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MyFitnessPal Community

How can CICO and plateaus both be real?

joyanna2016

Just having trouble wrapping my head around the reality of both. I've put full faith in CICO, but I also dont doubt the reality of plateaus- too many people have them. Can anyone explain?

Replies

lemurcat2

Water weight is likely a big factor.

janejellyroll

What many people think of as a plateau actually isn't -- they'll confuse a week or two without a loss or a less than expected loss with a plateau.

When it lasts for longer, there is often a reasonable explanation like a change in routine, eyeballing foods, overestimating calories burnt through activity, or failing to adjust a calorie goal for a lighter body weight.

Poobah1972

Regardless of diet, CICO is always the end factor in whether you gain or loose. As Lemurcat said, water weight can fluctuate wildly for a lot of different reasons. The larger you are, the larger the water fluctuation. And the smaller you are the more important it becomes to precisely know what you are consuming daily, as you have a less wiggle room to make error's when calculating macro's.

A good example would be... My fiance cooks up a stirfry of mostly vegitables served over cauliflower rice with sliced italian sasuage. She gave me the actual weighed components of everything fresh, and I matched up the italian sasuage to a boiled then broiled sausage in MYFP. Should be good right? Except she forgot to add she used 3 tablespoons of avacado oil, when cooking up all those vegitables.

3 tablespoons of chosen foods avacado oil is 130 calories per OZ... 360 cals total and much more calorie dense then all the vegitables in the entire recipe. Granted some oil stays in the pan, but that's a significant mistake when your close to goal. If you make multiple such mistakes it could easily defeat your weekly target and put you back in maintenance or worse.

Cico is science... And baring medical conditions such as Thyroid issues etc... CICO is what it all boils down to.

kimny72

joyanna2016 wrote: »

Just having trouble wrapping my head around the reality of both. I've put full faith in CICO, but I also dont doubt the reality of plateaus- too many people have them. Can anyone explain?

Your scale weight doesn't just measure your fat - it measures everything in your body, including especially water weight. Short "plateaus" of a couple of weeks are most likely due to water weight fluctuations.

The other thing to keep in mind is that our ability to measure CICO is not exact. Variations in the packaging and processing of food, cooking methods, and our measuring of portion size on relatively cheap home scales means that even the most detail oriented logger may be a bit off. Exercise calories are a complete estimation. And your BMR, NEAT, and TDEE are also estimations. If you are hitting your calorie goal for 6 weeks and don't lose weight, your estimations are most likely off. It is really easy to start off aiming for the wrong number, and needing tweak your numbers and goals.

It's also possible for people who have been logging and succeeding for awhile to get complacent and start making mistakes in CICO logging or calculations - not noticing a change in activity level, allowing more restaurant meals that are difficult to log, getting cocky and eyeballing servings. Then calling it a plateau rather than realizing it's a math or logging issue.

There are also plenty of real world issues that can change your TDEE temporarily, and if you don't realize it that could cause a plateau. Aggressive dieting can cause a down-regulation in energy expenditure. Stress can cause you to be more lazy throughout the day and not burn as many calories. Medical conditions and illness can cause you to burn more or less calories. Extreme temperatures can cause you to retain water or get dehydrated. Starting a new exercise routine can cause water retention that lasts a few weeks.

CICO is proven science. Our ability to measure CICO, consistently and over a long enough period of time to lose weight, can be tricky and inexact and requires patience to put up with and/or determine the cause of a lack of results :drinker:

dragon_girl26

Just because someone has a "plateau", doesn't mean CICO isn't in play. As your weight decreases over time, the amount of calories you need to consume and the number you burn changes. That's where some people get hung up...they don't adjust for the caloric needs of their new body weight. In that sense, some may argue that a plateau isn't really a thing.

Also what others said above...water weight is another one, although that typically is the cause of a stall (keeping the same weight at 3 weeks or less) as opposed to a plateau (longer than 3 weeks). I'd throw hormones in there, too, especially for women.

lgfrie

I've seen enough evidence of CICO in action with my 600 day spreadsheet - every CI and CO monitored during all that time - to know the unbreakable truth of the Law of CICO.

Short term plateaus can be caused by any number of things, usually water retention due to sodium, carbs, changes to macros, changes to food volume, etc. People here often talk about plateaus that are a week or two long, but those aren't really plateaus. That's just weight fluctuation. That is always going to happen and doesn't mean anything for fat loss.

Long-term plateaus - and I've had them - can result from diet fatigue: not measuring as carefully, taking more cheat/off/casual days, not staying up to date with your weight loss knocking 5 cals off your TDEE for each pound lost, every step of the way through your diet (you get 100 less cals per day with every 20 lbs lost! That makes a difference), diet-caused fatigue leading to less movement throughout the day and therefore a further reduced TDEE, and so on.

One thing I would be my arm, life, or house on is, there is no such thing as a long term plateau that violates the rule of CICO. There is no such thing as a two month long failure to lose weight that happens for supernatural reasons. It's either declining TDEE (due to either weight loss or lower activity levels or both), slipping on the calorie monitoring/logging and therefore eating more calories, or something else that, if identified, is not hard to fix. The body is chemistry and physics, not magic. If you provide less fuel than it needs to perform its tasks, it will dip into its energy reserves. CICO is king.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Usually it's due to inaccurate logging.

There is also a small effect due to metabolic adaptation, where your calorie burn (TDEE) reduces due to prolonged calorie restriction. For healthy people at a healthy weight and eating at a sustainable deficit (<25% TDEE), this effect is small and can be counteracted by being somewhat more active.

wunderkindking

There are a lot of factors in play. Your body is not precisely in line with online calculators, and your scale is not completely calibrated. Your energy burn is also slightly different EVERY DAY.

That said a lot of people are just impatient and expect some mathematically precise thing to happen with exact consistency. Your body is not a computer or a calculator. How much you slept, where your hormones are at a give time, how many steps you walked, what your stress level is, *how many times you jiggled your leg while at work*, the outside temperature, ALL play a role.

PAV8888

The balance of effectively absorbed CI vs actual CO will determine how your body energy reserves will change.

The determination of the values is affected by numerous measurement errors even under perfect and predictable conditions (endlessly discussed water weight variations).

But it is also true that dynamic adjustments can take place during shorter or even longer time periods that make the measurement errors based on static data even more difficult to account for.

While I don't disagree with pretty much anything said above, I would differentiate the concept of CI-CO from knowing the effective value of CO at any one particular time. Heck even CI can change with seasonal food variations; though I don't think in the whole slew of counter balancing errors that it is worth worrying about that.

Thyroid issues or adaptive thermogenesis issues or even less (or more) than expected calories burned during exercise issues would all fall under the rubric of correctly estimating one's current CO, and not under a violation of the principle.

The benefit of recognizing the principle is that you can now just concentrate on managing your CI and CO in a way that makes sense to you!

But it is a dynamically changing equation and part of the issue is that a lb is not always 3500 measured Calories because of this. Hence the (more often than not) perception or (more rarely) actuality of plateaus.

They said, I didn't run into a true plateau till I tried to maintain... so I wouldn't count on the inevitability of one.

joyanna2016

Thank you for the many thoughtful responses. Food for thought!

SnifterPug

You're not a car running on one type of fuel, with a gauge to tell you how much you have used up. There's so many variables even in the things you can measure. Add in hormonal fluctuations and the myriad of other things that go on behind the scenes and in some ways it's remarkable that CICO is as reliable as it is.

nanastaci2020

CICO is science is fact.

But humans are imperfect. We are going to have errors in our logging, some big some little. Forgetting oils, not realizing the scale batteries need changing and thus its reporting is off, having to estimate to some extent about the CO portion... Just a few examples.

Psychgrrl

Water retention, hormones, food waste (not pooping) ... inaccuracies in the equation (underestimating intake, overestimating output). The scale really isn’t everything. Persistence is.

temazur

Psychgrrl wrote: »

Water retention, hormones, food waste (not pooping) ... inaccuracies in the equation (underestimating intake, overestimating output). The scale really isn’t everything. Persistence is.

Oh god, water retention for sure. Have a salty meal or two, even if your calories are inline and you will see a jump on the scale. Same for if you naturally eat a bit lower carb and then have a high carb day, that will keep a touch of water on, too. If you see a bit of a plateau and everything else is in order, stay hydrated and cut back a bit on sodium to see what happens.

Hard workouts can lead to water retention afterwards, too, if I recall correctly. I would imagine it will look normal if you're always working out, so you won't notice. But if you just got back at it after a break, you might see a jump on the scale then, too.

elisa123gal

joyanna2016 wrote: »

Just having trouble wrapping my head around the reality of both. I've put full faith in CICO, but I also dont doubt the reality of plateaus- too many people have them. Can anyone explain?

Exactly. If CICO was absolute there would be no plateaus. CICO is simply a way to diet and lose weight..it has never worked for me.. and I get creamed on here when I mention that. However it works well for a lot of people. I find the key to losing weight and fitness.. is finding the plan that works for you.

As for plateaus? The body doesn't lose consistently on any weight loss plan.. it takes breaks to adjust.

sijomial

elisa123gal wrote: »

joyanna2016 wrote: »

Just having trouble wrapping my head around the reality of both. I've put full faith in CICO, but I also dont doubt the reality of plateaus- too many people have them. Can anyone explain?

Exactly. If CICO was absolute there would be no plateaus. CICO is simply a way to diet and lose weight..it has never worked for me.. and I get creamed on here when I mention that. However it works well for a lot of people. I find the key to losing weight and fitness.. is finding the plan that works for you.

As for plateaus? The body doesn't lose consistently on any weight loss plan.. it takes breaks to adjust.

You are confusing CICO (which is just an expression of your calorie balance) and calorie counting.
CICO is not a way to diet, calorie counting is.

Calorie counting never worked for me is a reasonable personal statement reflecting your experience with calorie counting.

Perhaps using the terms interchangeably when they have very different meanings is what gets you "creamed"?

FitAgainBy55

The answer comes in two parts, first we have to define a real plateau and then we can discuss the CICO model.

What is a real plateau
Stalls or even gains that occur over short periods of time (let's say 3 weeks or less) aren't real plateaus. Fat loss isn't linear and water weight causes lots of variations in our day to day weigh ins.

Real plateaus ARE CONSISTENT with the CICO model
The CO part of the model is NOT an absolute. It is an estimate. All models are wrong, some models are useful. There is a large amount of variability in CO for each individual. When faced with sustained calorie restriction over a period of many weeks, biological and behavioral adaptations can cause a large enough reduction in CO to stall weight loss when CI is held constant.

This is probably my favorite all time study on CICO. This quantifies the impact of behavioral and biological adaptations during long term (6 months) calorie restriction in terms of reduction in the CO component of CICO:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634841/

Here are some highlights from the study:

Resting energy expenditure was 6% lower after 6 months of 25% calorie restriction
TDEE was reduced by several hundred calories (AFTER accounting for measured sedentary energy expenditure) in the groups that were losing weight with calorie restriction only. The group that created a deficit with 50% exercise and 50% diet did not have a reduced TDEE.

Here is there summary:
Note: CR = Deficit created via calorie restriction, EX = Deficit created via exercise

"Therefore, this study supports a ‘metabolic adaptation’ in response to weight loss in humans and demonstrates for the first time a reduction in all components of daily energy expenditure with dietary-induced weight loss, including the level physical activity. Importantly, CR in combination with exercise (CR+EX) did not result in metabolic adaptation while inducing similar changes in body composition as with CR alone."

ninerbuff

joyanna2016 wrote: »

Just having trouble wrapping my head around the reality of both. I've put full faith in CICO, but I also dont doubt the reality of plateaus- too many people have them. Can anyone explain?

Yes. The body doesn't lose weight in a linear fashion due to it's complicated system overall. Unlike a car that loses weight volume as gas is burned up, hormones in the body help to dictate things like water level, metabolism, etc. for survival.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

MaltedTea

Readjustments and recalculations of both CI an CO required on occasion.

Speakeasy76

Listen, bodies are weird, especially when losing weight. If you lost a lot of weight in the beginning, your body is adjusting. Also, as others have explained there are so many things that can impact that number you see on the scale. Here's a perfect example from me (who is eating in a slight deficit): A few days ago my weight was all the way up to 147; today it was 142.6. That's obviously not all fat loss, but things like hormones, water retention from a salty meal the night before and from strength training all played a part in those number differences.

joyanna2016

FitAgainBy55 wrote: »

The answer comes in two parts, first we have to define a real plateau and then we can discuss the CICO model.

What is a real plateau
Stalls or even gains that occur over short periods of time (let's say 3 weeks or less) aren't real plateaus. Fat loss isn't linear and water weight causes lots of variations in our day to day weigh ins.

Real plateaus ARE CONSISTENT with the CICO model
The CO part of the model is NOT an absolute. It is an estimate. All models are wrong, some models are useful. There is a large amount of variability in CO for each individual. When faced with sustained calorie restriction over a period of many weeks, biological and behavioral adaptations can cause a large enough reduction in CO to stall weight loss when CI is held constant.

This is probably my favorite all time study on CICO. This quantifies the impact of behavioral and biological adaptations during long term (6 months) calorie restriction in terms of reduction in the CO component of CICO:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634841/

Here are some highlights from the study:
Resting energy expenditure was 6% lower after 6 months of 25% calorie restriction

TDEE was reduced by several hundred calories (AFTER accounting for measured sedentary energy expenditure) in the groups that were losing weight with calorie restriction only. The group that created a deficit with 50% exercise and 50% diet did not have a reduced TDEE.

Here is there summary:
Note: CR = Deficit created via calorie restriction, EX = Deficit created via exercise

"Therefore, this study supports a ‘metabolic adaptation’ in response to weight loss in humans and demonstrates for the first time a reduction in all components of daily energy expenditure with dietary-induced weight loss, including the level physical activity. Importantly, CR in combination with exercise (CR+EX) did not result in metabolic adaptation while inducing similar changes in body composition as with CR alone."

Thank you for this thoughtful, researched response. So the takeaway here is that I am less likely to have a true plateau if I'm exercising along with dieting? Good to know!