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Diet, Nutrition & Weight Loss
A complete and total repudiation of all the people who bleat "calories in, calories out"
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Anonymous
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So it is generally CICO but we need to be more aware of why cico is hard?
I fully appreciate that limiting food intake and calories can be very difficult for a variety of reasons but it does still seem like cico is correct when it comes to weight gain/loss… |
Anonymous
That is right. CICO is what people need to have in mind. It works. It only doesn’t work (as well) when the calories in have been in excess for so long that there becomes so much extra stored energy (body fat) that metabolic problems start happening and there is no longer a path forward to create enough of a calorie deficit to deplete the excessive amount of stored energy |
Anonymous
It’s linked to transmitting the virus more also according to a recent study. |
Anonymous
Then why do 9/10 dieters regain all the weight? Obesity is a health condition. New medications hold a lot of promise for treatment. Or we could tax junk food. But in 50 years, the blame and shame conversation will have moved on. Enjoy while you can I guess. |
Anonymous
dp I can answer that. Most diets that people go on are unsustainable. Watching your weight /exercise is lifelong habit. Once people lose the weight they think they can "treat" themselves which really means going back to the old diet which made them fat. I agree that food companies don't make it easy though |
Anonymous
DP, but it's not solely about unsustainable diets, it's about the fact that bodies are different. "Watching your weight" is a full-time job for some people and that's not sustainable. |
Anonymous
I think PP’s point is that any medical treatment that fails 90% of the time doesn’t work. We wouldn’t accept a heart disease treatment that only had a 10% success rate. How about 10% success rate for your antibiotic? If something doesn’t work, insisting that it should work because the theory is sound won’t magically make it work. |
Anonymous
You can’t overfeed yourself for decades to the point of having 50+ excess pounds and expect it to go away because you cut of dessert. You essentially are breaking your body once you become obese. CICO works for maintaining weight and losing small amounts weight. Small amounts of weight gain are reversible mainly bc the body doesn’t have the metabolic changes yet that happen with a lot of extra weight and because there is less likely to be a psychological component. There is a psychological component at play surrounding eating and food that people that end up obese or morbidity obese. Cutting calories can’t fix that |
Anonymous
They regain because they go back eating the same foods. Bluezone diets for example japan, diet consist of sweet potato, seafood, green veggies, and pork on holidays. Obesity is low. |
Anonymous
The difference is that someone putting themselves on a crash diet is not “medical treatment” like a heart disease treatment. If people were hospitalized and given very precise amounts of food and exercise and no access to anything else, THAT would be a medical treatment. |
Anonymous
I’m in public health, and all sorts of treatments have this dichotomy - in controlled settings the treatment works, but in the real world it doesn’t. Tuberculosis treatment is a good example - adherence is so poor we actually have to send nurses out door to door to observe people taking their pills in order to control TB. We don’t just insist that if people were better at doing what we said our treatments would work. We acknowledge the treatment failures and work to find something better. Obesity researchers are doing just that, but the obesity culture wars go on. |
Anonymous
This is a very helpful comment from someone who works in the field. But can you really say “calories in calories out” doesn’t work (the topic of the thread) if it does work in controlled environments? Isn’t the point that we need to help people control their environments better? That’s not what I see when people throw up their hands and appear to say that we just have no idea why people can’t lose weight. |
Anonymous
DP. I would like to respond to your question on why most dieters gain the weight back. They do because they have kept bad habits for years or even decades. Obesity is a health condition just as lung cancer is a health condition even when the patient was a smoker. Shaming and blaming is cruel, but downplaying the fact that habits and choices play a significant role dooms other generations to the same fate. People can do much more to prevent obesity. Some people are absolutely much more prone to food addiction, so it's even more important for these people to realize that developing healthy habits is crucial. My mother was 5'5 and 130 lbs in her late 20s after her first 4 biological children. She had her 5th bio child at 35 and she weighed about 160 after that. By 45, she was 180. She is 65 now and 230. There is no huge metabolic issue here. She slowly gained weight year after year. A few pounds a year is all it took to get her here. She is now stuck in her ways with a slower metabolism due to age. I am 5' 8" 38 now and weigh 180 after having 2 biological children, so I am on the same trajectory as my mother if I don't cut back on food. I don't have any major metabolic issue( if you see how much I eat, you'd say that my metabolism is pretty fast). I was 138 lbs at 24. I did not have a car then, and I walked all the time. My younger sister is 36, 5'7 and 130 lbs. The main difference between she and me is that she watches her weight ( no weighing regularly, but once clothes start feeling snug, she pays attention). The moment she gained 10 Lbs and shot up to 140Lbs, breakfast was reduced to a boiled egg and green tea. She has kept that for 3 years now. If she realizes that she starts gaining again, she will cut back on something else because she likes being thin. I don't care too much. Her metabolism is not faster than mine. This is the story of every overweight and obese person I know. It's gradual. Unfortunately, it's getting worse because bad eating habits are formed earlier and earlier in life so they are even harder to break. A short diet is not going to change those habits. |
Anonymous
I guess I don’t see how your post argues against the new weight loss meds, which I am currently taking. |
Anonymous
This answer just gives rise to far more questions. *Why* do people keep bad habits up for years or even decades? Why do they get into bad habits in the first place, bad habits that impact weight in particular? Your story is interesting because it is unusual. Most people I personally know gain weight as they age, I don't know anybody who gained 100 lbs between their late 20s and age 65. Something more is going on than just "oops, got a bad habit and didn't break it." I do think that at the core CICO is "true" but it seems like whatever is behind your calories in and whatever is behind you calories out is different for your family than it is for mine (we are all tiny). But I actually think this is a misguided inquiry; I think the inquiry should be around healthy lifestyle choices, since those are pretty straightforward and there is little risk of fat shaming if you say "talk a walk to decrease your cortisol level." |