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I don't hate CICO advocates, I just don't know if there's a constructive conversation to be had with people who consistently respond to everything with "you're lying" or "you must have missed something". This is also epistemic closure - anyone who struggles with CICO is always accused of lying.
As I've already said I did get some benefit from calorie tracking. I think it's useful even just to learn how many calories are in your food. So of course, I don't hate CICO, but of course this kind of defensiveness is also very typical of CICO advocates.
If the defense of CICO epicycles is that "uh, actually sometimes people just burn extra calories for no reason", that's not that compelling. Isn't the point of CICO that it should always give you predictable results, and that if your results are wrong, it's because you made a mistake or are lying?
You're mashing up two different things which should be clearly distinct at this point in the conversation. There is no epicycle that there is variability in CO. There is just variability in CO, given the things we are generally able to control for. That's just the data and the labels we have to go with it. I've seen some attempts to quantify things like calories consumed by individual organs and how that correlates to their sizes and such, but on a population scale, we're basically never going to have measurements like that to control for, nor is an individual likely to go to the effort of taking precise measurements that could, in theory, more precisely predict individualized CO. So, absent that, we take a few factors that are easily measurable, fit the curves, see that they work pretty well, with some variability. Before, you had been claiming that this population-level variability was flatly denied by your enemies. Now, you think it's an epicycle. These are both Obvious Nonsense claims. This is just data and empirics.
Now, what you're stuck on is the second part, given that the population-level curves aren't able to precisely control for everything, how do these curves and the variability they contain provide predictable results for individuals? Well, you need individualized observational data to figure out where you are within that variability. The population-level curves get you close, but if you want precision, you need good individualized observational data. My experience with tracking for my wife and I is that the data is extremely noisy and must be handled with care. But after that care, the trend line is, indeed, 500cal/day = 1lb/wk, only with very noisy measurements. I don't think either of our maintenance levels from the trend line were precisely what the population-level data predicted, but they were both pretty close, and our tracking decisions were probably suitable to explain the minor deviation. It's this part, after you've already gotten a lot of individual observational data to avoid the population-level variability problem, where the vast majority of people (and all tightly-controlled lab experiments) get predictable results. The population-level variability doesn't magically jump into this part as an epicycle.
My actual experience of CICO was exactly the opposite. It worked initially but when I tried to bulk, I found it predicted weight gain very poorly. Since CICO is of course, perfect and never wrong, it must have been a mistake I was making, and since I couldn't find my mistake, I decided to spare myself the stress and anxiety and stopped tracking.
I am sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately, it is probably unlikely that I will be able to figure out whatever was going on in your individual case through comments. But I'm not sure what is supposed to change about my understanding of the published literature from your example.
FYI, my personal experience included periods of gaining, and my trend line from the noisy data was bang on at 500cal/day = 1lb/wk on that side, too (and my wife's). But I'm not sure how you might/might not want to update your understanding of the published literature based on my example, either.
I have a similar understanding of the published literature to you, I think - but knowing that planes crash when their altitude decreases is not enough to avoid crashing a plane. The published literature tells us, for example, that calories out should probably exceed calories in by about 500 and then you'll lose weight. But as I've heard in this thread there is no reliable way to measure either, calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content. Which is a reasonable start.
But all this amounts to is a fine motte. The actual bailey of CICO is that everyone who follows a calorie tracker and gets an incorrect result is lying or denying science, that it's physically impossible to fail to lose weight on 1800 calories or to fail to gain weight on 4000 calories, and that hormones don't affect weight.
Dictating the food that one eats and the calories one expends is nowhere near as complex as piloting a plane. There's a reason why there are very few plane pilots, most of whom had to train a long time even before ever flying a real plane, while basically everyone, even many children, choose what to eat and how much to move.
And it absolutely is possible to get reliable enough measurements of both in order to accomplish certain goals, specifically weight loss. It's not that common for packaged foods to have multiple times the calories as their label indicates, and so one can pretty accurately place an upper bound in CI by adding up all the calories in those labels and then applying some multiplier >1. I like to use 2. It's also not that common for one's real caloric expenditure to be lower than their calculated BMR, especially if they do things like stand or walk during the day, so one can pretty accurately place a lower bound in CO by just calculating BMR. Get the upper bound of CI lower than CO, and you can be quite confident that true CI is lower than true CO. For weight gain, it's more tricky, because of the physical ability of the body to reject food, as well as its ability to involuntarily expend energy through heat, but generally CICO isn't talked about when it comes to weight gain; people looking to gain weight are rarely just concerned with weight, but rather specifically gaining muscle more than fat (or even not gaining fat at all or even even losing fat, which, despite some myths, are possible simultaneously while gaining muscle), and the composition goals tend to take precedence over just pure mass goals, which tack on a whole host of other requirements. The mirror is also true, of course, in that people looking to lose weight tend to want to lose fat while maintaining muscle, but due to how weight affects joint stress, simply losing the mass is often beneficial in itself even if it's muscle, and general everyday life often tends to provide enough exercise to maintain enough muscle (still, a lot of the advice around weight loss does push people towards doing resistance training to better help to maintain that muscle while losing weight).
Are there any specific comments on this forum that are in this bailey? Without specific references to such, this just seems like, at best, weakmanning, and likely strawmanning, based on what I've observed from people talking about CICO.
The body's system of weight, hunger, and energy regulation is of comparable complexity to the forces on a modern aircraft. It is, of course, designed to be simple enough to interact with that even dumb apes can feed themselves, but it is also not foolproof, which is why dumb apes in a food rich environment sometimes turn into 600lb whales. And of course, even with the advantage of modern scientific knowledge, you actually don't really seem to know what's happening at any particular stage. The person eating 2000 calories a day could, according to what you've written, be in anything between a 2500 calorie surplus (4000 calories in, 1500 out) and a 1000 calorie deficit (2000 calories in, 3000 out, which would correspond to gaining five pounds or more in dry body weight in a week or losing two or more pounds of dry body weight in a week, a prediction so vague as to be totally useless. I don't calorie count and I never find my weight fluctuating that much. So what good actually is this method? Because it seems by what you're saying, that it's hopelessly imprecise to measure either calories in or calories out.
And, far from being based on the Laws of Thermodynamics, totally inviolable scientific principles, now you don't know what drives weight gain. Ex150 sounds better and better.
These are all things I have seen or heard CICO advocates write online in other places. Whether that is true CICO, or if they are CICOINOs, I don't know.
Yes, and none of these complex systems require you to have much knowledge or expertise about anything in order to control how many calories you eat or expend accurately enough to lose weight. The control levers for piloting a plane are extremely complex and require lots of training to use properly. The control levers for placing food into your mouth and chewing it and swallowing and for moving around are extremely simple, so simple that almost everyone does it by default with minimal training.
A better analogy would be to, say, studying. Studying isn't trivially easy, but it's still very easy and simple in many contexts. And everyone knows that studying is useful for helping to pass a class. But the hard part is getting the motivation and discipline required to study consistently. Like how the tough part of managing weight is getting the motivation and discipline required to control one's food intake and exercise.
This has no relationship to what I wrote, from what I can tell, so I honestly have no idea how to respond to this. This is a complete nonsense non sequitur.
If you have no issues maintaining weight without calorie counting, then it sounds like you don't need to count calories to successfully implement CICO. Great!
Please walk it through for me how anything I wrote could be interpreted as such, with an emphasis on the "hopelessly" part.
According to you, food can have up to twice the amount of calories listed on the packaging. Leaving aside whether this is reasonable, that means that the person who thinks he's eating 2000 calories could actually be eating 4000 calories. This is obviously a large enough variation as to blow any attempt at tracking calories out of the water, to say nothing of variations in BMR. It's like piloting a plane with only one button and no altimeter. The interface being simpler doesn't make it easier - it can make it harder, because you don't get feedback! As you yourself suggest, it can take many months to get accurate predictions of weight loss, and maybe never get accurate predictions of weight gain.
Controlling one's food intake is actually pretty easy. My favourite cheat meal, I joke, is nothing. Eating is honestly just a chore.
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