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0 pointsFooBarBizBazz1y ago0 comments

Spreading "cope" hurts other people who read it and believe. Bomb-calorimeter energy is an upper bound on what your body can extract from the food, and limiting an upper bound works.

But ok, there is a problem with "CICO": Although true, it does psychologically put "CI" and "CO" on an equal footing -- whereas 90% of your attention really needs to be on "CI". The body is very efficient; exercising doesn't burn much. It's more for the purpose of maintaining some muscle mass as you drop weight. But junk food companies like to skew perception ("balance what you drink and do") to make it seem like a Big Gulp would be ok if only you ran more. Yeah, they're happy to shame and mislead overweight people, so long as they keep buying.

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HumanOstrich1y ago

Your body doesn't absorb all the calories you consume, nor does it expend or store as energy all the calories you absorb. Biology is complicated and CICO is a flawed and condescending oversimplification. It's like telling people "well, you know, if you eat more than you need to, you'll gain weight". Duh, not helpful.

naming_the_user1y ago

If you have a diet, say each week you eat X grams of meat, Y of vegetables, Z of cereals, and then next week (or for a number of weeks) you eat {X,Y,Z}1.1 or {X,Y,Z}0.9, that will have a net effect all else being equal.

There is nothing condescending about that. No-one is really claiming that all calories are equal e.g. you can replace 500 kcals of chicken with 450 kcals of olive oil and that be some sort of blockbuster great idea.

CICO does have an implicit "your diet isn't completely batshit insane" attached to it.

s1artibartfast1y ago

>It's like telling people "well, you know, if you eat more than you need to, you'll gain weight". Duh, not helpful.

It is a foundation to work from. Far better than believing that you can cheat thermodynamics, which is generally the alternative.

There are some fringe cases and nuances, but I have never heard of one that was relevant. Do you have a use case where deviations would matter?

Absorbed calories don't match label calories, but weight loss and gain are studied in terms of label calories, so it is irrelevant unless you are doing chemistry or particle physics.

Labels could be in terms of arbitrary moon units instead of calories and it would still be true. Weight loss is a function of moon units in and moon units out.

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