I haven’t checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can’t track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it’s been easy. When I’m dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that’s after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.
I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn’t work.
Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.
My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.
There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA’s Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That’s before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.
So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they’re recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It’s unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.
All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can’t imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake,
If that’s the case, why does it work?
I agree that calorie content of any particular meal is hard to measure accurately, but over time, the calorie content of many meals should gravitate towards the average.
You’re going overboard by stating, not just that CI:CO is hard, but that it’s impossible.
You’re saying that my positive experience with CI:CO over the past 5 years, which I was able to confirm numerous times, is a fluke.
That’s you being offensive and arrogant. Yes, you should be tapping out.
Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. It happens to be the case that this thing works for you. That is only very weak evidence that it works for anyone else at all. All humans are not the same.
We recommend getting over being insulted and frustrated when things that work for you specifically turn out to be flukes, it’s not a surprising thing and sufficiently internalizing how many actual studies turn out to be flukes would make it the obvious result. Reality shouldn’t be strange or surprising or insulting!
It doesn’t only work for me. It’s how most people I know, who are into fitness, manage their weight. The “Calories In” part is not eating too much. The “Calories Out” part is maintaining your metabolism by eating small meals regularly, exercising, and eating lots of protein to gain and preserve muscle mass.
It works. It works for a lot of people.
In fact, aside from gastric bypass surgery, it’s the only reliable way to lose weight that I know. And gastric bypass surgery is a form of CI:CO!
And then we have a bunch of people on Less Wrong, all of whom appear to be convinced that human bodies can somehow violate the rules of thermodynamics. Or that the calorie content of foods varies so wildly no one can ever track it well enough to lose weight. Then when challenged, you resort to arguments like this:
The sun is dark green.
No, it’s bright yellow, I saw it this morning.
That’s anecdotal evidence. It’s no good as science. It’s green, stop spreading your bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that it was yellow every time I saw it in my life. It was never green.
More anecdotal evidence. What you see is not what other people see. Learn to science, man!
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but this conversation has become so ridiculous, I am left with no more credible explanations for this denialism than that you guys are chronically fat, and hiding behind excuses because you lack the will power to stop slurping Double Diet Mountain Dew. Then, you make endless posts about beating akrasia.
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but...
There is not ever any reason to bring the conversation down to this level. In the future, consider writing only the first half of a comment in which the second half is going to be needlessly offensive and contribute nothing.
Or, you know, that “tapping out” thing paper-machine did? Which you were mocking him about? That is an acceptable thing to do when you don’t think the argument is productive any longer. Reading between the lines, this is what you think as well. Except that for some reason you feel the need to signal it by insulting everyone.
I haven’t checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can’t track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it’s been easy. When I’m dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that’s after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.
I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn’t work.
Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.
My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.
There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA’s Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That’s before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.
So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they’re recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It’s unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.
All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,
is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can’t imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?
I was right in the grandparent. I’m tapping out.
If that’s the case, why does it work?
I agree that calorie content of any particular meal is hard to measure accurately, but over time, the calorie content of many meals should gravitate towards the average.
You’re going overboard by stating, not just that CI:CO is hard, but that it’s impossible.
You’re saying that my positive experience with CI:CO over the past 5 years, which I was able to confirm numerous times, is a fluke.
That’s you being offensive and arrogant. Yes, you should be tapping out.
Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. It happens to be the case that this thing works for you. That is only very weak evidence that it works for anyone else at all. All humans are not the same.
We recommend getting over being insulted and frustrated when things that work for you specifically turn out to be flukes, it’s not a surprising thing and sufficiently internalizing how many actual studies turn out to be flukes would make it the obvious result. Reality shouldn’t be strange or surprising or insulting!
It doesn’t only work for me. It’s how most people I know, who are into fitness, manage their weight. The “Calories In” part is not eating too much. The “Calories Out” part is maintaining your metabolism by eating small meals regularly, exercising, and eating lots of protein to gain and preserve muscle mass.
It works. It works for a lot of people.
In fact, aside from gastric bypass surgery, it’s the only reliable way to lose weight that I know. And gastric bypass surgery is a form of CI:CO!
And then we have a bunch of people on Less Wrong, all of whom appear to be convinced that human bodies can somehow violate the rules of thermodynamics. Or that the calorie content of foods varies so wildly no one can ever track it well enough to lose weight. Then when challenged, you resort to arguments like this:
The sun is dark green.
No, it’s bright yellow, I saw it this morning.
That’s anecdotal evidence. It’s no good as science. It’s green, stop spreading your bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that it was yellow every time I saw it in my life. It was never green.
More anecdotal evidence. What you see is not what other people see. Learn to science, man!
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but this conversation has become so ridiculous, I am left with no more credible explanations for this denialism than that you guys are chronically fat, and hiding behind excuses because you lack the will power to stop slurping Double Diet Mountain Dew. Then, you make endless posts about beating akrasia.
There is not ever any reason to bring the conversation down to this level. In the future, consider writing only the first half of a comment in which the second half is going to be needlessly offensive and contribute nothing.
Or, you know, that “tapping out” thing paper-machine did? Which you were mocking him about? That is an acceptable thing to do when you don’t think the argument is productive any longer. Reading between the lines, this is what you think as well. Except that for some reason you feel the need to signal it by insulting everyone.