this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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me_irl
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You are not immune to the basic laws of thermophysics. Weight loss is literally calories in < calories out.
No shit. That's not some great revelation and I'm kinda tired of seeing it posted as if it is.
You don't burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch. Your body is very good at conserving energy. Not to say exercise isn't beneficial, it is, it's just not a great weight loss tool. Not at last as good as common wisdom might suggest.
The caveman in your skull is also very persuasive, and wants you to eat far more than you need, because it thinks you might not be able to find food again for a while. The caveman really likes carbs, and foods high in sugar and fat, and will ask for more the second you have any.
Ignoring the caveman is hard, harder for some than others. It's also taxing and after a while the caveman will wear you down.
Effective weight loss isn't just about putting less food on your plate. Fucking anybody can do that and it's exceedingly obvious to those trying that that's what they need to do.
Losing weight is about beating back the caveman in your skull, convincing him that he's had enough, and feeding him in a way that also nourishes the body you both live in.
There's a reason most people fail, and fail repeatedly to lose weight. It's as simple as eating less but it turns out, eating less for people who eat a lot isn't actually that simple. There are psychological and physiological drivers causing them to keep going back for more, to lie to themselves about how they're doing, and to ignore the obvious cues that something isn't working.
It really is the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" or "just don't take any drugs, duh" of weight loss. Like, you can't just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. It's reductive and unproductive.
People aren't having trouble with math or willpower, they're having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on "most") readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
It's almost identical to saying "just stop taking drugs." Or "just stop drinking."
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, they're literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
It’s also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. I’m slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
If it’s not a big difference, how does it lead to such divergent results? I’d suggest that a 4% difference is in fact pretty big, as that’s the equivalent of over 500 calories a week.
Do you have a link for the evidence? I’d be interested to see what it says about calorie absorption, as I suspect that has an even greater effect. Unfortunately, everyone just seems to repeat CICO as though it’s easy or simple to measure either of those inputs with accuracy. People just hope they’re average and that it will work normally for them. Most people are average, so that works for a lot of people, but not everyone.
I personally don’t digest animal fat well, so anything other than white meat chicken will give me the shits. I don’t eat animal products anymore, but when I did, I obviously wasn’t receiving 200 calories from 200 calories worth of beef. My sister has celiac’s, and when she realized it and stopped eating gluten, she gained a bunch of weight, because she was finally absorbing calories from her diet.
There have been many times that I justified gaining weight via alcoholism because I thought maybe if I was disgusting no one would assault me again. Turns that that's not only not true, I've become disgusted with and hate my own body. So now I have a crippling alcohol addiction in addition to hating myself, and being afraid of interacting with certain people.
I've done a lot of therapy. And I will continue to do a lot of therapy. I almost graduated from therapy this spring, and had curbed my alcohol intake. But, then I had to get a restraining order and my brain fell right back into it's old habits. It shouldn't be this hard to feel safe as a middle aged adult lol
Shit’s hard, it sounds like you have come a long way. I’m rooting for you ❤️
Thank you 💜
Hey friend. I'm on your team here. I can't help you but I'm rooting for you so hard.
It's hard. Fuckin hardest thing you'll ever do. You don't have to succeed in one try, or all at once. Every day is another chance to succeed just a little bit more, even if you stumbled yesterday.
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That's serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it's far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that's like 20lb less.
Relevant Kurzgezagt
A kind of 'side benefit' to muscle-building exercise, is that it increases the amount of calories your body burns 'by default', because by weight, muscle takes much more energy to maintain than fat.
So on top of eating less (fewer calories going into your body), you can 'attack' it from the other side at the same time by increasing your body's 'consumption' of the calories/energy stored in it.
This is a commonly repeated myth. One I believe myself until talking to my doctor about it.
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-may-16-la-he-fitness-muscle-myth-20110516-story.html
Seems like its a "technically true" but in practice irrelevant because muscle and fat only make up a tiny percent of total energy usage (because things like the brain, heart and liver are so energy intensive):
And that's why I referred to it as a 'side benefit'. It doesn't do much more, but it's not nothing, you know?
Not to mention all of the other more overt health benefits from exercise in general.
I wasn't posting it like some revelation, it's literally the most easy to understand concept ever. You cannot create mass from nothing. Stop taking in more mass than you expel. It's dead simple. The only counterpoint to this is examples of extreme medical anomalies.
They explained it to you on a level a four year old could understand.
It's about as simple as telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking or a depressed person to maybe just be happy.
Everything in your body is built against losing weight. If it wouldn't be that way, we would not exist right now.
What about the shape of the calories. Surely that matters.
Tbh I think the importance of shape is overstated. It's much more important that they pass a vibe check
I only consume masculine-presenting calories.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/18/dr-peppers-bizarre-new-not-for-women-ad-campaign/
So what's the point of posting it? If it's so obvious and all that you really need to know, why are so many people still fat?
The unsaid part of "it's simple, it's just calories in calories out" is the implied "and people who don't get this are just lazy/dumb/it's a moral failing." Maybe this isn't what you are intending, but it is kinda at the root of a lot of hate that fat people get.
The discussion around weight is changing because we're starting to look into and understand the psychological components of weight, IN ADDITION TO the actual phsysiological processes of weight loss. Lots of "normal" day to day tips and "common sense" is being investigated and debunked. Shit is hard and complicated. Food is being engineered to be addictive. Some people literally don't have easy access to healthy food.
Because the tweet they're commenting on is blatantly false and proposes a literal magical situation where exercising will somehow cause one to gain weight.
If people stop proposing actual fucking magic then maybe people won't feel the need to state the obvious...
Anecdotal, and I agree with you overall, but I hit the gym hard (2-3 hour jiu jitsu/MMA sessions) 4 times a week for 3 months and lost 18 lbs. I didn't change my diet at all, though I will admit it's possible I ended up eating less overall. But my point is I think exercise can definitely be a pretty good weight loss tool if you're working your ass off. Just depends on the amount of exercise and the intensity etc.
Yeah, massive amounts of exercise without a massive increase in consumption will work. But people act as if you can go for a jog 3 times a week and that will take care of it.
(also your last sentence is mangled)
Doesn't seem like it
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
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.
Human body is open system
"Depressed? Just cheer up, bro."