Fun debate about CICO

lindsey1979 wrote: »

senecarr wrote: »

lindsey1979 wrote: »

senecarr wrote: »

lindsey1979 wrote: »

UltimateRBF wrote: »

lindsey1979 wrote: »

CICO is a great guideline but it has its limitations when applied to the human body -- because unlike the physics law in a closed system, the human body has a lot more variables -- we literally have 1000s of chemical reactions in our metabolic pathways, and the coefficients and efficiency of those reactions can vary greatly, especially as influenced by various hormones. Plus, you have the issue that a lb of fat releases 3500 cals, but a lb of muscle releases a lot less (something like 900-1700). So depending on your fat to muscle ratio in your weight loss will greatly change your numbers on the scale -- if you're losing more muscle, the numbers will go down quicker. If you're losing more fat, the numbers will go down slower.

You also have the issue that the CO part is virtually impossible to calculate with any accuracy independently -- most calculate it based on a lot of assumptions (such as common BMR numbers) or in reverse based on their weight loss result (which once again with the fat/muscle issue is only an estimate at best). So when people talk about the law being indisputable, it is true but also not completely accurate as applied to the extremely complex system of the human body.

And then you have things like pesky hormones and how they can effect the equation -- which a lot of people don't want to admit exist because it can get soooo complicated at this point. Whether you're talking insulin, thyroid, HGH, grehlin, leptin, etc. -- it goes on and on and we really are only starting to scratch the surface of how this all works.

An easy hormone example is someone that has insulin resistance. There was a study in 2012 or so that showed that women with good insulin sensitivity lost nearly twice as much weight as their counterparts on a higher carb diet isocaloric deficit diet (protein was the same and caloric deficit was the same). But their insulin resistance counterparts had the exact opposite happen -- they lost nearly twice as much weight on the lower carb diet. Same amounts of protein, same deficit and drastically different results based on carb/fat ratio depending on the individual woman's insulin sensitivity/resistance. So, that's a powerful example of how all calories are not all equal and would produce drastically different results in different women for the same amount of total calories.

And before anyone gets all up in arms about how insulin resistance is rare -- it's not. Per the CDC, over 40% of US adults have insulin resistance at diabetic or prediabetic levels -- the vast majority of which don't know it. I think actual numbers from their 2014 report (which had data from 2010-2012 I think) was something like 9.3% had diabetes and 37% had insulin resistance at prediabetic levels -- that's over 46%, or almost half of the population of US adults! That's a LOT of people.

So, CICO is a great guideline and definitely a place to start when you're looking to lose weight. But, if you find yourself not seeing results after following it (and you're truly accurately weighing/measuring your food), then you need to start to look at issues outside of CICO such as insulin resistance, thyroid, etc. Because you might be in that half of the population that has an issue that shifts the equation from its commonly understood applications.

Oh, you're back. Insulin resistance is still your favourite topic I see.

nvmomketo wrote: »

DeguelloTex wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

TheDudeLovesFood wrote: »

yarwell wrote: »

A bit more reading suggests that activity may be responsible at least in part, Cornier cites Levine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9880251 as finding large variations in NEAT responsible for variations in fat gain during overfeeding :


In other words the maths only works if you measure everything rigorously and correctly and don't assume CO is a constant.

With all that said, the confusion is, CICO is still valid.

Yes, but I think the point is that CO is hard to establish because it varies so much between people, and even day to day, or meal to meal. Some foods (CI) will change what an individual's CO is for a time, and some foods (CI) make it easier or harder to eat at a caloric deficit.

Just my interpretation.

Meal-to-meal and day-to-day don't matter for CO any more than they matter for weight. Look at the trends.

How do some foods make it harder or easier to eat at a deficit? Are you talking about caloric density and satiety or something else?

I was referring to satiety and factors like hormones (ex. insulin, cortisol, and IGF-1). Those hormones will have an effect, albeit not a huge one, on CO.

And it's not only CO but how yourbody is able to access energy.

For example, if you're storing more cals as fat (like with insulin resistance), you'll feel more fatigued. To battle the fatigue, you eat more and end up overeating. So even though you need the energy, your body isn't accessing it effectively and you either end up with people that are very fatigued or overeating. That's one of the reasons why it can be so difficult to lose/maintain with IR, especially if you have a lot of carbs in your diet. Similar issues can be seen with thyroid issues, but totally different mechanism.

The ability to metabolize foods effectively for energy is one of the variables I referenced earlier. I choose IR as an example in particular because (1) it's a metabolic condition and (2) it's incredibly widespread (at least in U.S. adults).

I'm not sure you actually understand insulin resistance. Insulin resistance generally happens because you've _stored_ more calories as fat, not are storing more calories as fat. Insulin signals fat cells to take up glucose and blood lipids to make triglycerides for long term fat storage. If you're insulin resistant, your fat cells stop reacting to insulin as much and let sugar and blood lipids float more. This actually would tend to leave more energy available in circulation for activity, not less.
And even if it IR is present in 40% of the US population, 96% of the adult population is within 10-16% of the average for metabolic rate.
http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-people/
You seriously aren't going to see incredible variance in most of the population, metabolism is incredibly fixed. Even the burn for exercise is rather fixed. Where you'll see variation is the amount of exercise and the amount of NEAT individuals have going on.

You're missing some key points about insulin resistance. The whole point is that your muscle, liver and fat cells are RESISTANT to insulin -- not just fat cells, but fat, liver and muscle cells. So, yes, you have more glucose initially floating in the blood stream, but it's not available for energy because it can't get in to your cells because they're insulin resistant!! Then, the body pumps out more insulin to compensate -- sometimes as much as 5x as much than normal. Then that results in a rapid response from blood glucose going into the cells (some for energy, excess gets turned into fat) --so much so that you can end up hypoglycemic (lightheaded, hungry, etc.). Then that triggers hunger cues and the person overeats -- that's the basis of strong cravings and fatigue symptoms IR folks can get. It starts the vicious cycle all over again.

Depending on your level of IR, you'll have diabetes 2 or pre-diabetes. And if you eventually get to the point where your pancreas can't make enough insulin, you end up becoming insulin dependent (where you need to inject insulin) like type 1 diabetics (though their issues stem from an autoimmune system response that destroys the pancreas).

People with good insulin sensitivity don't get these big swings. They're able to access the glucose in their blood stream for energy needs in the cells as need through normal blood sugar regulation. So as the glucose depletes and goes into the cell, you only get low blood sugar because you need more energy (not because it's there but can't make its way into the cells). It's a much more efficient metabolism -- you ideally aren't eating more to access the same amount of energy. You just need to eat as you need the energy.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/training-the-obese-beginner.html/

That insulin resistance is actually a “good thing” is especially true under both low-carbohydrate and low-calorie dieting conditions. If the fat cells are trying to keep calories out (and push them to burning elsewhere), this can facilitate fat loss. In this vein, one of the major adaptations to getting leaner is a massive increase in insulin sensitivity, which is part of what makes further fat mobilization more difficult as folks get leaner. I’d mention that this is exactly the opposite of how most people think it works (insulin sensitivity actually predicts weight gain, not the other way around).

Seriously. You don't understand IR, and Lyle McDonald does. Your understanding of it is because it is a phantom you're willing to blame for failures and difficulties instead of properly understanding it as a metabolic adaptation in the light of the most important dogma of biology: evolution. Simply put, metabolic pathways have already dug to as efficient as they without starting over from scratch, and thus most people's bodies are pretty similar in how much energy they burn, and how much they store. We don't tend to have huge magical metabolic differences in getting fat, we tend to have huge mental differences in how we react to becoming overweight and balancing it.

Lyle understand IR (from what I can tell), but you don't seem to understand what Lyle wrote. Or you're intentionally misrepresenting what he said. he even talked about if you have IR, how it impacts diet choice -- that a restricted carb diet will help those with IR (even after fat loss). I think you need to go back and read all of what Lyle wrote about IR.

Yes, there are times when certain things are good in certain contexts and bad in other contexts. I totally agree that in certain contexts, IR can be good -- but that's not the same thing as saying it's good thing in all cases. Lyle discussed a very specific situation -- none of which we've been discussing here.

And, yes, there are certain things in an evolutionary context are an advantage. Those that held onto their fat stores the best or built them the quickest most definitely would be an advantage in an evolutionary sense because it would provide the most protection for survival in times of famine. But, that advantage in that context becomes a disadvantage in the modern times when food is plentiful -- like in the US theses days -- because such people are not facing extended times of famine as they would have in the prior times of our evolution. Constant plenty is a relatively modern occurrence for the masses. That "blessing" now becomes a "curse" -- which you see in all the high levels of obesity.

Same thing goes with efficiency and what exactly you're talking about being efficient -- the metabolism of glucose, the use of glucose in the muscle, etc. Those all have very different results depending on which perspective you're discussing. For example, if we're talking about muscles becoming efficient -- that's great for a marathon runner because he/she can do more work for less energy (either from food or fat stores) so she/he can run further. For someone that is trying to lose weight, it's the exact opposite because it means that they burn less calories for the same amount of work. So they now how to work more to burn the same amount of calories. This is one of the reasons some studies believe that those who have lost 10% or more of their bodyweight have a lower than expected RMR than those of a similar weight/comp that didn't recently lose a lot of weight. Whether that ever recovers over the longterm remains to be seen (it apparently does not change for the first year after weight loss) -- which likely also accounts for why many people find maintenance even more difficult than actual losing.

Also, what failures are you talking about? I just want people to work smarter, not harder. That if they do have a problem like IR, thyroid or countless others that they figure that out and then adopt strategies that best suit their specific circumstances. That's not excuse for failure -- that's just being smart. I mention IR in particular because it affects such an overwhelming amount of people (over 40% of the US population) -- so it's likely a lot of people on this site looking to lose weight have it, and that could affect their strategies (like the carb restricted diet Lyle mentions).

That's why I've said from the very beginning, hey, CICO is a great starting point guideline, but if you're not seeing the results you expect according to the basic calculations, it's a good idea to start to look beyond them because you may have other things going on in your system that make the calculation, from a practical standpoint, much more complex and/or confusing. Continuing to cut calories either by too little food or too much exercise isn't the solution in such contexts and can actually make things worse -- finding out what is off and having it corrected so you can eat/exercise like a "normal" person is the solution. Why do you find that so threatening?

lindsey1979 wrote: »

Nothing in biology makes sense outside of evolution. Nothing about modern obesity is an evolutionary disadvantage. You can still find someone and have kids before anything obesity related will kill you.
The flipside is, until 100 years ago, almost the entire world population would have an advantage over the rest if they could perform metabolic pathways more efficiently. Such advantages would be rapidly selected for. We started walking upright because it saves about 4 calories / km to walk that way when you have slightly longer legs. We don't have magic efficiency methods that work only for people with more IR genes than others.

No human being can burn less calories running. It really, really doesn't work that way.

You don't even understand what it is you're arguing against. CICO is just a statement of thermodynamics. It isn't a way to calculate metabolic expectations. There are plenty of BMR / TDEE calculators out there. They tend work very well if the people using them are honest, and the same people are honest with with input. The fact that many of them can predict 96% of the population within 10-16% is pretty good. 40% of the population having IR can't take be that large a hit.

The fact that you think Lyle McDonald knows what he's talking about because he sells a rapid fat loss book that is low carb (it is actually fairly low fat too, it is basically a protein diet, but he's aware you can't remove fat as completely from the human diet), tells me what a great deal about your thought processes. They aren't scientific. They're tribalism. Lyle isn't in your tribe. He's practicing actual science, and you think he belongs to yours because you have a cargo cult and you recognize some of the flag gestures he's throwing up to make the magic cargo birds happen.

Because I agree with some things that Lyle says I'm tribalistic now? Seriously? That's your deduction? Wow. Okay, whatever.

I think I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm arguing -- as I've said several times, the limitations of applying a thermodynamics law to a complex biological system like the human body. CICO is simultaneous a very simple equation and a very complex equation because of the complexity in calculating the CO part. To use things like BMR and TDEE calculators, there have to be a certain amount of assumptions/variable to be true/accurate. If you fall into those parameters, it works great. That's the reason I've said from the VERY beginning I think it's a great starting place and guideline.

BUT, if you have something going on that would impact those variable/assumptions, such as thyroid issues, IR, adrenal issues, certain vitamin deficiencies, those calculators are often no longer as accurate (or wildly inaccurate) because of the shift in assumptions/variables. A big catch is that many people have such issues but don't know about (like the numbers cited for IR by the CD). So, now let's see if you can follow this... if you're not getting the results you expect and are accurately tracking food, it's probably because something else is going on. Since IR alone affects over 40% of the US adult population and not some "edge cases" as some think it is here, that's a very big caveat. To me, that's a significant limitation of the simple CICO calculators that people use for weight loss. Then, of course, you also have the difference for loss of fat versus loss of non-fat tissue. It doesn't mean CICO is invalid or doesn't work, just that it has limitations from a simple, practical application (like seen in the calculators) to weight loss for SOME (not all, but some).

Some people come to realize they have such issues going on when the CICO calculations didn't work after several months of scrupulous application -- myself included. In my case, once I got those things sorted out with proper medication and whatnot, the CICO calculations started working again as expected. Imagine that.

As for Lyle, I've read a good deal of his stuff over the years and I find him generally to be well reasoned. I largely agree with his discussion on IR, though I'm not as familiar with it as I am some of his other articles. The fact that you make such a crazy leap to tribalism is downright nutty. And if I'm a person that has such a "tribe", the tribe is UC Berkeley, and I'm pretty okay with that tribe in the biological sciences.