Regarding CICO, I assume Calories Out includes calories burnt. I'll only note that the latter can vary; that's why anyone trying to lose weight should avoid near-starvation diets, since their metabolism will slow down and (aside from being miserable) take longer to lose weight.
Great points! I agree that believing in UFOs is epistemically more defensible than these other obviously wrong ideas.
There's another dimension though, which is how salient the belief is. I would argue that holding an irrational view on an issue that's important to your life is probably worse than holding a *very* irrational view that has little practical effect (such as housing, where the average person's view has ~0 impact).
Completely agree with this. The vector has a direction and magnitude, so even if the direction is off, if the magnitude is small, the size of the "wrongness" component is still small.
Compare that to devoting your life to something that's somewhat wrong, your "wrongness" component might end up comparatively large.
However, to get the maximum "rightness" component, you've got to go all in and try to point 100% of your available effort at the best thing.
'Hard CICO' being on here feels odd to me. I've never seen anyone express disbelief of that – it's always been about some form of 'soft CICO', as defined here (though granted 'things I have seen personally' does not determine the things you have).
All the contention I've ever seen about CICO have come from the opposite direction – treating CICO as if the abstract conversation of energy model is all you need to understand for it to work as a dieting strategy. The conversation of energy in the body as an abstract model doesn't really map onto that, because it doesn't represent the messy reality that applies at every single level of it (calorie numbers being approximations AND not representative of how human bodies process food; different degrees of absorption; satiety; etc.)
You acknowledge that 'soft CICO' has all this messiness; it's just backwards from my experience about which bit people actually get hung up on. I think, for this narrow definition of 'hard CICO' which is just 'your body cannot break the laws of physics', you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who actually disagrees, though? Unless this is a recurrent thing outside of my spheres that I'm blissfully unaware of.
It usually looks like something like "I'm not losing weight on 300 calories a day." Granted, they're not claiming 0 calories a day, but a human brain alone needs about 300 calories daily:
Often, the response to that (as seen in the thread) is that they're actually eating too little to lose weight. I would call this a Hard CICO violation.
Hah, yes, that's a good example. I think some people learned the complexities of the how reality complicates the in/out model, and then massively overfit for the effects they're expecting to see, leading to nonsense.
I think it is theoretically possible to eat that little for a very short period and see perverse effects on the scales, but instead mostly due to how confounded measuring weight is as a proxy for stored energy, plus likely additional measuring errors like weighing at different times/states each day. (Potentially other things like digestion slowing down, meaning more fecal mass, and so forth.) There are lots of ways in which one can appear not to lose weight despite (seemingly) eating very little, at least in the short term.
The OP of the post is also an example of more the kind of thing I was talking about, which is falling for the trap that the in/out effect should be simple. Assuming they're sincere, it's almost certain that they're counting calories very imprecisely (from memory, when they've studied this, it can easily be off by a big multiplier), possibly compounded with imprecise calorie numbers recorded for the foods (also sometimes very far off, and also not counted in a way that necessarily represents how the body processes that food, since the body doesn't actually burn it). The body's TDEE also does change in response to how much food is coming in (e.g. you fidget less when you're dieting, as well as having less other motivation to move), which also reduces the difference.
(Someone in the thread also says an encapsulated version of the thing I'm talking about, which is 'Calories out equals weight lost.'. That's one of those things which I would say is 'mostly true but profoundly unhelpful' – the real problem is in having any kind of confidence in what 'calories out' actually are vs what's going in, and what confounding factors apply to 'weight lost'.)
I guess what I’m getting at in my longwinded comments is that I have some sympathy for how people’s views on the matter get so messed up.
It is strictly true to say that ‘calories in - calories out = weight lost’, but every single part of that equation has about 14 footnotes about how it actually works in practice. Some people expect it to be simple, and get frustrated. Others learn that it's complicated and then overmythologise it.
Suggesting that thermodynamics requires the body to make “food eaten = miles run” in the way most people mean when they say CICO is a pure straw man argument.
I’m just going to put this here, as one example:
“As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size.”
Suggesting that I have suggested “food eaten = miles run” is a straw man argument.
I distinguish between Hard CICO and Soft CICO for this reason, though there are too many variations of Soft CICO to name. I specifically call out Hard CICO denial because it's physics-breaking; I make no claims about all other CICOs.
Even your linked paper seems to similarly accept Hard CICO:
"Studies such as these, as well as results here, suggest that physical activity may be only one piece of a dynamic metabolic strategy that is continuously responding to changes in energy availability and demand."
Regarding CICO, I assume Calories Out includes calories burnt. I'll only note that the latter can vary; that's why anyone trying to lose weight should avoid near-starvation diets, since their metabolism will slow down and (aside from being miserable) take longer to lose weight.
Great points! I agree that believing in UFOs is epistemically more defensible than these other obviously wrong ideas.
There's another dimension though, which is how salient the belief is. I would argue that holding an irrational view on an issue that's important to your life is probably worse than holding a *very* irrational view that has little practical effect (such as housing, where the average person's view has ~0 impact).
Completely agree with this. The vector has a direction and magnitude, so even if the direction is off, if the magnitude is small, the size of the "wrongness" component is still small.
Compare that to devoting your life to something that's somewhat wrong, your "wrongness" component might end up comparatively large.
However, to get the maximum "rightness" component, you've got to go all in and try to point 100% of your available effort at the best thing.
'Hard CICO' being on here feels odd to me. I've never seen anyone express disbelief of that – it's always been about some form of 'soft CICO', as defined here (though granted 'things I have seen personally' does not determine the things you have).
All the contention I've ever seen about CICO have come from the opposite direction – treating CICO as if the abstract conversation of energy model is all you need to understand for it to work as a dieting strategy. The conversation of energy in the body as an abstract model doesn't really map onto that, because it doesn't represent the messy reality that applies at every single level of it (calorie numbers being approximations AND not representative of how human bodies process food; different degrees of absorption; satiety; etc.)
You acknowledge that 'soft CICO' has all this messiness; it's just backwards from my experience about which bit people actually get hung up on. I think, for this narrow definition of 'hard CICO' which is just 'your body cannot break the laws of physics', you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who actually disagrees, though? Unless this is a recurrent thing outside of my spheres that I'm blissfully unaware of.
It usually looks like something like "I'm not losing weight on 300 calories a day." Granted, they're not claiming 0 calories a day, but a human brain alone needs about 300 calories daily:
https://www.reddit.com/r/caloriedeficit/comments/1kf6srp/why_am_i_in_a_large_calorie_deficit_only_300/
Often, the response to that (as seen in the thread) is that they're actually eating too little to lose weight. I would call this a Hard CICO violation.
Hah, yes, that's a good example. I think some people learned the complexities of the how reality complicates the in/out model, and then massively overfit for the effects they're expecting to see, leading to nonsense.
I think it is theoretically possible to eat that little for a very short period and see perverse effects on the scales, but instead mostly due to how confounded measuring weight is as a proxy for stored energy, plus likely additional measuring errors like weighing at different times/states each day. (Potentially other things like digestion slowing down, meaning more fecal mass, and so forth.) There are lots of ways in which one can appear not to lose weight despite (seemingly) eating very little, at least in the short term.
The OP of the post is also an example of more the kind of thing I was talking about, which is falling for the trap that the in/out effect should be simple. Assuming they're sincere, it's almost certain that they're counting calories very imprecisely (from memory, when they've studied this, it can easily be off by a big multiplier), possibly compounded with imprecise calorie numbers recorded for the foods (also sometimes very far off, and also not counted in a way that necessarily represents how the body processes that food, since the body doesn't actually burn it). The body's TDEE also does change in response to how much food is coming in (e.g. you fidget less when you're dieting, as well as having less other motivation to move), which also reduces the difference.
(Someone in the thread also says an encapsulated version of the thing I'm talking about, which is 'Calories out equals weight lost.'. That's one of those things which I would say is 'mostly true but profoundly unhelpful' – the real problem is in having any kind of confidence in what 'calories out' actually are vs what's going in, and what confounding factors apply to 'weight lost'.)
I guess what I’m getting at in my longwinded comments is that I have some sympathy for how people’s views on the matter get so messed up.
It is strictly true to say that ‘calories in - calories out = weight lost’, but every single part of that equation has about 14 footnotes about how it actually works in practice. Some people expect it to be simple, and get frustrated. Others learn that it's complicated and then overmythologise it.
Suggesting that thermodynamics requires the body to make “food eaten = miles run” in the way most people mean when they say CICO is a pure straw man argument.
I’m just going to put this here, as one example:
“As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503
Suggesting that I have suggested “food eaten = miles run” is a straw man argument.
I distinguish between Hard CICO and Soft CICO for this reason, though there are too many variations of Soft CICO to name. I specifically call out Hard CICO denial because it's physics-breaking; I make no claims about all other CICOs.
Even your linked paper seems to similarly accept Hard CICO:
"Studies such as these, as well as results here, suggest that physical activity may be only one piece of a dynamic metabolic strategy that is continuously responding to changes in energy availability and demand."