Why the Calories In, Calories Out Argument is False

web.archive.org/web/20170506190453/http://www.healthyenough.net/calorie-counting/

>In this post I want to reveal the fallacy that is calories in, calories out, suggest that you do away with calorie counting altogether, and finally present a more enjoyable, sustainable and intuitive method for weight loss.

>The theory that the number of calories you consume vs. calories you expend determines your weight is false. In reality, the equation is far more complicated than that, due to the fact that human beings are incredibly complicated biological machines.

>Cronise discovered that while the simple theory of calories in, calories out might technically be correct (in its most literal form), the popular interpretation of the theory is completely wrong.

>In conclusion, the more educated you are on what happens to the food you eat, the more likely you are to eat right.

Thoughts, Veeky Forums? The arguments given in this article make sense, but I don't trust the average fatty to be able to control themselves enough without being leashed by a calorie counting program. It's too easy to give in to temptation, or more commonly to rationalize your indulgence and eat that slice of chocolate cake and destroy your progress. Calorie counting keeps a person tied to a specific regimen, tracks their progress, and serves as a guideline for changing their lifestyle. This is why I personally recommend calorie counting to anyone that is serious about weight loss. They need the direction and guidance.

It sounds like he's saying that while the fundamentals of CICO are true (they must be), the actual process of energy intake and expenditure is very complex and such oversimplifications, the most of extreme of which is the infamous "Twinkie diet", are not the best approach to losing weight and living a healthy lifestyle.

In summary, he argues for a lower carb and higher protein/fat diet and a strong sense of personal responsibility for the choice of foods that we decide to eat.

sounds like it was written by a delusional coping fatty who wants to rationalize eating 5000 calories per day

countless amounts of people have done CICO with success time and time again
I don't understand how this manages to be a controversial topic still
fuck off

I've given up sugar/refined carbs/alcohol and feel/look better. I don't track my kcals at all and eat as much as I want. So far so good. Although I very well could just be eating within my TDEE because it's hard to overeat on healthy food like apples and shit.

Nobody with any intelligence claims CICO to be the be all and end all of health. Just that it WORKS FOR WEIGHT LOSS/GAIN

It does work, in 99.99% of cases. There is literally zero evidence to prove otherwise.

This is just fattys or shills trying to push their own agendas. People with something to push don't like simple truths because it stops people looking for some way to buy their goals.

I have lost 50 pounds over a period of 6 months by just not eating as much. That's evidence enough that it works.

>Gas in, gas out isn't a good metric of how far you'll go. You can put premium gas in your tank and you'll actually go farther

Fuck off. Everyone knows you need a balanced diet, but the amount of food you eat does affect how much you weigh.

>I've given up sugar/refined carbs/alcohol and feel/look better.

Same here, more or less. I'm not counting at all I am consistently losing right around 2 lbs per week for the past month. I'm mainly doing what this article proposes and can attest that it does work, but it required enormous lifestyle changes on my part that I'm uncertain that the average person in the USA could accomplish.

didn't read the article but it's really not as simple as CICO. Veeky Forums will have an autistic sperg fit about that though

not all calories are equal

COPE
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>Cronise discovered that while the simple theory of calories in, calories out might technically be correct (in its most literal form)

The only kind of correct.

>not all calories are equal

This is the core of the argument the article puts forward, and that pure CICO is a gross simplification.

I think the sensitive point here is that this position opens the greased-up slippery slope that the average fatty takes to justify their lack of discipline and indulgence, not so much the contention of the fundamentals of CICO itself.

I don't understand how riled up you people get. I don't understand fatties pushing this either. Have these people just not tried eating less? Have they tried it for a week and saw no results and just stopped? Why wouldn't they try it for a year? Do people not have any will power?

Oh boi he is at it again, I missed you user.

Are you talking about the user that kept posting the Asian guy talking about insulin resistance?

OP I hope you realize precious few are going to actually read your post.

Every line after the link could have said "CICO IS TRUE" and youd still get the knee jerk cookie cutter responses you got.

>OP I hope you realize precious few are going to actually read your post.

I do. I'm hoping there are some anons out there who are interested in a discussion around the topic. I know you're right and my expectations are appropriately curbed.

CICO is strictly true on a thermodynamics level. However it is a very simple concept that can be specified and expanded, there's way more to it.

Basically everybody agrees on "a calorie is not a calorie" which goes directly against the principle of CICO. Calory counting works and is an easy way to lose weight but you can do even better.

Agreed on all points - I would never send the article to a hamplanet because they would misconstrue it to continue terrible habits, but I would send it to someone who I knew was already reasonably conscious about their health and wanted to improve.

I fully fucking believe it. I eat very clean at +4k calories a day and haven't put on hardly any fat, only muscle. I pinch my stomach every couple days where fat gets deposited first usually for me and it has hardly if at all changed. I only started putting on real gains once I upped my calories by a good 1k. You'd have to be a bona-fide idiot to really believe your body is as simple as calories in vs out by a basic law of thermodynamics. Sure, calories have an impact but meal timing and macros are more important then anything. Understand your body's nutrition needs and you don't have to put on endless amounts of fat when bulking.

It's not that CICO is false, it just doesn't really apply well to living things. It's taking a static calculation and apply it to a dynamic living system, it just doesn't really make a lot of sense.

But counting calories still works for the most part to LOSE weight, but the hard part isn't losing weight, now is it? It's maintaining weight loss. I think that's where calorie counting isn't really maintainable in the long run, so the person should stick with a diet of whole foods high in water, maybe fiber, protein, fat, and with as little prior processing as possible. The end goal is to feel full, satisfied, and happy with the diet while keeping weight stable.

Having personally had 160lb weight swings in my lifetime, what has worked the best for me so far is weight lifting a few times per week, and eating a high protein diet with plenty of fat, lower in carbs, and with very little refined carbs.

He is right saying you technically don't need carbs at all to survive, out body will synthesize glucose on its own. What he doesn't say is that tons of key ingredients are only found in carbohydrates, the biggest groups being fiber and phytonutrients that are by definition only found in plants (which are generally mainly carbs).

He says that the calorie counting model is too simple and stupid and he is right. But he then does the exact same mistake and only talks about macros, completely neglecting nutrition.

woops, disregard that food pyramid. That's if you want skelly mode like Furhman. He's a fucking kuck. Pictured is closer to what I meant.

Why do you think there's carb cycling for example? Calories in vs calories out are for people that don't care to know about nutrition so they want to believe it's that simple. Body building is easily +80% nutrition as they say.

>Having personally had 160lb weight swings in my lifetime, what has worked the best for me so far is weight lifting a few times per week, and eating a high protein diet with plenty of fat, lower in carbs, and with very little refined carbs.

Very impressive and more or less what the author of the article advocates (lower carb diets as a general rule).

cronise is a fucking nut , he's great .

When I cut out the carbs I lose fat, when I eat extra carbs I gain size.

That simple.

I'm really struggling with the protein in the morning.

Eggs are alright but super high in cholesterol and I have family history/high cholesterol myself.

The chourico is super high in sodium and the milk is high in calories/sodium/carbs.

Wat do?

Food is 90% of it. I know from personal experience.

I tried exercising 2 hrs a day and got some results but not fantastic. It wasn't until I got a job working as a coal miner doing hard physical labour for 12 hours a day, 8 out of 9 days, that I saw decent weight loss. Nobody would want to do this.

I had a second experience a few years later where my work stopped preparing meals for me and I had to bring them myself. I'm lazy so I hardly did this and basically reduced my intake of food significantly and the weight loss was as quick and good as when I was working as a coal miner for long hours.

If you want to lose weight focus on food intake.

Really stupid question incoming; why are vegetables far more healthier to eat than meat? My eating habits are basically your pyramid but upside down.

cut out the choriso and veg oil spread
butter is better . try almond milk

I hate almond milk.

Getting rid of the eggs and chourico is fine, but that's another 36g of protein I need to replace

They both work, this argument was only created to make low willpower fats that over count calories feel better about why they're so fat.

You should ALWAYS be eating a healthy diet and counting is optional if you want to reach a goal a little faster.

CICO while eating just junk gets really fucky

They have all the micro nutrients you may or may not need while being filling, fibrous and low cal so you don't get fat.

So long as you eat enough vegetables and you aren't fat you don't have to base your diet off them

99.4% of people fail long-term calorie counting diets. I don't really buy it either. It's too easy to be hungry af all the time, increasing your chances of giving in. It's much better to "reset" the body through fasting as your body won't even be physically able to hold down horrible shit. And if done right, the person shouldn't desire horrible shit either.

Anyone not smart enough to realize that is fucking retarded. It's such a basic idea I can't believe anyone could ever disagree with it, and is so simple it's not even useful.
> 1500 calories of only Coca-Cola
> 1500 calories of only spinach
Obviously they are equal, 1500 calories is 1500 calories after all!

piss bottles in the top left....

Veggies have fiber which is essential for your digestive system. Also, the very low calories make it very gentle on your body because very little energy is used to digest it. Meat, in excess, is extremely hard on your digestive system (ever felt your heart rate and body heat increase after consuming too much meat? that's how hard your body is working to digest it).

Calories have a standard deviation of 10%. For the most part it's bs and encourages people to, like you say, fit bad foods into their daily calorie limit. This is why the dieting "industries" will never die.

It's what drives me fucking crazy about the whole thing. Who doesn't honestly know what's really healthy vs what's not? Surely, there's some grey areas, but if you don't realize soda is unhealthy, or that baked chicken is better than fried pork, you don't deserve to breed.

There are only a few things that violate CICO. One of these is fructose.

Fructose is metabolized differently from other sugars. If you don't use it right away, it becomes fat very quickly.

2000 calories of fructose behaves very differently from 2000 calories of literally anything else. Your liver has a very limited storage capacity for fructose (around 100g) and will convert ANY excess to fat.

I don't know what the article says, but if you want to lose weight, cut out soda right now and never touch it again.

>Who doesn't honestly know what's really healthy vs what's not? Surely, there's some grey areas, but if you don't realize soda is unhealthy, or that baked chicken is better than fried pork, you don't deserve to breed.

They know, but people can and will rationalize anything in order to not feel bad about their own shortcomings.

When enough people begin rationalizing their poor choices, in results in society-wide delusional phenomena like the fat acceptance movement. If everyone agrees on a perception of reality, then it can be made so.

Notions that suggest a concept of objective reality are unfashionable in today's world.

>They know, but people can and will rationalize anything in order to not feel bad about their own shortcomings.

This. Humans will be humans, and pushing CICO (too hard anyway) puts quantity over quality. Even if they know what's bad or what's not, focusing solely on CICO will make them feel okay about whatever they eat as long as it fits within that calorie limit. In the end, they never truly let go of poor food habits full stop, they just go through months or even years of struggle self-control and they will eventually pig out.

I totally get wanting a sugar or salt bomb sometimes, but there's countless resources out there to teach how to make fresh/healthy stuff really fulfilling.

I'm no nutrition specialist but earlier this week I had diarrhea for 2/3 days. Everything I ate went straight to poo. I could see in the toilets bits of fresh carrots, hazelnuts and muesli I was eating few hours earlier.

I lost 2 weeks worth of gains but also cut a little bit of the skinnyfat tier layer on my belly.

I guess it was unprocessed calories and "calories out" in a different mean.

>be me (formerly obese)
>Use CICO and track calories with myfitnesspal plus moderate exercise
>Eat fast food nearly every day but never more than 1800 calories worth
>Lose 80lb in roughly 10 months and feel great

CICO is the best fat loss method because its simple and its consistent.

It makes me wonder what people think that 'calories out' means. I mean we all see it as energie expenditure which has got to do with how efficiently our bodies use the calories in. What does the cico does mot real crowd think that it means? Do they think that calories out means poop? Is that the basis for this confusion? Poop more than you eat = cico for these disgusting slobs?

ITT: retards that aren't aware that Thermic Effect of Food is part of the "out" in CICO.