For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
Calories in, calories out.
For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.
After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.
It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).
Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).
If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.
This assumes a whole bunch of things. First, do you actually absorb all of the calories through your gut? Does your body maintain the same base rate of expenditure (BMR) in both the short and long term of restriction?
When you look at people who did The Biggest Loser they did the exact thing you are talking about. They had a significant caloric deficit through eating restricting and massive amounts of exercise. In the short term they did lose weight but it also ruined their BMR. Years later they had mostly put the weight back on and had a lower BMR than at the start. It damaged them.
If you lose weight through caloric deficit you may not notice any change but your body will stop prioritising things like your hair and skin, muscle growth, and bone maintenance. All of those are low priority for an organism in caloric deficit. Instead your body will focus on the most important thing, getting more food. You become food obsessed, thinking about it all day, and you will eat almost anything you can access. You also end up with a lower body temperature, less immune activity, and lower drive for exercise and sex. It is an absolute nightmare.
The end result is that calories in calories out assumes a perfect and simple system. It does not take into account things like proton uncoupling in brown fat, differing levels of absorption through digestion, body temperature, hair growth, cell turnover, and tonnes of other things. It can appear to work for a short time but long term it breaks down and deviates more and more from the data.
You do not absorb all the calories. Those, therefore, are part of neither calories in nor out. I make no assumption here. BMR is a closely related topic but doesn’t change the calories in / calories out impact, which is what I am getting at and what most the remainder of your post says.
Nearly all of what you say here is correct and I wouldn’t dispute it. Except the last paragraph. It is, I’m sorry, categorically false. Calories in and out, in fact, simplifies nothing and does take things like brown fat and body maintenance prioritization into account; those simply change those two variables. I’m not saying the systems are simple. I’m saying the amount of carbon atoms absorbed into your body via energy stored in food and drink as one of a few macronutrients less the carbon atoms breathed out via respiration is a fairly accurate account of weight change. Everything else you’re saying is not in dispute. It isn’t easy and it isn’t simply, but calories in / out is not inaccurate, if still reductive.
I disagree, but I think we agree on a lot here.
Colorimetry measures calories in food by burning the food and measuring the amount of heat generated. This is different to what happens in cells for a huge number of reasons, so it isn’t really reasonable to think of it as a good starting point for nutrition. If you take a substrate, say for example a fat, and you use it to make a hormone it is not being burned for energy and thus breaks the calorie in calorie out model. That is a simple way it fails.
I am not saying the disconnect is 100%, I am saying it is not 100% accurate and depending on how disregulated your system is it may be more or less accurate. Someone who is super healthy and of a low body fat percentage with a reasonable amount of muscle mass would probably end up fairly close to CICO for the first few weeks of a dietary change. This is not really in dispute.
The dispute comes from the rest of the population. We have more deranged systems which are less in line with CICO due to metabolic issues like insulin resistance, gut damage, gluten issues like celiac disease, and so on. The more deranged the body the more CICO loses its predictive value and becomes a bludgeon.
When I went to the doctor about my weight they told me to eat less and move more. My insulin resistance was not measured and the dietary recommendations led to more muscle loss and body fat gain. I had tonnes of issues with acne, dandruff, terrible body odor, mild scurvy, and overall ill health. Adding more food that I could actually digest and switching from my broken glucose metabolism to a ketogenic metabolism allowed me to repair damage, absorb vitamins more effectively, and fix all sorts of seemingly minor but overall stressful issues. My caloric intake was higher but I lost excess weight first by dropping glycogen and associated water but then by dropping fat while also gaining muscle. I felt like moving, I wanted to move, so I moved, but it wasn’t willpower driving that like on CICO, it was hormones driving the change in output.
The calories being low led to conserving energy and being depressed and inactive. Adding good calories I could actually use led to more activity along with better mood and brain function. CICO is not a good model for making changes, it is just accounting. If you want to say “this many carbons came in, this many left” that is fine, but there is no why in that and no guidance on what to do from there. If you try changing how many calories go in or go out you shouldn’t be surprised when the self regulating system regulates itself and changes something else, such as making you burn less energy or eat more food.
I can tell we agree on a lot here too. I’m simply saying calories in and out isn’t wrong, it just isn’t the full story. And you’re right to be suspicious of anybody that says it is. It can be a good jumping off point. Like “eat less”. “Great, how do I actually reliably eat less, doc?” The answer there is the nuanced point you are making, about changing how the body responds.
And like you said, the “move more” thing goes out the window if you aren’t able to get your energy out of storage well. One just feels sluggish.
I lost about 30 kg, and that was primarily by just tracking what I ate. Even just knowing is helpful for accountability.
Yeah, it is like saying “Recessions are caused by GDP reducing for at least two consecutive quarters”. I mean, yes, that does describe what a recession is, but it says little about what the cause of a recession is. In the same way, having less fat in storage is the way you lose body fat, but the mechanisms of actually making that happen are way more complex and trying to reduce it to eat less move more is unhelpful.
It is inaccurate, food manufacturers are allowed about 20% error margin when measuring calories. Calories have nothing to do with what our bodies do with the material we eat, since everything is a chemical process and we aren’t closed systems. When we mobilize fat we create ketone bodies which are exhaled in our breathing, how do you propose to measure ‘caloric expenditure’ then? It is far too reductive.
Calories on a label are not the calories in the metabolic equation, so I don’t see how that is relevant here. Calories in are calories absorbed by the body, which is some subset of those taken in. Some come right back out the other side; we don’t count those. To say calories have nothing to do with it is bonkers to me. It is precisely the chemical process to which you refer. When we expend energy / heat / calories, we get that from food and drink. Yes, more immediate from one of the three major energy distribution mechanisms, but it all comes from what we put in. Then the carbon atoms stripped off of saccharides are bonded to oxygen and exhaled as CO2.
And all this to say, one cannot gain weight while eating fewer calories than being expended, reductive or not.
The calories on the label are what is used to make decisions when it comes to using CICO to decide what to eat, which is why it’s relevant. I see now where you are coming from though, because I’m speaking from a pragmatic stand point, but yours is a theoretical one.
We do however appear to be in agreement, too. Due to these chemical processes CICO is highly reductive and pretty pointless for losing body fat, because what our bodies do in response say to 100 kcal of sucrose and 100 kcal of protein is entirely different, and result in entirely different biological outcomes.
Yeah it definitely isn’t the whole story. And protein is a great example. It takes about 15% of the calories in proteins just to break down the protein, so you sort of get that as a discount. But that can be said as calories out immediately goes up by that 15%. :)
To add further nuance to what you’ve said, (I know you know this already, so this is for other readers) when we ingest sucrose it is converted into glucose and fructose, which causes our blood glucose to rise steeply, which then results in a commensurate steep rise in insulin secretion. Elevated insulin causes many cells in the body to uptake glucose and chronically elevating insulin from a constant intake of carbohydrates means that the adipose tissue have no choice but to keep converting glucose to fat.
Sufficient ingestion of protein too will cause an increase in blood glucose levels, but nowhere near as steep nor as high. The biological effects are entirely different. And for anyone curious, it’s possible to visualise this by wearing a continuous glucose monitor. It’ll provide a lot of insight into an aspect of how eating different foods can affect your body differently.
How dare you call out people for their bias. Lol
I mean, calories in/out is real, you can’t get fat if you’re eating less than what you’re spending. On the other hand you definitely can thin up eating more calories than you spend by for example going into ketosis where calories don’t matter all that much.
All of that being said, calories in/out is not the whole picture, like you mentioned there are plenty of other stuff that might make it so that two people eating the same and exercising the same amount get drastically opposite results. At the end of the day our bodies have a calorie budget they’re trying to stick to, eating less (or actually eating better) is the solution, exercising helps but not in increasing your calorie budget, only in directing your budget to be more healthy.
Calories in / calories out works perfectly and predictably for fat loss as long as you’re measuring correctly and most people don’t. I used to follow it religiously in the run up to fights in order to make weight.
I would look at my weight, look at the weight I need to be 8 weeks later, figure the calorie hole I needed and follow it incredibly closely.
It worked every single time without fail. I always stepped into the ring lean as fuck and having lost zero muscle because I was training twice a day six days a week and keeping protein intake high. I allowed one maintenance calorie day per week on my recovery day.
There are other things that account for weight loss (e.g. loss of sugar from muscles and the associated water loss that comes with that) if you’re using keto but most people are after fat loss more than weight loss.
People are just very judgemental when it comes to weight. I think a lot of people like to believe that it all comes down to self-control, which is not the case. That can be very harmful. People are blamed for their own medical situations. Their self esteem is harmed and they are made to suffer through years and years of diets making the situation worse without getting the appropriate (medical) help they need.
We also judge people by their face all the time, and there is nothing they can do to change it.
And because of our animal side, we value beauty higher than almost anything else, which makes us stupid and easily manipulated.
I agree. That happens too. But I think the process of judging people by their face is largely an implicit and unconscious one. I do not think that many people will actually claim that they believe that you can decide whether someone is a bad person by e.g., the shape of their chin. (Although you always will have exceptions.) This makes it very hard to change.
Many people will claim that overweight is just the result of a lack of self control. This is something they believe explicitly and consciously. It is possible to change that believe and it should change as it is incorrect.
Even if it would be lack of self control, I dont see why people get to judge that person for it. The old saying that you need to walk in someones shoes to truly understand them is very true…
Why not support people who struggle instead of tearing them down? Specially now when we live in a society and a person being fat is no downside to the group. I can see how it could be an issue if you are a group in the forest and you have to walk long distances and the fat person slows everyone down and it endangers the group. But we dont have that situation today at all. So why not lift them up and help?
I agree with that. There is no reason to not just accept overweight people like anyone else.
To play the devil’s advocate, there’s some nuance to this. If someone is metabolically unhealthy and obese, they impose an on-going cost to society if only in terms of healthcare. It’s somewhat on the same lines as
Shaming fat people and blaming them for being fat surely isn’t constructive. It very rarely, if ever, is a lack of self control. But I also don’t think we should accept a metabolically diseased state as normal.
I think obese people should get the help they need, but we should accept them for who they are as a person. It is the same as with other physical or psychological issues or disabilities. It is very rude to keep reminding people that they cost a lot and are a burden to society because of their disease. People’s value as a human being should not be determined by that and it should not affect whether they are accepted.