this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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Except that the human body is way more complicated than that. Whenever you try to increase calories out by exercise, your body just finds somewhere else it can economize, because it wants to operate on a fixed budget. This can include pulling calories from your immune system, or making you subconsciously move less throughout the day, or even sleep more. You can only overcome this for a limited time. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this phenomenon. What you actually want to do is reduce calorie intake.
Exercise is good for lots of reasons, but it isn't a good way of losing weight long term.
Is that not the exact sentiment when people bring up CICO, though?
Not exactly, as it implies more exercise will get the same result as eating less, but thats not guaranteed, for a variety of reasons
It's how I've always interpreted it. The oft-cited saying is "you can't outrun a bad diet"
No. The Internet is full of people who tell a commenter they're wrong then say the exact same thing the commenter said.
Not really. Lots of people talk about excecising more when it comes to loosing weight, and many of those follow CICO. Not realising that isn't how a human body works with regards to excercise. You also see people claiming that genetics are not signficant, or that slow and fast metabolisms don't exist. Even though we know all of these things are a factor. It's mental what some people believe about diet, nutrition, and excercise. Likewise everyone using BMI pretty much is an idiot, even in school I was told that isn't a good metric otherwise every athelete or body builder would be obese.
Also still not convinced CICO is even a thing. Digestion is not a 100% efficient process. Calories are measured by burning something, and human metabolism isn't a fire.
So... you don't even agree with the crux of your own argument?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting CICO, as I assumed it could be taken as just it's initialism without having to be associated with any more complex fad diet.
I understand that when people reference something, interpretation is not universal. There's always going to be variance. I just hadn't had that experience.
I also know it's a very hard metric to track. It will vary depending on body type, metabolism, and even psychology. I don't recall that being disputed, though. Just that, at it's core, it's more about reducing caloric intake than increasing caloric use.
I mean for a start calories themselves are a bad unit to use. A human body is not a fire or an engine. It doesn't actually burn stuff.
As I explained the whole Calories Out portion of CICO doesn't actually work, because the body can adjust it's various metabolic processes. Only the CI part has any real use.
I think you're misunderstanding cico
Well can you explain it better then?
Eat less. Move more. Lose weight.
If the amount you move doesn't change, eating less still will make you lose weight.
It's just physics at the end of the day, regardless of how unhappy you are with units of measurement.
As I have explained the Move More part doesn't actually do much long term. So that's my problem with it. Fairly easy to understand. Again calories aren't even a good measurement to begin with, you aren't an engine or a fire. More like a fuel cell.
Cico is a ratio of two things. If you isolate one half and claim it doesn't work, you're no longer critiquing the method, your critiquing a thing you don't like and using that to claim the ratio doesn't work.
Even the eat less part isn't quite right. As it completely ignores why people eat too much in the first place, or how the body adapts to insufficient food. Trying to treat biology as a physics problem isn't going to work here.
That doesn't discredit calories in calories out? They didn't even mention exercise or imply that you didn't need to reduce your food intake. It works. When I am on a cut I can estimate down to within a few days how long it will take me to get where I want to be just following CICO.
Reducing Calorie Intake is only the first half of CICO. Not everyone can even absorb the same amount of calories from the same piece of food, because calories are about burning stuff not about human digestion and metabolism.
Yes there's variation between humans but the principal is true. If you absorb less than you use you will lose weight. You might have to adjust your intake for your own body chemistry but that's how it works.