the Calories In / Calories Out model of weight loss is correct
My opinion is that it is a “motte-and-bailey” type of a model. Technically correct, but skips some of the important parts.
Things you can control directly:
amount and type of food you put in your mouth
type and amount of exercise you choose to do
whether you really start doing the exercise each day, and keep doing it as long as possible
Things you cannot control directly:
what your metabolism actually does with the food you put in your mouth
Things this model doesn’t even mention:
there are other important things about the food, not just calories
As a consequense, these things happen in real life that the model does not predict:
If you are lucky, you can actually put a lot of calories in your mouth without getting fat as a result, even if you are not exercising hard. Not sure what exactly happens, my uneducated guess is that the metabolism only takes as much calories as needed, as the rest goes to shit. (So yes, technically it is “calories out”, but it is not what people proposing this model typically mean, and you have no direct control over this, i.e. you can’t simply decide to lose weight by going to the bathroom more often.)
If you are unlucky, the “calories in” get converted into something that is somehow not easily accessible as an energy source. (Either because your metabolism is fucked up generally, or because your body is low on some important component, such as iron.) You know you should burn some calories, but at the same time you are weak as a fly, so you really can’t. (Not because “math doesn’t work”, but because the linear model ignores some parts of the reality.) But you mentioned this in the “random thoughts” part.
...however, assuming that the metabolism is working more or less correctly, the model is useful.
My recommendation would be: Step 1 -- get checked by a doctor, whether you are low on something; start taking supplements; Step 2 -- start exercising regularly, without worrying about the “calories in” yet, just to build the momentum; Step 3 -- get more strategic about the food you eat.
The reason I put “step 2” before “step 3″ is because studing calories can take unlimited amounts of time, and can be used as a convenient excuse to procrastinate on exercising. I would also say that “add a lot of unprocessed vegetables in your food” is a good first approximation for healthy diet.
Other random thoughts:
don’t focus too much on “weight”—it correlates with the right thing, but is not exactly the right thing; converting 5 kg of fat into 5 kg of muscles increases your health and attractivity even if the resulting weight is the same, on the other hand dehydrating yourself decreases your weight but hurts your health;
shaming people for their metabolism (or just not having time to exercise because they e.g. have to work 2 jobs to survive) is bad; but enforcing a norm of tabooing information about healthy lifestyle is in my eyes even worse… essentially, because people doing the former are at least usually recognized as assholes, while people doing the latter can pretend noble intentions while in fact they contribute to avoidable premature deaths;
I believe that “eating a lot of unprocessed vegetables” is the essence of healthy diet, and the rest is mostly role-playing (i.e. you can eat “Mediterranean diet” and imagine being an exotic Italian, or eat a “paleo diet” and imagine being a prehistorical warrior, but the outcome is the same for the same reasons, regardless of your aesthetical preferences)
I mentioned the nutrition because that used to be my problem in the past.
I had low level of iron, so the answer “just exercise and burn some calories” was quite useless to me—I was barely able to wake up in the morning. Repeatedly I tried to exercise regularly for a few weeks, but the outcome was always pathetic: after a few moves I was exhausted, and there was no visible long-term progress. Of course, after doing a difficult thing with zero benefits, after a few weeks my motivation was gone.
Meta problem was that “checking my levels of iron” wasn’t even on the list of things I was thinking about, when I was thinking about how to get rid of some fat. (People around me assumed the opposite causal model: I have a problem with energy, because I am not doing any sport or exercise, duh!) It happened quite randomly; a friend of mine was reading somewhere on internet a list of symptoms of iron deficiency and mentioned it to me, and I was like “huh, sometimes I have similar symptoms, too”. Yet it took a few years until once I asked a doctor to measure my iron level. Turned out, it was at the lowest end of the “healthy” interval… so, according to the doctor, not worth mentioning unless I ask explicitly, because I am still technically healthy. I guess being technically healthy is important from the official medicine point of view, but I would rather get closer towards the optimal health, so… I bought some iron supplements, and...
With the level of iron fixed, it was a completely different game. I suddenly felt full of energy, which was something I only remembered happening decades ago. Suddenly, exercising hard became possible. (At the risk of making a pseudoscientific explanation, I suppose that iron plays an important role in the process of converting “calories in” into energy available for exercising.)
Then, after a few months of exercising hard I lost some fat, gained some muscles; people who haven’t seen me for a longer time say I have visibly changed. (I don’t even check my calories, but I started eating more fresh vegetables, so maybe it happened as a side effect.)
So my experience is that exercising more, and eating less calories (not by eating less in general, but by eating different food) worked for me, but I had to “unlock” this option by doing something else first. In other words, when “calories in, calories out” finally started working for me, the problem was already halfway solved.
My opinion is that it is a “motte-and-bailey” type of a model. Technically correct, but skips some of the important parts.
Things you can control directly:
amount and type of food you put in your mouth
type and amount of exercise you choose to do
whether you really start doing the exercise each day, and keep doing it as long as possible
Things you cannot control directly:
what your metabolism actually does with the food you put in your mouth
Things this model doesn’t even mention:
there are other important things about the food, not just calories
As a consequense, these things happen in real life that the model does not predict:
If you are lucky, you can actually put a lot of calories in your mouth without getting fat as a result, even if you are not exercising hard. Not sure what exactly happens, my uneducated guess is that the metabolism only takes as much calories as needed, as the rest goes to shit. (So yes, technically it is “calories out”, but it is not what people proposing this model typically mean, and you have no direct control over this, i.e. you can’t simply decide to lose weight by going to the bathroom more often.)
If you are unlucky, the “calories in” get converted into something that is somehow not easily accessible as an energy source. (Either because your metabolism is fucked up generally, or because your body is low on some important component, such as iron.) You know you should burn some calories, but at the same time you are weak as a fly, so you really can’t. (Not because “math doesn’t work”, but because the linear model ignores some parts of the reality.) But you mentioned this in the “random thoughts” part.
...however, assuming that the metabolism is working more or less correctly, the model is useful.
My recommendation would be:
Step 1 -- get checked by a doctor, whether you are low on something; start taking supplements;
Step 2 -- start exercising regularly, without worrying about the “calories in” yet, just to build the momentum;
Step 3 -- get more strategic about the food you eat.
The reason I put “step 2” before “step 3″ is because studing calories can take unlimited amounts of time, and can be used as a convenient excuse to procrastinate on exercising. I would also say that “add a lot of unprocessed vegetables in your food” is a good first approximation for healthy diet.
Other random thoughts:
don’t focus too much on “weight”—it correlates with the right thing, but is not exactly the right thing; converting 5 kg of fat into 5 kg of muscles increases your health and attractivity even if the resulting weight is the same, on the other hand dehydrating yourself decreases your weight but hurts your health;
shaming people for their metabolism (or just not having time to exercise because they e.g. have to work 2 jobs to survive) is bad; but enforcing a norm of tabooing information about healthy lifestyle is in my eyes even worse… essentially, because people doing the former are at least usually recognized as assholes, while people doing the latter can pretend noble intentions while in fact they contribute to avoidable premature deaths;
I believe that “eating a lot of unprocessed vegetables” is the essence of healthy diet, and the rest is mostly role-playing (i.e. you can eat “Mediterranean diet” and imagine being an exotic Italian, or eat a “paleo diet” and imagine being a prehistorical warrior, but the outcome is the same for the same reasons, regardless of your aesthetical preferences)
Agreed. Some people have significantly higher metabolisms.
Agreed. I’m not talking about nutrition, just weight loss.
I mentioned the nutrition because that used to be my problem in the past.
I had low level of iron, so the answer “just exercise and burn some calories” was quite useless to me—I was barely able to wake up in the morning. Repeatedly I tried to exercise regularly for a few weeks, but the outcome was always pathetic: after a few moves I was exhausted, and there was no visible long-term progress. Of course, after doing a difficult thing with zero benefits, after a few weeks my motivation was gone.
Meta problem was that “checking my levels of iron” wasn’t even on the list of things I was thinking about, when I was thinking about how to get rid of some fat. (People around me assumed the opposite causal model: I have a problem with energy, because I am not doing any sport or exercise, duh!) It happened quite randomly; a friend of mine was reading somewhere on internet a list of symptoms of iron deficiency and mentioned it to me, and I was like “huh, sometimes I have similar symptoms, too”. Yet it took a few years until once I asked a doctor to measure my iron level. Turned out, it was at the lowest end of the “healthy” interval… so, according to the doctor, not worth mentioning unless I ask explicitly, because I am still technically healthy. I guess being technically healthy is important from the official medicine point of view, but I would rather get closer towards the optimal health, so… I bought some iron supplements, and...
With the level of iron fixed, it was a completely different game. I suddenly felt full of energy, which was something I only remembered happening decades ago. Suddenly, exercising hard became possible. (At the risk of making a pseudoscientific explanation, I suppose that iron plays an important role in the process of converting “calories in” into energy available for exercising.)
Then, after a few months of exercising hard I lost some fat, gained some muscles; people who haven’t seen me for a longer time say I have visibly changed. (I don’t even check my calories, but I started eating more fresh vegetables, so maybe it happened as a side effect.)
So my experience is that exercising more, and eating less calories (not by eating less in general, but by eating different food) worked for me, but I had to “unlock” this option by doing something else first. In other words, when “calories in, calories out” finally started working for me, the problem was already halfway solved.