Calories in vs calories out

martinel2099

Well ... I totally do not get dieting ! Did Atkins gained 2lb , pigged out nite and lost a pound !?????? Atkins says calories in vs calories out is a myth . Anyone disagree ?

Not sure if trolling or not.

I don't care which diet you take up, you will only lose weight if you create a calorie deficit. It's not theory, it's science. Pigging out might seemed to have worked for you last night but keep it up and see what happens over time.

Weight loss is a tricky thing and there's lots of factors that disguise weight loss/weight gains. You might have pigged out last night and lost a pound but you could have just as easily lost a lot of water weight between the time when you ate and when you weighed yourself.

Daily measuring on the scale is not an effective tool for measuring progress unless you realize weight loss is not linear and average your results each week. If your trending downward in a 4-6 week cycle you are doing something right and eating at a decifict, if you are consistently gaining over that cycle you are eating at a surplus.

ninerbuff

All diet books tell you that you won’t have to restrict calories, and then trick you into doing it anyway.

These forums have ruined diet books for me. I used to love to read them for some reason, whether I intended to do the diet or not. I picked up one from the library the other day and just flipped through it with a few "bah, humbugs" before returning it. I'll never be the same now. :sad:

Well you saved some money! But diet books are written for one main reason...............profit. Granted there are some for people will health/hormonal issues, but for the general population who's just overweight, it's going to come down to basic math.

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Branstin

Did Atkins not realize that his weight loss plan was built on CICO? Either a person manually count calories or pay some program like Atkins to do it for him/her. I would love for someone to explain to me the manner in which eating more than needed for maintenance causes weight loss.

Commander_Keen

http://www.awlr.org/blog/a-calorie-is-a-calorie-unless-of-course-they-derive-from-an-atkins-diet

Interesting article.

Commander_Keen

Another interesting artical

http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/fitness/weight-loss/counting-carbs-vs-counting-calories-whats-better-for-weight-loss.html#b

vismal

http://www.awlr.org/blog/a-calorie-is-a-calorie-unless-of-course-they-derive-from-an-atkins-diet

Interesting article.

From the article:

According to traditional logic, if you want to lose weight, there must be a calorie deficit. In other words, you should find out how many calories your body uses each day, then eat 500 calories less each day and you will lose 1 pound per week. According to PhotoCalorie.com (which employs the widely used mifflin-St Jeor basal metabolic rate equations), for a 5'3" 160 pound woman to lose one pound per week she should eat about 1,480 calories a day. If this person went on the Atkins diet summarized in Consumer Reports, they would be predicted to GAIN a pound each week! And those consuming the Zone diet would be predicted to lose the most weight since they allow the least calories per day.

Yet this doesn't seem to be the case. In this review of diets and the scientific literature supporting them, calories don't predict weight loss.

SO A CALORIE IS NOT A CALORIE??

A calorie is a unit of measurement. A calorie is always a calorie in the same way that an inch is always an inch. The problem with fad diets as well as pure calorie counting is human error. People either consciously or unconsciously are not compliant with diets. They have cheat meals/days, miscount calories, don't weigh food, don't track intake accurately, etc. Anyone not losing weight is simply eating more calories then they burn in a day. Certain metabolic conditions exist that make burning calories much more difficult and might require calories in to be so low that compliance is nearly impossible. Conditions like these are rare and are the exception, not the rule. Long story short, if in the long run you are not losing weight, you are eating too much/burning too little.

silentKayak

Atkins and other extremely low-carb diets contain a metabolic "cheat" to pure CICO.

If you don't eat carbs, you go into ketosis. The body burns fat for fuel, but it does it really inefficiently. Half-burned fat-cells are excreted through the urine (as well as through the skin and breath, which is why you get bad breath on that diet). This means that for every calorie you "burn" you also lose some fat by literally peeing it out. So yes, you can eat more calories and still lose weight on a high-fat, high protein diet because you're shedding fat cells you didn't have to burn.

The catch is that you can't have a cheat day. You can't eat a piece of birthday cake or your mom's Christmas cookies or so much as a single saltine cracker with your vegetable soup. Carbs above about 20-30 g/day will knock you out of ketosis for days.

vismal

Atkins and other extremely low-carb diets contain a metabolic "cheat" to pure CICO.

If you don't eat carbs, you go into ketosis. The body burns fat for fuel, but it does it really inefficiently. Half-burned fat-cells are excreted through the urine (as well as through the skin and breath, which is why you get bad breath on that diet). This means that for every calorie you "burn" you also lose some fat by literally peeing it out. So yes, you can eat more calories and still lose weight on a high-fat, high protein diet because you're shedding fat cells you didn't have to burn.

The catch is that you can't have a cheat day. You can't eat a piece of birthday cake or your mom's Christmas cookies or so much as a single saltine cracker with your vegetable soup. Carbs above about 20-30 g/day will knock you out of ketosis for days.

This is highly scientifically inaccurate. CICO still applies even in ketosis. The reason for rapid weight loss while in ketosis is due to the extreme amount of water weight/glycogen the dieter loses in the first few weeks. This is why a similar rapid gain is seen when the dieters returns to eating mixed meals.

lindsey1979

I personally think we're missing something in the pure CICO world -- either our understanding of it is incomplete or the CO aspect fluctuates so greatly do to CI and hormonal balances that it's of limited usefulness. Yes, calorie is a unit of measure, but it has a limited application when we're talking about it in the context of weight loss and the body's metabolism. In many ways, think about other simple measurements. Yes a mile is a mile is a mile. But how hard it is to traverse that mile will depend on other factors -- whether swimming a mile, hiking up hill a mile at a 10% incline or sliding down a mile on a sled. All a mile -- but all very different outputs on your personal exertion.

Just the body composition of tissue lost (whether fat vs. muscle) is going to change your actual weight seen on the scale since 1 lb of fat releases 3500 calories whereas 1 lb of muscle releases far fewer (somewhere between 600-1700). You'll see studies where people of different insulin sensitivities fare better on different macronutrient levels. Some lose more weight with higher fat/lower carbs, some lose more weight with higher carbs. If it were all the same, then the macro levels shouldn't matter -- but they do.

That being said, I do think CICO is a really useful starting point for most people. If someone is tracking all of their food intake faithfully (weighing everything) and is falling outside of those expected CICO weight loss results, then it's time to start digging into other reasons. If you're one of those people that would benefit from shifting of macros (like reducing carbs) or there is an underlying medical condition (thyroid, PCOS, insulin resistance, etc.).

I just don't think it's so black and white as some on this site seem to believe -- that CICO is 100% the answer or others that think that it has no useful purpose I think there are some limitations and some caveats, many of which we don't fully understand (yet). I do think the quality of your calories is also important in addition to just the sheer quantity. How important that is varies for the individual.