I have heard repeatedly the argument about “calories in, calories out” (e.g. here). Seems to me that there are a few unspoken assumptions, and I would like to ask how true they are in reality. Here are the assumptions:
a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;
b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;
and in some more strawmanish forms of the argument:
c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.
If we assume these things to be true, it seems like a law of physics that if you count the calories in the food you put in your mouth, and subtract the amount of exercise you do, the result exactly determines whether you gain or lose fat. Taken literally, if a healthy and thin person starts eating an extra apple a day, or starts taking a somewhat shorter walk to their work, without changing anything else, they will inevitably get fat. On the other hand, any fat person can become thin if they just start eating less and/or exercising more. If you doubt this, you doubt the very laws of physics.
It’s easy to see how (c) is wrong: there are other important facts about food besides calories, for example vitamins and minerals. When a person has food containing less than optimal amount of vitamins or minerals per calorie, they don’t have a choice between being fat or thin, but between being fat or sick. (Or alternatively, changing the composition of their diet, not just the amount.)
Okay, some proponents of “calories in, calories out” may now say that this is obvious, and that they obviously meant the advice to apply to a healthy diet. However, what if the problem is not with the diet per se, but with a way the individual body processes the food? For example, what if the food contains enough vitamins and minerals per calorie, but the body somehow extracts those vitamins and minerals inefficiently, so it reacts even to the optimal diet as if it was junk food? Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?
Ignoring the (c), we get a weaker variant of “calories in, calories out”, which is, approximately—maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.
But it is possible that some of the “calories in (the mouth)” may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?
Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?
In other words, I don’t doubt that the “calories in, calories out” model works perfectly for a spherical cow in a vacuum, but I am curious about how much such approximation applies to the real cases.
But even for the spherical cow in a vacuum, this model predicts that any constant lifestyle, unless perfectly balanced, should either lead to unlimited weight gain (if “calories in” exceed “calories out”) or unlimited weight loss (in the opposite case). While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value. The weight itself has an impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies, but I doubt that this is sufficient to balance the whole equation.
I thought that to most LW’ers the weak version of “Calories in, Calories out” was uncontroversial. One can accept that Calories in (the mouth) is not the whole story, and at the same time feel it’s pretty much most of the story.
The motte of “calories in, calories out” is a purely descriptive post-facto theory. If you lost weight, it means that your organism somehow spent more calories than it gained, and if you gained weight, it means that your organism somehow spent less calories than it gained, but the details about the calorie flows are completely unspecified.
The bailey of “calories in, calories out” is: “You complain about not losing weight? Just eat less and exercise more, dummy! You say you already tried that, but it didn’t work for you? Congratulations, you have successfully violated the laws of physics, go collect your Nobel Prize!”
What people who complain about this actually want: a strategy that fat people could use to lose weight without negative side-effects… or admitting that for some people such strategy doesn’t exist for metabolic reasons. The motte version of “calories in, calories out” is definitely not such strategy, but the bailey consists of pretending that it is.
In reality I think it’s likely that different people are overweight for different reasons.
Adenovirus 36 infections for example do correlate with overweight.
Partly because “The infection with Adv36 accelerates differentiation and proliferation of the 3T3-L1 human preadipocytes into adipocytes [27,43,44] and increases the concentration of lipid content in fat cells.”
Saying it’s “calories in, calories out” suggests that the fact that the virus results in more adipocytes (fat cells) in lab cells is irrelevant.
Lab animals with their controlled diets also got more overweight.
Investing money into finding out how to cure Adenovirus 36 seems important to me from a public health perspective but a group of researches of obesity who believe in the calorie in, calorie out maxim won’t direct their research that way.
It seems like we have the technology to produce vaccines against some types of Adenovirus.
The motte of “calories in, calories out” is a purely descriptive post-facto theory.
It is a also a predictive ex ante theory. It successfully predicts the change in your weight on the basis of your persistent net energy balance.
The bailey of “calories in, calories out” is: “You complain about not losing weight? Just eat less and exercise more, dummy! You say you already tried that, but it didn’t work for you?
… then continue. Eat LESS and exercise MORE. Still doesn’t work? Eat LESS and exercise MORE. I guarantee that at some point you will start losing weight
What people who complain about this actually want: a strategy that fat people could use to lose weight without negative side-effects...
Sure. People want a lot of things. I want the ability to fly, it’s just that pesky gravity that gets in the way. Wouldn’t it be great to jump off a cliff and soar without the negative side-effects of going splat! shortly thereafter?
Just a few comments ago you accused me of strawmanning, and now here you come with a comment that I wouldn’t have ascribed to the “calories in, calories out” fans, because I would think this would be too strawmanish. Yet, such opinions apparently do exist in the wild.
From another point of view, thank you for showing me that it was meaningful to start debating this topic.
Okay, so...
Let’s assume that “still doesn’t work” for some people means “when I try eating even less, I am so weak that I can barely move my body; yet my weight doesn’t decrease”. How specifically—excluding the possibility of magic—are such people supposed to apply the “eat less and exercise more” advice to become thin.
This is like telling people that levitation is easy: you just have to believe hard and raise yourself high in the air. Doesn’t work? Believe harder, and raise yourself higher! I guarantee that if you follow both parts of this advice, at some point you will start levitating (but I suspect you will probably ignore the second part, in which case, that’s your fault not mine).
Let’s assume that “still doesn’t work” for some people means “when I try eating even less, I am so weak that I can barely move my body; yet my weight doesn’t decrease”.
Let’s not. This is equivalent to discussing exercise by starting “let’s assume some people collapse from utter exhaustion on their way from the parking lot to the gym, what about them?” You are not saying yours is a central example, are you?
In any case, CICO is not a normative theory. It’s primarily a descriptive theory. It says that A (net energy balance) and B (body weight) always go together, A is necessary and sufficient for B and B is conclusive evidence for A.
CICO certainly has implications for attempts to lose weight (e.g.: if you’re not in calorie deficit, you are not going to lose weight), but it makes no claims about optimal (in various meanings) ways to lose weight. It says that there is a simple, specific way that always works: eat less. It does NOT say that it will be easy or pleasant or that your average Fatty McFatface will be able to stick with it for more than a day.
Issues with losing weight are usually psychological and often biochemical. These issues can be overpowered by eating less though, again, it’s not necessarily the optimal way to go about it. And, by the way, I assume general health—if you are or should be under medical care (e.g. you are a diabetic), such generic advice no longer applies.
Basically, the advantages of eating less as a way to lose weight are that it’s simple and, provided you can execute, it is guaranteed to work. The disadvantage is that it’s hard to execute because it’s unpleasant and few people can stick with doing unpleasant things for a long while. “Eat less” is good advice for some people and useless advice for others: YMMV as usual.
So… I guess we both agree that eating less and exercising more is a good strategy to lose weight unless there is a health-related reason why this strategy will not work.
(And that for different people, or even for the same person at a different age, the proportions of the food consumed and exercise necessary to lose weight may be quite different?)
And we disagree… about how frequent are these health-related reasons in population, and how often the people with the health-related reasons are given this advice anyway...?
I guess we both agree that eating less and exercising more is a good strategy to lose weight
It can be—for some people. It’s probably not a good strategy for other people. The simplest way to find out is to try.
the proportions of the food consumed and exercise necessary to lose weight may be quite different?
Yes, very much so. That’s why it says “eat less” and not “eat 1000 calories/day”.
And we disagree… about how frequent are these health-related reasons in population, and how often the people with the health-related reasons are given this advice anyway...?
I don’t know—neither of us made explicit claims about that :-) Generally speaking, humans are well-adapted to periods of starvation and fasting can help with some health problems. Diabetes is probably the most widespread disease which will present problems with “eat less” approach.
Seconded; it seems that for most people, much of the time, CICO is a fine approach to weight loss and will work if you even approximate your deficit and BMR. There is definitely weird stuff, but it’s not the MOST likely issue.
Just one point of data: I kept a spreadsheet when I lost 59 pounds in 96 days. I had values for my personal base burn as a function of current weight and per task (usually a rower and hiking), and a daily deficit of 2000 calories correlated fairly well with a daily loss of .55 pounds (in round numbers; I don’t want to sound like the proverbial economist with a sense of humor. I also went over some and under some, used nutritional labels and activity estimates that rounded to the nearest 10, &c.)
I was not scientifically rigorous so grain of salt, but over three months or so, I anecdotally found that 3500 calories of deficit correlated very well with a pound of loss. After that I stayed pretty constant while I was paying attention, 1-2 years. Bit North of there now, but I don’t do much counting anymore.
This is a good point. While “calories in != calories out” within a broad range of caloric inputs, because humans have some built-in ability to absorb fluctuations in food intake centered around each person’s metabolic setpoints, you can definitely get some play at the extrema of the caloric intake/expenditure axis.
In the opposite direction from your example, if someone has a hard time gaining weight, they may find that eating 3000 cal/day has no effect but eating a carefully measured 6000 cal/day definitely moves the needle upward.
The problem in general is that maintaining a caloric deficit of 2000 cal/day for weeks is going to be impossible to achieve for most people, and likewise maintaining a caloric excess of thousands of calories per day is a full-time job (ask any bodybuilder).
gives you a few calculators that estimate your resting energy burn rate. Each human will be slightly different being noisy systems. Add in an entire lifestyle of different potential variations and you get a good feel that this is a very fuzzy estimate.
The first one on google gave me 1818kCal a day. You can look at the equation that got to that.
CICO is a close enough approximation to use for dieting. Dieting systems usually do what they do based on the assumption of CICO. given CICO if you also only eat blueberries you wont be very hungry or similar.
I believe the Shangri-la diet works in an interesting way around disconnecting calories with pleasure reward.
Most diets work if you can stick to them. Different diets might sound like they are selling the “what you eat” part, but in reality they are usually selling the “you can stick to it” part disguised as the “what you eat” part.
If you also look into the energy burnt during say; an hour of running, an hour of walking, and an hour of sleeping. You can get a sense of the scale of how much exercise impacts weight loss (hint: not much).
This can also be reasoned from first CICO principles that you can eat more calories in 5 minutes than you can burn in 5 hours running a marathon. (You can out eat your exercise routine and more effective interventions will involve diet than just exercise, but of course both together is best.)
As a final note: There will always be another birthday cake.
a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;
This is certainly not true. Usually calories in food are measured burning the stuff and measuring the calories emitted, but of course our digestive tract doesn’t work like that.
This means that we always absorb less calories that are in the food, indeed cooking was a great revolution in human history because it allowed more calories to be extracted from the same amount of food.
b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;
This, on the other hand and with the caveat of a), seems pretty uncontroversial. There are different deposits of long-term energy, such as glycogen in the liver, glycogen in the muscles and adipose tissue. But other than accumulating or being used to produce ATP, I have never seen any reason to believe that calories are used for something else.
c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.
Well, this is obviously untrue, but usually “calories in, calories out” is used in the context of weight loss.
Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?
It can be, but the body is usually extremely efficient when extracting vitamins out of food. An inability to do that would be a serious business, most probably caused by a genetic disease, and surely cured by supplementation rather than eating large quantity of food.
maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.
I don’t see how the first sentence would work. As far as I know, there are no hidden reserve of energy besides glicogen, muscle proteins and fat.
But it is possible that some of the “calories in (the mouth)” may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?
This is a certainty. Think for example to all the calories contained in indigestible fibers.
Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?
That is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and is the way that most of our calories are expended: keeping body temperature constant, providing energy to all the chemical reaction in the body, etc.
While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value.
Yes, there is a set-point which is regulated by a complex interaction between various hormones, such as ghrelin, leptin, insulin, etc.
Not sure if I am reading your response correctly, so would you agree or disagree that it is possible for two people to eat the same food, do the same work, and yet one of them will be thin and the other one will be fat, because of some combination of:
different gut flora;
different genes contributing to efficiency of digestion;
different genes contributing to efficiency of keeping body temperature constant;
(other stuff I forgot to mention).
In other words, that there is such a thing as “metabolic privilege”, which is usually denied or ignored by the “calories in, calories out” proponents.
In other words, that there is such a thing as “metabolic privilege”, which is usually denied or ignored by the “calories in, calories out” proponents.
Huh? The individual metabolism (aka the “metabolic privilege”) is what primarily determines the “calories out” part. No one denies that people have different metabolisms.
The CICO theory says that the only way to lose weight is to have a negative calorie balance. You can achieve it in any way you want—by lowering the CI part, or by increasing the CO part—but it has to be there for you to lose weight.
The claims that all calories are fungible or that the CO part is stable are just strawmen.
No one denies that people have different metabolisms.
Statements including “no one denies that …” are usually false.
Regardless, my goal here was to ask people to help me decipher what “calories in” and “calories out” precisely mean, especially where the correct version could differ from the naive interpretation.
Because it seems to me that (a) the naive interpretation is wrong, but (b) most people use the “calories in, calories out” argument as if the naive interpretation is true. (“If you disagree with the naive interpretation, you ignore the laws of physics!”) Motte and bailey, etc.
Statements including “no one denies that …” are usually false.
Taken literally, yes. However these statements are not intended to be taken literally, they are a shorthand for “it is widely accepted that X is true, most people who deny X are either blatantly unreasonable or have strong incentives to do so. I do not expect sane people to deny X with a straight face”.
Regardless, my goal here was to ask people to help me decipher what “calories in” and “calories out” precisely mean
See the grandparent post. In particular, to repeat myself
The CICO theory says that the only way to lose weight is to have a negative calorie balance.
In general CICO posits one-to-one correspondence between net energy balance and gaining/losing weight, regardless of anything else. This is on a time scale where short-term fluctuations (from bowel movements to water retention) are ignored as noise.
CICO also does NOT say anything about the fat/muscle ratio, it does NOT say that different foods with the same calorie content will have the same effect on weight (food you eat generally affects both the CI and the CO parts), it does NOT say that specific levels of CI (e.g. 1000 calories/day) will result in specific gain/loss of weight.
You’re missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That’s what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they’ll feel correspondingly less hungry.
impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies
Actually, it’s mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.
People are forced to eat more than they should primarily because of hunger pangs.
I am not sure this is true in contemporary West. I suspect that a lot of overeating happens because of social cues (“I’m at a dinner party so I should eat even though I’m not hungry”) and for purely psychological reasons—from boredom and activity displacement (“I’d like to procrastinate a bit, let me go and have a snack”) to hedonics (“Sugar boosts make me feel better, yay sugar!”). None of that is actually hunger.
Perhaps that’s also a reason, but the role of insulin / leptin resistance in causing hunger pangs (contractions of the stomach) in situations when additional food is not actually required is pretty well established.
Oh, feelings of hunger certainly exist (though I’m not sure what does “additional food is not actually required” mean).
Perhaps it would be useful to draw a distinction between people who are trying to lose weight and who are not. The former are likely to get to the point of actually being hungry and so being driven by hunger. The latter, I think, rarely get hungry and tend to overeat for non-hunger reasons.
A simple daily-iterated formula to start:
WEIGHT = WEIGHT—WEIGHTBURN + FOOD
My assumptions are that WEIGHT is the person’s current weight. WEIGHTBURN is the amount the person burn per every day from energy consumption + bodily maintenance. FOOD varies from person to person.
My questions for you:
But it is possible that some of the “calories in (the mouth)” may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?
Not unreasonable. I remember reading that while brocoli has more calcium than milk, the composition of milk allows the calcium to be absorbed better. In fact, the components of brocoli seem to contain something that actually inhibits calcium absorption!
More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct? (I assume that food labels use some sort of average, say, 10,000⁄100 = x per 100g. Correct me if this is wrong please!)
Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?
Define your ‘work’. Is it physical activity without any body maintenance? Keeping your body temperature, for example. Digesting food also takes ‘work’. I don’t think you can burn so much calories from exercise alone, in fact. Calorie counting is a better choice for fat loss than walking/running distance.
More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct?
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between “food labels” and “actual food digestion” may depend on the specific person. To use your example, some person may be able to better extract calcium from food than other person, either because their genes create different enzymes, or because their gut flora preprocesses the food differently.
Now apply this argument to the calories themselves. Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
Define your ‘work’.
Well, you have just returned my question. I was curious whether there are ways to spend calories that most people would forget to think about when thinking about “work”.
For example, whether it is possible that we could observe two people the whole day and conclude that they do the same things (same kind of work, same kind of sport) and therefore their “calories out” should be approximately the same, while in reality their “calories out” would differ because one of them e.g. wears a warmer sweater.
Adding these two questions together, I am asking whether it is possible to have two people eat the same food, do the same amount of work and sport, and yet at the end of the day one of them gains extra calories and the other does not.
Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
Yes. Off the top of my head some factors which will affect this: bowel transit time, the general condition of the GI tract including the amount/efficiency of digestive enzymes, gut flora particulars.
I am asking whether it is possible to have two people eat the same food, do the same amount of work and sport, and yet at the end of the day one of them gains extra calories and the other does not.
Certainly possible. In fact, I would expect this to be true for the same person at different ages: a 20-year-old who loses weight at a certain food/activity level would eventually become a 40-year-old who would gain weight at the same food/activity level.
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between “food labels” and “actual food digestion” may depend on the specific person.
Obviously; things like lactose tolerance seem like clear examples of this, and Lumifer’s list seems like the sort of things I would expect matter in less obvious but more important ways.
I’m not really sure how to pinpoint individual differences. I’m going to stop here but I honestly think it would be nice to break this down further. A potentially harmful practice could be taking some sort of average ability to digest food, and then start deriving standard deviations from it. I’m saying ‘harmful’ because I (1) do not know how to do this and (2) I have no idea if this is the right thing to do.
Now apply this argument to the calories themselves. Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
I’d imagine that people who had a less economical digestion would probably have less offspring, but that’s just a guess.
Well, you have just returned my question. I was curious whether there are ways to spend calories that most people would forget to think about when thinking about “work”.
It would be greatly helpful to have a list of energy spendings by the body, then. Can someone provide directions?
EnergyIntakeFromFood = Food’sCaloricComposition (* PercentAbsorbed: where this is probably close to 100%)
This is also more complicated because food travelling through your digestive system (or liquid travelling through your filtration system) can be at various stages and weights. For example watermelon has a lot of water in it, so will initially make your weight go up, but shortly after only the sugar will remain.
Other factors like feeling bloated may genuinely be caused by water retention. BUT if we try to build a model assuming these other factors are not there...
And assuming that when you eat food, the mass of the food is equivalent to your weight change due to the caloric load. (which is distinctly not true for chocolate, where you can eat less weight of chocolate but put on more weight because of the calories. The weight comes from added water when you process that food.)
(this is where the weight-measure starts breaking down but if we keep going anyway we can still get a useful model)
Basically every person (including those who will tell you that calories in = calories out) has seen babies, so if your model of the people who disagree with you would be baffled by the fact that fat dad and football sized son don’t gain the same weight from eating the same food then your model of their beliefs may be lacking an important nuance.
I have heard repeatedly the argument about “calories in, calories out” (e.g. here). Seems to me that there are a few unspoken assumptions, and I would like to ask how true they are in reality. Here are the assumptions:
a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;
b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;
and in some more strawmanish forms of the argument:
c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.
If we assume these things to be true, it seems like a law of physics that if you count the calories in the food you put in your mouth, and subtract the amount of exercise you do, the result exactly determines whether you gain or lose fat. Taken literally, if a healthy and thin person starts eating an extra apple a day, or starts taking a somewhat shorter walk to their work, without changing anything else, they will inevitably get fat. On the other hand, any fat person can become thin if they just start eating less and/or exercising more. If you doubt this, you doubt the very laws of physics.
It’s easy to see how (c) is wrong: there are other important facts about food besides calories, for example vitamins and minerals. When a person has food containing less than optimal amount of vitamins or minerals per calorie, they don’t have a choice between being fat or thin, but between being fat or sick. (Or alternatively, changing the composition of their diet, not just the amount.)
Okay, some proponents of “calories in, calories out” may now say that this is obvious, and that they obviously meant the advice to apply to a healthy diet. However, what if the problem is not with the diet per se, but with a way the individual body processes the food? For example, what if the food contains enough vitamins and minerals per calorie, but the body somehow extracts those vitamins and minerals inefficiently, so it reacts even to the optimal diet as if it was junk food? Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?
Ignoring the (c), we get a weaker variant of “calories in, calories out”, which is, approximately—maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.
But it is possible that some of the “calories in (the mouth)” may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?
Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?
In other words, I don’t doubt that the “calories in, calories out” model works perfectly for a spherical cow in a vacuum, but I am curious about how much such approximation applies to the real cases.
But even for the spherical cow in a vacuum, this model predicts that any constant lifestyle, unless perfectly balanced, should either lead to unlimited weight gain (if “calories in” exceed “calories out”) or unlimited weight loss (in the opposite case). While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value. The weight itself has an impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies, but I doubt that this is sufficient to balance the whole equation.
I thought that to most LW’ers the weak version of “Calories in, Calories out” was uncontroversial. One can accept that Calories in (the mouth) is not the whole story, and at the same time feel it’s pretty much most of the story.
EY likes to say that “mass in, mass out” works even better for predicting changes in weight.
Yeah, I feel about this similarly.
The motte of “calories in, calories out” is a purely descriptive post-facto theory. If you lost weight, it means that your organism somehow spent more calories than it gained, and if you gained weight, it means that your organism somehow spent less calories than it gained, but the details about the calorie flows are completely unspecified.
The bailey of “calories in, calories out” is: “You complain about not losing weight? Just eat less and exercise more, dummy! You say you already tried that, but it didn’t work for you? Congratulations, you have successfully violated the laws of physics, go collect your Nobel Prize!”
What people who complain about this actually want: a strategy that fat people could use to lose weight without negative side-effects… or admitting that for some people such strategy doesn’t exist for metabolic reasons. The motte version of “calories in, calories out” is definitely not such strategy, but the bailey consists of pretending that it is.
In reality I think it’s likely that different people are overweight for different reasons. Adenovirus 36 infections for example do correlate with overweight.
Partly because “The infection with Adv36 accelerates differentiation and proliferation of the 3T3-L1 human preadipocytes into adipocytes [27,43,44] and increases the concentration of lipid content in fat cells.”
Saying it’s “calories in, calories out” suggests that the fact that the virus results in more adipocytes (fat cells) in lab cells is irrelevant.
Lab animals with their controlled diets also got more overweight.
Investing money into finding out how to cure Adenovirus 36 seems important to me from a public health perspective but a group of researches of obesity who believe in the calorie in, calorie out maxim won’t direct their research that way.
It seems like we have the technology to produce vaccines against some types of Adenovirus.
It is a also a predictive ex ante theory. It successfully predicts the change in your weight on the basis of your persistent net energy balance.
… then continue. Eat LESS and exercise MORE. Still doesn’t work? Eat LESS and exercise MORE. I guarantee that at some point you will start losing weight
Sure. People want a lot of things. I want the ability to fly, it’s just that pesky gravity that gets in the way. Wouldn’t it be great to jump off a cliff and soar without the negative side-effects of going splat! shortly thereafter?
Just a few comments ago you accused me of strawmanning, and now here you come with a comment that I wouldn’t have ascribed to the “calories in, calories out” fans, because I would think this would be too strawmanish. Yet, such opinions apparently do exist in the wild.
From another point of view, thank you for showing me that it was meaningful to start debating this topic.
Okay, so...
Let’s assume that “still doesn’t work” for some people means “when I try eating even less, I am so weak that I can barely move my body; yet my weight doesn’t decrease”. How specifically—excluding the possibility of magic—are such people supposed to apply the “eat less and exercise more” advice to become thin.
This is like telling people that levitation is easy: you just have to believe hard and raise yourself high in the air. Doesn’t work? Believe harder, and raise yourself higher! I guarantee that if you follow both parts of this advice, at some point you will start levitating (but I suspect you will probably ignore the second part, in which case, that’s your fault not mine).
Let’s not. This is equivalent to discussing exercise by starting “let’s assume some people collapse from utter exhaustion on their way from the parking lot to the gym, what about them?” You are not saying yours is a central example, are you?
In any case, CICO is not a normative theory. It’s primarily a descriptive theory. It says that A (net energy balance) and B (body weight) always go together, A is necessary and sufficient for B and B is conclusive evidence for A.
CICO certainly has implications for attempts to lose weight (e.g.: if you’re not in calorie deficit, you are not going to lose weight), but it makes no claims about optimal (in various meanings) ways to lose weight. It says that there is a simple, specific way that always works: eat less. It does NOT say that it will be easy or pleasant or that your average Fatty McFatface will be able to stick with it for more than a day.
Issues with losing weight are usually psychological and often biochemical. These issues can be overpowered by eating less though, again, it’s not necessarily the optimal way to go about it. And, by the way, I assume general health—if you are or should be under medical care (e.g. you are a diabetic), such generic advice no longer applies.
Basically, the advantages of eating less as a way to lose weight are that it’s simple and, provided you can execute, it is guaranteed to work. The disadvantage is that it’s hard to execute because it’s unpleasant and few people can stick with doing unpleasant things for a long while. “Eat less” is good advice for some people and useless advice for others: YMMV as usual.
So… I guess we both agree that eating less and exercising more is a good strategy to lose weight unless there is a health-related reason why this strategy will not work.
(And that for different people, or even for the same person at a different age, the proportions of the food consumed and exercise necessary to lose weight may be quite different?)
And we disagree… about how frequent are these health-related reasons in population, and how often the people with the health-related reasons are given this advice anyway...?
It can be—for some people. It’s probably not a good strategy for other people. The simplest way to find out is to try.
Yes, very much so. That’s why it says “eat less” and not “eat 1000 calories/day”.
I don’t know—neither of us made explicit claims about that :-) Generally speaking, humans are well-adapted to periods of starvation and fasting can help with some health problems. Diabetes is probably the most widespread disease which will present problems with “eat less” approach.
Seconded; it seems that for most people, much of the time, CICO is a fine approach to weight loss and will work if you even approximate your deficit and BMR. There is definitely weird stuff, but it’s not the MOST likely issue.
Just one point of data: I kept a spreadsheet when I lost 59 pounds in 96 days. I had values for my personal base burn as a function of current weight and per task (usually a rower and hiking), and a daily deficit of 2000 calories correlated fairly well with a daily loss of .55 pounds (in round numbers; I don’t want to sound like the proverbial economist with a sense of humor. I also went over some and under some, used nutritional labels and activity estimates that rounded to the nearest 10, &c.)
I was not scientifically rigorous so grain of salt, but over three months or so, I anecdotally found that 3500 calories of deficit correlated very well with a pound of loss. After that I stayed pretty constant while I was paying attention, 1-2 years. Bit North of there now, but I don’t do much counting anymore.
This is a good point. While “calories in != calories out” within a broad range of caloric inputs, because humans have some built-in ability to absorb fluctuations in food intake centered around each person’s metabolic setpoints, you can definitely get some play at the extrema of the caloric intake/expenditure axis.
In the opposite direction from your example, if someone has a hard time gaining weight, they may find that eating 3000 cal/day has no effect but eating a carefully measured 6000 cal/day definitely moves the needle upward.
The problem in general is that maintaining a caloric deficit of 2000 cal/day for weeks is going to be impossible to achieve for most people, and likewise maintaining a caloric excess of thousands of calories per day is a full-time job (ask any bodybuilder).
LMGTFY: “base metabolic rate calculator”
gives you a few calculators that estimate your resting energy burn rate. Each human will be slightly different being noisy systems. Add in an entire lifestyle of different potential variations and you get a good feel that this is a very fuzzy estimate.
The first one on google gave me 1818kCal a day. You can look at the equation that got to that.
CICO is a close enough approximation to use for dieting. Dieting systems usually do what they do based on the assumption of CICO. given CICO if you also only eat blueberries you wont be very hungry or similar.
I believe the Shangri-la diet works in an interesting way around disconnecting calories with pleasure reward.
Most diets work if you can stick to them. Different diets might sound like they are selling the “what you eat” part, but in reality they are usually selling the “you can stick to it” part disguised as the “what you eat” part.
If you also look into the energy burnt during say; an hour of running, an hour of walking, and an hour of sleeping. You can get a sense of the scale of how much exercise impacts weight loss (hint: not much).
This can also be reasoned from first CICO principles that you can eat more calories in 5 minutes than you can burn in 5 hours running a marathon. (You can out eat your exercise routine and more effective interventions will involve diet than just exercise, but of course both together is best.)
As a final note: There will always be another birthday cake.
This is certainly not true. Usually calories in food are measured burning the stuff and measuring the calories emitted, but of course our digestive tract doesn’t work like that. This means that we always absorb less calories that are in the food, indeed cooking was a great revolution in human history because it allowed more calories to be extracted from the same amount of food.
This, on the other hand and with the caveat of a), seems pretty uncontroversial. There are different deposits of long-term energy, such as glycogen in the liver, glycogen in the muscles and adipose tissue. But other than accumulating or being used to produce ATP, I have never seen any reason to believe that calories are used for something else.
Well, this is obviously untrue, but usually “calories in, calories out” is used in the context of weight loss.
It can be, but the body is usually extremely efficient when extracting vitamins out of food. An inability to do that would be a serious business, most probably caused by a genetic disease, and surely cured by supplementation rather than eating large quantity of food.
I don’t see how the first sentence would work. As far as I know, there are no hidden reserve of energy besides glicogen, muscle proteins and fat.
This is a certainty. Think for example to all the calories contained in indigestible fibers.
That is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and is the way that most of our calories are expended: keeping body temperature constant, providing energy to all the chemical reaction in the body, etc.
Yes, there is a set-point which is regulated by a complex interaction between various hormones, such as ghrelin, leptin, insulin, etc.
Not sure if I am reading your response correctly, so would you agree or disagree that it is possible for two people to eat the same food, do the same work, and yet one of them will be thin and the other one will be fat, because of some combination of:
different gut flora;
different genes contributing to efficiency of digestion;
different genes contributing to efficiency of keeping body temperature constant;
(other stuff I forgot to mention).
In other words, that there is such a thing as “metabolic privilege”, which is usually denied or ignored by the “calories in, calories out” proponents.
Huh? The individual metabolism (aka the “metabolic privilege”) is what primarily determines the “calories out” part. No one denies that people have different metabolisms.
The CICO theory says that the only way to lose weight is to have a negative calorie balance. You can achieve it in any way you want—by lowering the CI part, or by increasing the CO part—but it has to be there for you to lose weight.
The claims that all calories are fungible or that the CO part is stable are just strawmen.
Statements including “no one denies that …” are usually false.
Regardless, my goal here was to ask people to help me decipher what “calories in” and “calories out” precisely mean, especially where the correct version could differ from the naive interpretation.
Because it seems to me that (a) the naive interpretation is wrong, but (b) most people use the “calories in, calories out” argument as if the naive interpretation is true. (“If you disagree with the naive interpretation, you ignore the laws of physics!”) Motte and bailey, etc.
Taken literally, yes. However these statements are not intended to be taken literally, they are a shorthand for “it is widely accepted that X is true, most people who deny X are either blatantly unreasonable or have strong incentives to do so. I do not expect sane people to deny X with a straight face”.
See the grandparent post. In particular, to repeat myself
In general CICO posits one-to-one correspondence between net energy balance and gaining/losing weight, regardless of anything else. This is on a time scale where short-term fluctuations (from bowel movements to water retention) are ignored as noise.
CICO also does NOT say anything about the fat/muscle ratio, it does NOT say that different foods with the same calorie content will have the same effect on weight (food you eat generally affects both the CI and the CO parts), it does NOT say that specific levels of CI (e.g. 1000 calories/day) will result in specific gain/loss of weight.
Well, I’d generally never let two strawmen fight each other.
You’re missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That’s what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they’ll feel correspondingly less hungry.
Actually, it’s mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.
I am not sure this is true in contemporary West. I suspect that a lot of overeating happens because of social cues (“I’m at a dinner party so I should eat even though I’m not hungry”) and for purely psychological reasons—from boredom and activity displacement (“I’d like to procrastinate a bit, let me go and have a snack”) to hedonics (“Sugar boosts make me feel better, yay sugar!”). None of that is actually hunger.
Perhaps that’s also a reason, but the role of insulin / leptin resistance in causing hunger pangs (contractions of the stomach) in situations when additional food is not actually required is pretty well established.
Oh, feelings of hunger certainly exist (though I’m not sure what does “additional food is not actually required” mean).
Perhaps it would be useful to draw a distinction between people who are trying to lose weight and who are not. The former are likely to get to the point of actually being hungry and so being driven by hunger. The latter, I think, rarely get hungry and tend to overeat for non-hunger reasons.
Can we get in some agreed upon middle ground?
A simple daily-iterated formula to start: WEIGHT = WEIGHT—WEIGHTBURN + FOOD
My assumptions are that WEIGHT is the person’s current weight. WEIGHTBURN is the amount the person burn per every day from energy consumption + bodily maintenance. FOOD varies from person to person.
My questions for you:
Not unreasonable. I remember reading that while brocoli has more calcium than milk, the composition of milk allows the calcium to be absorbed better. In fact, the components of brocoli seem to contain something that actually inhibits calcium absorption!
More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct? (I assume that food labels use some sort of average, say, 10,000⁄100 = x per 100g. Correct me if this is wrong please!)
Define your ‘work’. Is it physical activity without any body maintenance? Keeping your body temperature, for example. Digesting food also takes ‘work’. I don’t think you can burn so much calories from exercise alone, in fact. Calorie counting is a better choice for fat loss than walking/running distance.
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between “food labels” and “actual food digestion” may depend on the specific person. To use your example, some person may be able to better extract calcium from food than other person, either because their genes create different enzymes, or because their gut flora preprocesses the food differently.
Now apply this argument to the calories themselves. Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
Well, you have just returned my question. I was curious whether there are ways to spend calories that most people would forget to think about when thinking about “work”.
For example, whether it is possible that we could observe two people the whole day and conclude that they do the same things (same kind of work, same kind of sport) and therefore their “calories out” should be approximately the same, while in reality their “calories out” would differ because one of them e.g. wears a warmer sweater.
Adding these two questions together, I am asking whether it is possible to have two people eat the same food, do the same amount of work and sport, and yet at the end of the day one of them gains extra calories and the other does not.
Yes. Off the top of my head some factors which will affect this: bowel transit time, the general condition of the GI tract including the amount/efficiency of digestive enzymes, gut flora particulars.
Certainly possible. In fact, I would expect this to be true for the same person at different ages: a 20-year-old who loses weight at a certain food/activity level would eventually become a 40-year-old who would gain weight at the same food/activity level.
Obviously; things like lactose tolerance seem like clear examples of this, and Lumifer’s list seems like the sort of things I would expect matter in less obvious but more important ways.
I’m not really sure how to pinpoint individual differences. I’m going to stop here but I honestly think it would be nice to break this down further. A potentially harmful practice could be taking some sort of average ability to digest food, and then start deriving standard deviations from it. I’m saying ‘harmful’ because I (1) do not know how to do this and (2) I have no idea if this is the right thing to do.
I’d imagine that people who had a less economical digestion would probably have less offspring, but that’s just a guess.
It would be greatly helpful to have a list of energy spendings by the body, then. Can someone provide directions?
going to modify for clarification:
EndOfTodayWeight = StartOfTodayWeight—EenergyBurn + EnergyIntakeFromFood + WaterIn—WaterOut
where Energyburn is:
EnergyBurn = BaseMetabolicRate + IncidentalExercise + PurposefulExercise (+ SomeFudgeFactor for individual variance)
And:
EnergyIntakeFromFood = Food’sCaloricComposition (* PercentAbsorbed: where this is probably close to 100%)
This is also more complicated because food travelling through your digestive system (or liquid travelling through your filtration system) can be at various stages and weights. For example watermelon has a lot of water in it, so will initially make your weight go up, but shortly after only the sugar will remain.
Other factors like feeling bloated may genuinely be caused by water retention. BUT if we try to build a model assuming these other factors are not there...
And assuming that when you eat food, the mass of the food is equivalent to your weight change due to the caloric load. (which is distinctly not true for chocolate, where you can eat less weight of chocolate but put on more weight because of the calories. The weight comes from added water when you process that food.)
(this is where the weight-measure starts breaking down but if we keep going anyway we can still get a useful model)
Basically every person (including those who will tell you that calories in = calories out) has seen babies, so if your model of the people who disagree with you would be baffled by the fact that fat dad and football sized son don’t gain the same weight from eating the same food then your model of their beliefs may be lacking an important nuance.