, but the weight of all current and future inhabitants of the Earth!
Exactly, thank you. Simple != convenient is absolutely the best way to summarize it. Losing weight this way is extremely inconvenient. It does mean that earth will become uninhabitable. But that does not mean that it's not worth the hard work!
You’re ignoring genetics. We have evolved to store fat to survive in harsh conditions, but this does not mean we can survive a missing crust and exposed mantle.
I once lost 17kg (50 pounds) by caloric restriction (500cal deficit per day). I’ve got news for you: you will be slightly hungry most of the time. Meals will be the highlight of your day.
You only know that you were slightly hungry most of the time. For you, meals were the highlight of your day.
But you didn't need to go hungry. Folks lose weight by caloric restriction and fill up on a lot of fruits and (non-starchy) vegetables. Some folks have luck with legumes and beans and filling foods. Some folks snack and don't have meals.
And the experience of hunger changes, too! Sometimes, in the same person and definitely between folks.
Examples: I used to smoke. Nicotine is an excellent appetite suppressant, and honestly made it easier to lose weight.
High stress can make me lose most of my appetite or do the opposite.
I menstruate. A few days each month, I have indescribable hunger. It is hormone driven, and unlike other hungers I've experienced. Suddenly, I feel like I've skipped meals. It consumes me. I can't do anything about it, but if I eat a little, I can go back to paying attention to other things.
Not me personally, but there are a number of drugs that increase your appetite, too.
Again, the point really is that hunger isn't as simple as "you'll be slightly hungry most of the time".
Interesting. You may be right - in fact, I’d never considered filling up on broccoli or other calorically thin ingredients to suppress hunger. I was just working on the assumption that hunger is the body’s response to caloric deficit (in the absence of drugs).
I've lost about 15kg in the last year. (109 to 95 or so). While I'm not explicitly counting calories, I've definitely scaled back snacks, desserts, and "eat until I'm fed up" lunches.
I wonder if it's worthwhile to find some compelling distraction-- the equivalent of "I'm grudgingly coming to the table and slamming the least amount of food possible so I can get back to my task" sort of thing. If I'm at my desk away from food sources, I'm not consuming calories.
Does this assume the body expends a constant amount of energy, or do you actually work out until the deficit level is achieved?
Because for most people trying to lose weight, the struggle is not only to reduce calories in, but in preventing the body from being more thrifty with those calories...
It's simple by definition but not easy to do. Cravings (fat, sugar, filling boredom with eating, depriving yourself from flavor of diet soda/soda) is easier said than done.
It's true, spending time eating can distract from the only real way to lose weight, which is by reducing the mass of the planet Earth. Stay focused, everyone! Together we can do it.
No way, I'm already at a good healthy weight. If I lose 20 lbs my doctor will get concerned, and I'll end up spending a lot of time getting tests for various cancers.
e: there are relatively rare medical conditions, such as water retention, that can affect weight loss. A better term might be "body fat percentage". But the end result is that if you want to lose body fat, consistently intake less calories than your body uses for energy.
I think if we're looking at body fat percentage that's a very different question, and something that's probably more in the realm of biology than physics. But weight loss is simple, it's not going to be effected by medical conditions or "metabolism" if you can just reduce the mass of the Earth.
I think they key question is "overweight" compared to what? Yes, far less than 98% of people are overweight compared to a baseline created by doctors that was essentially biased by the existing distribution of weights in western society. But 100% of Americans are overweight compared to how much they would weigh if the Earth's mass was reduced by 50%.
> Furthermore, it's not that simple. Lots of other factors affect metabolism, hunger and energy levels, all of which have huge effect on weight loss\gain.
It is that simple: people simply are looking for an excuses why they aren't willing to do it.
I'm going to again plugin this guy https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-lose-fat-with-science-based-t... because his lectures are amazing and he breaks down the actual scientific consensus on these topics rather well.
He is neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has made contributions to the brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration and repair fields.
Yes, next time I get annoyed at someone on HN I plan to return to this thread and remind myself that I'm in the elite 1% of commenters who actually read the article and the other comments before I write something.
It's important to note that in the method of weight loss discussed here, you don't have to lose a single atom from your own body, but your weight can go down by an almost arbitrary amount. For example, Yuri Gagarin had his weight reduced to almost 0kg, together with his rocket, while not losing a single atom (talking about the indie of the cabin, of course).
It takes a lot of effort, but you don't have to feel hungry, and the results will beat exercise by orders of magnitude in terms of pure weight loss!
You are always breathing, but you breath about 3x more while you're working out cardio style, but you're not significantly changing your average breath rate for the day unless you're working out for hours daily. 24 "rest-hours of breath" on a lazy day, 26 "rest-hours of breath" on a day when you spend a full hour doing cardio/running/etc, so spending an hour doing intense workouts only increased your carbon exhaled by 8.3%. Also, somewhere around 2/3 (if not 3/4+) of the weight you lose per breath is simply water vapor restored when you have your next drink, not carbon atoms being attached to oxygen molecules in the air. Also, working out makes you hungry, rightfully so (in a world that isn't essentially full of infinite tasty food for those of us with a little money). The only way to lose significant weight is to feel hungry, and to stop eating before you "feel" full. This is de facto psychologically insurmountable (or nigh unsustainable) to everyone who is overweight and wants to lose it but just can't bear to be hungry enough for long enough. Spoken as someone slightly overweight who just needs to feel a little hungry for a couple months to get to a much better weight. And of course, once you've made a habit of eating over your ideal calories, even after you've lost the weight, your stomach is still bigger and it's effortless to go back to eating your usual large-self amounts even after you've lost all the weight, and go right back to large-self weight.
I don’t see why these things must be as interconnected as you’re question suggests.
If you have a relatively constant outflow of breath, measurably but not drastically affected by exercise, the CICO conception could still account for the net difference in body mass.
Your exhalations are a direct result of the chemical reaction that gives you energy: C + O2 -> CO2. C is your carbon-based food, O2 is your inhalation, and CO2 is your exhalation. When you burn more calories, you increase the speed of that reaction, and you breath out more CO2. That is why exercise makes you lose weight (and why it makes you heat up). They are inextricable. The mass has to go somewhere!
the breath thing is how the metabolic waste products leave the body (when your fat gets broken down eventually the mass of it leaves your body as co2).
also, the amount of hours you spend not working out dramatically trumps the amount of hours you spend not working out so working out itself doesnt change your mean..
I always knew that a lot of people didn't read the article before commenting, but I'm still surprised at the number replying here without reading the whole three-sentence comment.
You're implying that "calories in" are all absorbed equally. We poop. Literally. Calories go out that are never absorbed. Every body does this differently. Is that physics too?
Also: some people get calories from certain foods that other people don't get calories from. Is that physics?
Can you lose weight from a calorie restriction diet? Of course! But don't claim that it's the only answer. It's not. The human body deserves more respect than that.
Of course many diets could work for losing weight. But that’s going to be 20 pounds max for most people. I’m saying that we can lose potentially 50% or even nearly 100% of our body weight through some simple physics. F=G(m1)(m2)/(r^2)
Some calorie measurements are done via bomb calorimeter- you measure before eating, and then, er, after eating, and subtract the difference. So the inefficiency of poop can be baked in.
Like a good engineer I used to follow CICO religiously. It’s so simple and ‘right’, you just budget your calories and that’s all that matters.
This led to me eating treat bags of sweets for lunch. Cycles of months putting on weight and then the following months doing a 500 deficit per day to lose it. Radical hunger spikes l, nights awake in bed because I was so hungry and dreams of eating marshmallows. Lack of nutrients.
By the end of it I’d lost a lot of hair (I put a lot of this down to the inflammation caused by insulin resistance), my sweat smelled sweet, my temperature was totally out of whack, and maintaining my weight was a constant struggle.
However, since fasting and eliminating sugar from my diet I’ve maintained my weight with way less effort. By focusing on low GI food, nutrient dense food, Ive reduced my hunger pangs, my sweat smells normal, my hairs started to grow back, my sleep has improved, I recover faster from exercise, etc.
So yeah, CICO works. But it’s not optimal. The worst thing about my new diet is just how expensive and time consuming it is compared to just reading the calories on a packet and buying the cheapest thing that fits my daily budget. But it’s worth it.
CICO is simply saying caloric deficit with is the main mechanism of weight loss. It is not saying that a caloric deficit is all that is needed for optimal health or that all calories are created equal from a health perspective.
Health and weight loss shouldn’t be conflated. I would venture to guess that your new diet of fasting and nutrient dense foods is still giving you a caloric deficit to lose weight. You’ve just swapped counting calories for alternatives that serve as a proxy for reducing caloric intake.
Ex.
- intermittent fasting makes it easier to create a deficit because you're reducing the amount of time you can shove calories into your intake port
- carnivore diet works because you're cutting out all the carbohydrates in your diet and protein/fat tend to be more satiating, resulting in fewer calories overall
- Low GI foods reduce the amount of caloric-dense food options and reduce ghrelin, making you less likely to binge
They just use a different heuristic to ultimately reduce calories.
IMO this is one of the causes of yo-yo dieting. A proxy works well for a while and people lose weight. But then it stops being a good proxy for creating a caloric deficit and they plateau. Leading them to drop it, gain the weight back, and then jump onto the next fad that will serve as a rough proxy for caloric deficit again.
CICO is the mother of all motte-and-bailey fallacies. The motte is a restatement of thermodynamics and therefore completely unassailable, at least in this universe. From this the proponents sally forth to make claims like "counting calories is a good way to lose weight". Whenever someone refutes this or anything else CICOs pulled from the bailey they, the CICOs, retreat to the motte and say stuff like "see, you did have a calorie deficit from IF".
Yes, thermodynamics is always correct but usually not the appropriate level of analysis at which to address human problems.
A simple restatement of CICO arguments in terms of car fuel is enough to see how utterly trivial they are:
"My uncle got stranded on the highway"
"How so?"
"Ran out of gas"
"Well, he must have had less energy in the tank then he needed to get to his destination. Simple CICO"
Notice how the response is completely correct yet utterly useless. We haven't learned anything about why the uncle ran out of fuel. Was it a leak? CICO is true. Did he forget to fill up? CICO is true. Was he out of money and desperately hoping for the best? CICO is true. Thermodynamics is always true!
Notice how all of the different real reasons need a completely different solution. If you responded with "you just need to have enough fuel available to the engine to make it to the destination" as your "solution" people would think you are autistic.
If, when presented with the real solution, you said "well, see because he gave his uncle money for gas, now the fuel balance is postive" people would ask if you had a stroke.
Why is it that this level of "argumentation" is somehow okay for intelligent people when it comes to weight loss but would get you laughed out of the room on literally any other topic? Try it: poverty? money-in-money-out! Housing? Houses-built-Houses-used! Job problems? Literally just get fired once less then you get hired!
The reason people always go back to CICO is because it’s almost always the root cause, barring some extreme edge cases. Yet people won’t acknowledge it has anything to do with it.
People get distracted by other claims. “It’s seed oils!” No, it’s because seed oils are used in ultra-processed food that have a ton of calories. “Its the hormonal effect of carbohydrates!” No, it’s because carb-rich foods are extremely easy to overeat. “It’s because we evolved to only eat plants!” No, it’s because animal products are calorie dense by comparison. If you eat less calories than you metabolize you will lose weight, yet people get fixated on all kinds of heuristics of that point.
Eating kosher is a rough heuristic for avoiding food poisoning. It doesnt make germ theory useless, it distracts from a more rooted understanding.
I do agree that making the behavioral changes to lose weight is much more complicated. But we have to first agree on the cause. The reason why people constantly hammer on it is because so many people don’t accept that idea. To extend one of your examples, it would be like trying to convince someone how to get out of debt, but they refuse to believe their debt problem has anything to do with their spending habits and instead constantly point to things like the predatory nature of credit cards. Those can all be proximate causes, but at the end of the day they are in debt because they spend more than they earn and they’ll never fix the issue if they refuse to acknowledge that simple fact. The govt can pay off their loans and they’ll still be in debt if they don’t shore up their ledger.
CICO is literally not the root cause. In the strict sense it can't be since it's simply a thermodynamic equation applied to body weight. Equations are not causes.
If you mean "overeating" then that's also not the reason. It's like saying that being sad is the root cause of depression.
If your analysis of obesity doesn't factor in hormons then it's not going to get you any working solutions. Which is exactly what we observe in the public health sphere since the 1970ies.
> Debt
Nobody is contesting that. What you say is true but it's also just a very obvious and unhelpful restatement of the problem.
I play soccer, badly. When better players give me feedback there is two kinds. One boils down to simply a restatement of the goals of the game: pass better, don't miss the goal, get the ball. I hope you agree that if you really think about it such exhortation are silly. What I actually need is advice that tells me HOW to achieve this.
It's the same for debt, weight loss etc.
Not to forget that Ketoers and Low Carbers starting with Attkins where and are viciously attacked by the CICO mainstream. When people here say stuff like "well get your deficit anyway you want" than this shows the influence that losing to LC for the last two decades had on the CICO faction. It wasn't like this when I started my keto journey. Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.
>If your analysis of obesity doesn't factor in hormons then it's not going to get you any working solutions.
Nobody is debating that there are systematic effects. I mentioned ghrelin before, I'm obviously not ignoring the effect of hormones. But that effect is to rebalance CICO. In some ways it's behavioral, like when ghrelin impacts you satiety. In other ways, it's a thermodynamic effect like how eating protein takes more energy to metabolize than the same number of calories of simple carbohydrates. But it all still boils down to the balance of calories in to calories out.
I still maintain that's what keto is doing for you. It's giving you an easier set of heuristics to balance CICO. But at the end of the day, it's still CICO and the same principle applies to a variety of dietary choices. So keto isn't some holy grail body hack; it's just a simplified model for reducing the complexity of human metabolism to rules that ultimately reduce calories.
>Back then they said it can't work because fat has the highest energy density and will make your heart explode.
Yes, fat has the highest energy density but it's not the density that matters unless you factor in mass of fat consumed. You can still have less calories while eating fat.
If you can show that someone can have a long-term weight loss eating more calories than they burn (outside of hormone therapy) with something like a keto diet, that would be a reasonable counterpoint.
It seems to me what you're saying is "Yes, CICO is correct but hard to implement. Keto is a way to implement it." I can partially agree, but it doesn't make an understanding of CICO unhelpful. Keto can help rebalance CICO. However, it can also be used to increase caloric intake by drinking cups of olive oil. It's still keto, but it won't lead to weight loss because it's undermined the more fundamental principle. That makes the context of CICO important.
Put differently, can you lose weight by running against CICO principles and following keto? I'd say no. Can you lose weight running against keto principles and following CICO? I'd say yes. They aren't mutually exclusive, but that makes CICO a more fundamentally important principle.
It feels like we are discussing two different aspects. I'm talking about the overall strategy of rebalancing CICO. You're talking about the tactical methods to do so. The latter doesn't negate the former.
A naïve person might see CICO and immediately conclude that the most direct way to weight loss is to eat less and exercise more -- which can work except that the body reacts to this change by making you more hungry and conserving more energy. Now you get into the realm where systematic effects dominate: how do you reduce hunger? how do you coax the body to burn more fuel? At this stage, what you eat, how you eat it, and when you eat it becomes much more important than strictly controlling the calories -- because while it's possible to do so, it's also impractical to do so consciously in many cases.
At this point, any practical solution still needs to comply with the laws of physics (i.e. CICO), but that's kind of like insisting that a person needs to understand the laws of quantum mechanics to play basketball.
I think this, like the idea that your metabolism slows as you age, has been shown to be antiquated myths.
You burn less calories as you lose weight because you have less body mass to support. Your body doesnt flip a switch to “conserve” calories, all else being equal. This is why understanding the fundamental principles is key.
Your basketball analogy is a bad analogy. Yes, everything must adhere to the laws of physics. The difference is I’m saying there’s a ton of ways to adhere to CICO, you just need to find what works within the behavioral framework of the individual.
For some keto works great. For others, it’s not sustainable because they can’t have a simple piece of cake at a birthday party. But flexible dieting may work if they accurately count calories. For others, counting calories is too tedious and they can’t do so accurately. But they may be able to eat a vegan whole food diet. All the approaches that work have the same goal: rebalance the CICO model.
A better basketball analogy is having a zone defense vs man-on-man. Different tactics but the same goal to score more points than the other team. You don’t need to understand quantum mechanics, you just have to know how to count. If you can’t count, your approach needs to weight the game outcome in your favor. But it doesn’t make counting irrelevant to basketball any more than it makes CICO irrelevant to weight loss.
I get if you say CICO isn’t helpful for you because it is too tedious, or too much uncertainty given your food choices to implement accurately. But that doesn’t mean it’s unhelpful for everyone, especially when it’s the fundamental principle that governs weight loss with literally every approach. It just means you haven’t found a way to implement it effectively. Other people who can estimate CICO accurately find it works just fine.
I think it's because people just want to find a simple reason that lets them look down on fat people.
'It's CICO! Just lose the weight.' Done. No thought needed, and they get to feel superior.
General knowledge around proper nutrition in western countries is abysmal. In the UK for example I was pretty much convinced by government guidelines that potatoes are unhealthy. That couldn't be further from the truth!
I think this is a bad-faith argument. I didn't see any say "Just lose the weight." There's a difference between acknowledging a fundamental principle and treating it as if that fundamental principle is easy to implement.
> I didn't see any say "Just lose the weight." There's a difference between acknowledging a fundamental principle and treating it as if that fundamental principle is easy to implement.
It's right at the top:
> elil17 1 day ago
> I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out
That’s the point. You can still lose weight on IIFYM. The issue is people conflated “weight loss” with fitness.
I can lose weight on the tapeworm diet. It’s doesn’t mean it’s healthy. They’re two different (but sometimes related) goals, so they are easily conflated.
I think we do agree. I'm not arguing, I'm just saying it seems like you're discussing a different point than the OP and it's digression from their topic.
This is utter trash and clearly you're a shill for the CICO industry. The real secret to weight loss is CICU Calories in, Centripetal force Up. This has been suppressed for decades by rocket scientist, the government, Elon Musk and other elites.
The only real thing that will be shrinking under CICO is your bank account as it's drained dry by the subsidies for crust flingers.
Under CICU your weight will go down as energy is expended to increase the rotational speed of the earth. This will not only leave the crust intact but would also allow us to see multiple sunsets/sunrises in a single "day".
I think a lot of people didn't notice the "Crust of the earth"-part in "Crust of the earth Out".
I gotta admit, I was a bit confused why there was a "calories in, calories out" argument in response to TFA and how it could connect to orbital mechanics.
I consider myself trolled along with most of my sibling commentors!
Have you heard of planetary fasting? Pretty much you just stop absorbing sunlight and the planetary insulin levels drop when all of the carbohydrate producing plants die off. Works great!
i get the joke but reminds me of a good talk where some googlers got a little upset when gary taubes started going into the problems with CICO thinking.
Moving from asia to europe, I find sugar way more prevalent here in europe. Desserts everywhere and sweeter. Drinks are sweetened, breads are sweetened. My sugar consumption has increased significantly compared to my asian life and I don't even have a sweet tooth.
I would agree that Asia is a much better place to go to work on weight loss, but not because of food or sugar. They have the JSA, Roscosmos, and CNSA, whereas Europe only has the ESA.
I actually dislike any extended conversation on losing weight. Just stop eating is basically the answer. It sounds blunt but it feels like we need to hammer the message in.
I did. It gets into all this stuff about "density" and "distance from the center of the Earth." I just feel like that is missing the point. As I said, weight loss is simple CICO, Calories In, Crust of the earth Out. You don't need to think about it any more than that, no matter what "scientific publications" like XKCD tell you.
Someone can correct me here, but I believe CICO is false, due to the the difference of efficiency in difference foods and the different people consuming them, leading to significant differences compared to CICO values.
CICO is absolutely true, that's a fact. All you have to do is look at the basic physics. If you reduce the mass of the Earth by 50% (without decreasing your distance from Earths center, a common trap people fall into when they're trying to lose weight), you will lose 50% of your weight.
Fad diets and "body mass" are, excuse my harsh language, B.S. Yes they can contribute to weight loss but they are going to let you lose 10 or 15 pounds tops. Reducing the weight of the Earth, on the other hand, can get you to lose essentially any amount of weight.
CICO is not false, and that is at most a +-10% variance. Food absorption is definitely is a part of Calories In. If you're worried that you're absorbing more or less calories versus other people, adjust your Calories In.
More likely, you are miscounting calories - a common mistake that people trying to lose weight make. For example, you'd be surprised how many calories are in that packet of creamy sauce that came with your fast food!
CICO is hard to stick to, because we are biologically wired to enjoy high calorie diets. As a result, lots of people have come up with justifications as to why it wasn't their fault that they failed to adhere to it.
The reality is that weight loss is simple. It's very difficult, especially if you're not willing to completely overhaul your diet and relationship with food as an American.
I would say that overhauling your diet/relationship with food is really not what it's about. It's about gathering the necessary energy, resources, etc. to start putting significant amounts of Earth's mass on an escape trajectory.
Don't eat breakfast and don't gorge on snacks before bedtime. That will be a huge benefit to most people that struggle. Now...getting the willpower to stick with it is another battle...
Personally, I drink these 100 cal nutrition drinks for breakfast, or have a banana, and a sparkling water.
I've settled on
- Very lightweight breakfast (~100 cal)
- Light lunch (~700 cal)
- Heavy dinner (~1400 cal)
- Hard liquor only (tall single vodka/soda is my goto)
You'll notice that's over 2000~ a day. I also walk a lot, use an exercise bike instead of the couch when watching TV, and bicycle everywhere I can. On lazy days, I adjust downwards.
One thing I've done that's helped a lot is eating a low carb diet - I did keto, found it was incredible effective in losing weight, but kinda brutal. Instead, a low carb (non-ketosis) diet allows for some carbs but significantly reduces "empty calories".
The opposite of simple is not difficult, it's complex. The opposite of difficult is not simple, it's easy.
Simplicity has to do with the effort needed to understand something, difficulty has to do with the effort needed to perform an action. It's not unusual that something that requires little effort to understand requires a great deal of effort to execute.
CICO is still true. While some foods can increase metabolism (the other reply suggested up to 10% - sounds reasonable to me), that is an increase in calories out. You can also increase metabolism by exercising, or some drugs.
There's no reason why certain physically and calorifically dense foods (eg. Christmas pudding) couldn't necessarily be combined with oxidizers and fitted into solid rocket motors, which could then be used to launch significant chunks of the earth's crust out of its gravity well.
There are different ways to measure calories. In a calorimeter you can measure all the calories in some stuff. In your body the amount of calories available to your body to digest is some amount less depending on what that stuff is. This can vary from foodstuff to foodstuff by (iirc) about 1-15%
So one could be more accurate and say Available CaloriesICO I guess
Unless you are an athlete or have some condition the simple CICO rule is accurate enough to be useful. Eat less, move more, and weight will be lost (or at least gains will slow).
None of this says anything about each person’s own life challenges that alter how difficult it is to do that.
I think that the energy density of rocket fuel is pretty easy to measure. If you're trying to do a food powered rocket it's true the energy measurements could get more complicated.
Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure modern calorimeters won't catch the energy available via nuclear reactions. What if our digestive tracts have evolved some as-of-yet undiscovered mechanism to tap into that energy, thereby invalidating all the "CICO" people's claims? Now that would be a real pickle.
I think the fact that calories are a measure of energy in fuel makes calories extremely relevant to the Calories In, Crust of the earth Out weight loss method.
You misunderstand simple for easy, and the fact that you refer to physics for something that belongs to biology and psychology show that you don't really know what you're talking about
Weight really has very little to do with biology, and nothing to do with psychology. It is a simple matter of how much the earth's mass bends space-time - the more mass we eject of the earth, the less bent space-time will be in the vicinity, the less we'll all weight.
It really is the simplest weight loss method possible, it will work for everyone living on the planet at once, and the article presents it (and its difficulties) quite clearly - not sure why you'd go off topic by talking about biology and psychology.
But how do you reduce m1 without reducing r? TFA (correctly) points out that many attempts to reduce m1 will also reduce r, which can be counterproductive.
CICO often makes the assumption that we metabolize food in the same way that a bomb calorimeter burns it. Calorie numbers on labels refers to the latter.
You're not seeing the bigger picture. If we pull our work together, we can all collectively lose significant weight, and all it would take is a few measly kilometers of the earth's crust being thrown off into space - this is what this thread is all about!
Discussing fat loss is really short sighted when ejecting a little bit of mass could help the entire population lose some weight forever.
What's hilarious is that jasonpeacock didn't just avoid reading the article, but it's clear that he also avoided reading the very comment he replied to.
It's like people just want to get outraged over nothing.
Even though it's a lot of fun, it's honestly a bit eye opening to see how little some people engage with the substance of the comments they are replying to...
To be clear I agree with you. I find “CICO” a totally dissatisfying explanation of obesity, not because I don’t think it’s true, but rather because I think it fails to provide any insight that’s actionable from a public health perspective.
Yes, I've been there once or twice myself, no judgment on you personally! The amount of people responding this way was a bit surprising though. I will note that I completely share your feelings about the boring version of CICO.
So you provide a single, simple method of weight loss and then you edit your comment when attacked and add a single case of weight loss to make your point. You then claim there's no possibility for debate, it's proven, and you reiterate how simple it is
CICO is true, of course, but it doesn't do justice to how interesting the whole topic of weight loss is. Why do some people need more food to reach satiety, why do some people move more, for example.
To be fair, in the CICO model, everyone on Earth would lose the exact same amount of weight, regardless of any of the factors you mention - or at least, the weight loss we'd experience from truly following the tenets of CICO could easily offset any individual mass modification from food or exercise!
It's also true that you'd get far more, and quicker, weight loss by increasing your distance from the earth instead of reducing the earth's mass, but that seems a little selfish...
While this is true strictly speaking, whether weight-loss actually happens is 99% a psychological thing, and ignoring that is ridiculous.
People aren't magical machines with infinite, perfect willpower, ignoring that this is the main factor is completely out of touch. That's what the whole conversation is about, how to make it easier for people, more realistic. Find foods that make people feel sated while still eating less for example. Find ways to make habits. etc.
Not really - your psychology really has absolutely nothing to do with how much force the Earth exerts on you (and everyone else). CICO captures this perfectly: the more Crust of the earth Out, the less force the Earth will exert on us, so we'll all weigh less. No amount of psychology will help or prevent you from losing those newtons of weight!
BMR is a thing. Gut bacteria are a thing. How your body conserves energy is a thing. How your body tries to find efficiencies while doing the same thing is a thing. Insulin is a thing.
The only way the CICO model has any value is through it’s most trivial “physics based” interpretation at which point it’s not useful in any way. It’s like saying “Developing software is simple. It’s Code in, Executable out”. Its not wrong, but it’s also a completely pointless statement, which only serves to trivialize a complex issue and end discussion on it.
You could write that comment on every software development related article on HN and dismiss the article as clickbait on that basis, which would obviously be ridiculous, even if your statement wouldn’t be wrong.
Kind of a meta comment, it's always interesting to see / hear that when a somewhat well-known author writes a new book, you see interviews with them cropping up on "all the usual" places, other outlets write about it etc.
It's nice with something like "What if? 2", because Randall is an interesting podcast guest, and there are just so many different things to talk about.
It's a bit more annoying in other cases, where within two month you hear the same author on 5 different podcasts, and the author says the same thing on each of them. Time to use the skip button.
I guess that's simply how it works nowadays in publishing: writing the book is work, but then you also need to spend quite some time promoting it, in the hopes not only that it boosts sales, but also that the boosted sales put the book in some bestseller lists, boosting sales even further.
> within two month you hear the same author on 5 different podcasts, and the author says the same thing on each of them.
They’ve received media training to do exactly that, to repeat their main talking points no matter what the interview questions are, and normal journalists are trained to ignore it and just move on to the next question, so it usually works for them both (but us listeners and readers are left with the situation you describe). Sometimes, though, the people asking the questions aren’t willing to ignore it, and if the interviewee does not catch on to this and adjust their answers accordingly, the interview can go disastrously wrong:
I know for a fact that publishers will now vet authors as well as manuscripts. A nice-looking and personable author, preferably with a well-oiled presence on social networks, has a much higher chance of getting published than the rest of the pack; that's because publishers now "sell" the author as much as the book.
This is actually one of the more important aspects in publishing. But its not so much the author themselves being sellable, its the built in sales they might have from their social media audience. The conversion rate from marketing to their own audience is much higher than otherwise, and is enough for even small publishers to justify an initial print run of a niche book.
If we're selecting for mediagenic authors with a lot of Twitter followers, we're going to get the culture we deserve. I grant that publishers have always selected for things other than the quality of the book alone, just observing that this has an effect.
Makes me ask myself: which hugely successful works of fiction (excluding stuff like the Bible) are out there convincing readers solely through their content because the author remains anonymous/pseudonymous and how can they reliably be found?
First thing that came to mind was Elena Ferrante, but also one of my favorite authors, K.J. Parker (who is no longer pseudonymous but was for a long time).
But why does it have to be fiction, and why does the author have to be anonymous? There's a big difference between being anonymous and being a social media influencer: I'd guess most of the best and most influential fiction and non-fiction authors have fallen in that range.
The thing to avoid is a world where publishers would say "Sorry, Mr. Faulkner, we won't be publishing your little book until you get a few more followers."
My immediate thought was: would it even work to publish a non fiction book anonymously?
> There's a big difference between being anonymous and being a social media influencer.
Agree. My reasoning was: even without any digital social media, charisma (and other factors such as having connections or previous success) is probably a trait that positively influences an author's success. If you want "pure quality of the oevre itself" to speak for itself, then shouldn't it have been published anonymously?
Ferrante is extremely likely to actually be someone who was already connected to publishing (either the wife of a celebrated Italian writer, or a nome de plume for both of them), so it's hard to say "she" got there "on merits alone".
top web fiction, royal road, and so on - there are a lot of places budding authors can post their fiction. Since we are talking about unknown authors the burden is on you to find them. That means get off the top lists and search things that are way down in the rankings (most of the ones on the top of the list will publish on Amazon in the future as that is where the money is)
More importantly to the publisher, the author sells themselves. Most books are basically flops and so having a built-in market is a huge advantage for the publisher.
Publishers have always "sold" authors, it's the how that's changing. In 1990 internet/social presence probably wasn't seen as meaningful, now it's just one of the standard tools in the bag.
>I guess that's simply how it works nowadays in publishing: writing the book is work, but then you also need to spend quite some time promoting it, in the hopes not only that it boosts sales, but also that the boosted sales put the book in some bestseller lists, boosting sales even further.
PR Tours for Books have been around for decades. The format may have changed but the concept has been around for a long time.
It's not just for authors. You'll observe the same for new movies, TV shows, product launches etc. It's not a coincidence that leaks and behind the scenes articles and videos pop up when something new is launching.
That's just how the PR machinery works.
These comprise of more than 50% of reddit posts on all the popular subreddits. You can filter any post title with a celebrity or upcoming release of media in it as an ad.
Unless the author is relatively well known, the book tour often barely pays for itself. In some cases the author gets to travel "on the company dime" and basically tour the country/world and have the expenses paid by some book sales.
The author may also get a much larger cut of any books sold during the tour, even without "signing fees" or similar.
They are hoping to get the big break. That can be people who see them locally buying a copy (most people will buy a book when the author is there, but may not even look at the book otherwise, so you can count on a few sales if you appear in a bookstore), but ideally is moves onto they actually read the book and like it enough to tell all their friends. You can get a big bonus if a someone well known happens to be in the crowd and tells all their followers.
I think it is how it works since always. Book tours on bookstores and book interviews (newspapers, tv, and radio) are a way of promoting book sales on launch for some time. Just added podcasts to the mix.
I do sorta wonder how often people are turning down podcasts.
Will MacAskill was on several of my favorite podcasts lately. Presumably it makes the interview slightly easier for the interviewer when there is a clear argument/thesis of the author but also seems like he would have been just as good of a guest 4 or 8 months ago (and 4 or 8 months from now) as he is now. And seeing he always has a desire to promote his work/his view I don't know why he would ever say no to a legitimate podcast.
Was Will saying no to them then? Or asking people to wait? Or is much of this still sorta random and it takes the initiative of a third party PR person to connect people?
(Replace whatever author you are thinking of with Will)
Tim Ferriss was one of the first to avoid a traditional book tour when marketing his first book (4 hr work week). Instead, he reached out to bloggers, which was a new strategy at the time. He's written that he would tailor each interaction for the culture of each blog. So he'd use a portion about fitness for a fitness blog, and a portion about finance for a finance blog, etc. At least that mixed it up a bit.
> I guess that's simply how it works nowadays in publishing:
Not nowadays, this is how it has always worked. Promotion is always trying to find cost effective ways to raise awareness, using whatever tools are available in the budget that makes sense for the project.
You are listening to podcasts that have a correlation, in the days before podcasts you might have noticed the same things with talk shows or magazine articles, the main difference being you might consume fewer of those so not notice as much.
I’d the book is a one-off you see this a lot. The best podcasts are with people who aren’t promoting a specific item, just themselves as experts. You get more variety that way. In general if they’re on a book tour, I only listen once no matter how much I like them.
It is exactly how it works. Unless you have ridiculous amounts of luck and/or is an established name, you won't sell books unless you commit to spending a lot of time marketing. The market for books is ridiculously saturated.
I guess I just wasn't aware of it in the past. Back when I listened to radio, I wouldn't often come across the author doing interviews, but then I only switched between 3 or maybe 4 different stations...
I'm glad to hear there's a follow up book to What If? (How To was also good, of course) – it's one of the more entertaining, yet educational, audiobooks I've listened to (and it really does work well in audio form unlike much non-fiction, plus Wil Wheaton is the narrator).
Personally I can't stand Wheaton's narration. He's an incredible presenter in video content but when he's doing narration he always does this voice that just drips arrogance.
I'm in the same boat as you, I don't think that he's doing it intentionally but I just don't believe he possesses a smooth enough modulation to enjoy listening for long periods of time as you would with an audiobook.
It works when everyone in the book is a smug asshole, like his narration of the Interdependency books. You just have to suppress your desire to smack him in the mouth.
So I wondered if I could lose some weight if I teleported on top of Everest and started searching for formulas. Apparently, this question is already answered and the answer is yes - I could lose half a pound.
So yeah, if you have resources to shave off that much of Earth surface, then you have resources to construct a high enough building to lose those 10 pounds which would have been a lot easier.
I notice there are certain arguments that come into popularity and suddenly you'll find people all over who love to interject it-- sometimes even when it's not related. The whole 'mother teresa was a terrible person' thing is another argument people love to throw around for some reason. Which, is not true btw[1].
Could you build a giant space straw that sucks out the molten core instead of peeling away layers, and otherwise leave the crust alone so you don't make volcanos everywhere?
I don't think the Earth is structurally sound enough for that to work, at least if you're hoping to make any kind of a hollow shell.
If the goal is just to preferentially remove the dense stuff first, that would likely work. You'd still destroy every part of the biosphere though. The crust bits shifting into place as you remove everything below them would be catastrophic, off the scale earthquakes everywhere and extreme heating and volcanic activity.
Good news: the crust is still technically there
Bad news: a bunch of it collapsed in the middle and the resulting energy heated it to make more magma and the crust is unrecognizable
Lets just hope it swirls in the right direction with the same iron consistency so that we can maintain our magnetic field, or else our distance ancestors (millions of years from now) might have trouble breathing.
I feel an inescapable urge to point out that our distant ancestors have long stopped breathing, and its our distant descendants who will slowly lose their atmosphere as an unfortunate byproduct of this plan.
That's sad to hear, a big part of the fun was answering "stupid/impossible" questions by assuming whatever makes them impossible was actually possible.
Thanks, it looks pretty reasonable, except for rearranging the molecular bonds like atoms were shingles.
Assuming that was possible, it might be just a matter of r-squared - supposing we started with a million-atom thick skin, stretching the radius by one thousand should do it.
I assume that's why he didn't bother answering — you just take the volume of rubber, divide by the covalent radius of carbon, and plug into A = 4 pi r^2.
No need to climb. With the vast resources you have seized for this project, you can probably have a few of your laborers carry you up to the new ground plane in a palanquin.
About 15 years ago I weighed about 235 pounds when I stop getting on scales.
I was 200 at 18 and tried going to the gym to lose weight but I stopped because I bulked up with muscle I increased my weight rapidly. So I went back to being a lazy nerd.
I started losing weight by buying a bike to get to work and doing yoga so that I could go hiking in the mountains. I started eating better, tried being vegan and other fad diets and slowly got down to 185-190 and was stuck, but was in pretty good shape with extra padding.
I eventually realized I had an issue with gluten and when I cut that out, I dropped done to about 170, and am probably a perfect body fat.
I’ve since lost about 10 pounds in the last year from food prices rising faster than my income and am frequently hungry and lightheaded.
It took nutritional experience and exercise, but I feel physically and mentally so much better it’s like being a different person(to yourself and others).
I thought the question was how many kilograms of dirt would you have to physically carry into outer space (eg. up a really tall ladder) in order to burn 20 lbs (70,000 calories).
If my calculations are correct: 1 (kilo)calorie is 4184 joules. So you need to burn 70,000 * 4184 = 292,880,000 joules. It takes 9.8 joules to lift 1kg by 1m. Using an "outer space" definition of 100km (100,000) meters, it takes 980,000 joules to lift 1kg of dirt to space.
Dividing 292,888,000 joules (the amount of energy we want to burn) by 980,000 (the energy it takes to carry 1kg to space), we get about 299 kilos. You'd have to carry about 300 kg up a ladder to outer space to lose 20 lbs. (Subtract your body weight, of course!)
(Accounting for the fat burned along the way is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
> You didn’t actually need to remove mass from the Earth, you just needed to go under it. You could’ve avoided all that work with a comparatively simple tunnel.
His ability to make what is actually quite complex science accessible is mind blowing. What If, How To, and now What If 2 are some of my eight year old son’s favourite books. I’m absolutely certain he doesn’t really grasp any of the maths, but he adores when things going terribly wrong as a result of those maths.
I contest that our own bodies are part of Earth’s crust and thus a more efficient way to do this would be removing mass from our own bodies exclusively.
Depending on your constitution, the simplest way to achieve this is cutting one or two of your legs off.
Anyone can lose weight without giving up any of the things they love! _Here's how:_
1. Live a full life
2. Get in a wooden box
3. Slough away all your soft tissue - you might like to use it for a worm farm
4. Welcome to the new-look you!
If gravity increases for the initial part of going down, wouldn't it take a lot less energy to go up? Once you're up in the stratosphere, you would weigh noticeably less.
Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.