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Is it the same for everyone ?
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healthy491 wrote: »So we can all agree that CI<CO leads to weight loss for everyone, which is awesome. BUT when it comes to certain facts ( or myths ? idk ) like sugar being addictive , vegetables are fulfilling etc.. are they the same for everyone ? I am asking this because when I was eating chicken , vegetables etc and no sugar , I used to feel extremely hungry and sad and end up eating more and more. Now I basically eat chocolate and sweet stuff during the day and some proteins at night and I feel happy and full while still staying under my calorie goal.
What's the criteria for calling CICO a success? What's the criteria for failure?
You can find study after study that proves a calorie deficit results in weight loss - so clearly there is some truth to the "first law of thermodynamics", which seemingly everyone has suddenly become an expert.
You can also take a look around at all the people you run into each and every day and see pretty clearly that the problem isn't as simple as "Calories In/Calories Out", since it is FAILING for the majority of people. Every year that goes by, the simple "Calories In/Calories Out" equation fails more and more, yet people still want to boil this problem down into the simplest of terms and place the blame squarely on a person's own will power or lack of enthusiasm for exercise.
I mean, sure, you can do that - just blame the person, because hey - that's EASY!
But you aren't going to solve the obesity epidemic this way
CICO does not fail anyone, it is merely a reflection of what is going on with the individual...4 -
I think many confuse CICO with calorie counting...13
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It sounds to me like you get lots of carbs and feel hungry. I am doing LCHF and am never hungry, have no cravings and have lost 103 pounds since January. I am not saying carbs are bad but maybe the way you eat is not working for you. check out dietdoctor.com
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If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
I've "failed" at weight loss several times in my life - lost it, then gained it all back again. Each and every time, I can clearly point to the cause of the failure, and it has nothing to do with CICO. Call it "oversimplifying" or whatever else you'd like to justify absolving the individual of any responsibility, but I was able to face the truth. Which was that I slacked off on my eating and working out and allowed myself to put the weight back on. I lost my motivation and it became more important to me to be lazy and enjoy eating as much as I wanted than it was to maintain a caloric deficit. It wasn't my genetics or my hormones or anything else - all it was, was my fault - for knowingly allowing it to happen and not doing what I knew I had to do to stop it from happening.
Every time I've successfully lost weight, I've done it by creating a caloric deficit. CICO didn't somehow mysteriously stop working to cause me to regain the weight. What stopped working was my willpower, dedication, motivation and adherence.
We're humans. We're not machines which can be dialed in to a particular setting and counted on to precisely and effortlessly maintain that setting indefinitely. I don't see why that's so difficult for people to realize and understand. The principles behind CICO work, but it isn't as simple as running an equation and eating that exact amount. You may have to watch, weigh, measure, learn and adjust as you go to compensate for individual variations. We're not all special snowflakes, but we're not all 100% identical in every regard either. Activity levels, hormones, satiety, personal taste, willpower, emotional tolerance, age, environmental factors - these all can vary. If you took ten people who were 5'8" and 185 lbs. and put them on identical, controlled calorie deficits for 6 months, there probably wouldn't be two of the ten whose weight loss results were perfectly identical. But I'll 100% guarantee that if every one of them was truly in an accurately measured caloric deficit, every one of them would lose weight.13 -
If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
I've "failed" at weight loss several times in my life - lost it, then gained it all back again. Each and every time, I can clearly point to the cause of the failure, and it has nothing to do with CICO. Call it "oversimplifying" or whatever else you'd like to justify absolving the individual of any responsibility, but I was able to face the truth. Which was that I slacked off on my eating and working out and allowed myself to put the weight back on. I lost my motivation and it became more important to me to be lazy and enjoy eating as much as I wanted than it was to maintain a caloric deficit. It wasn't my genetics or my hormones or anything else - all it was, was my fault - for knowingly allowing it to happen and not doing what I knew I had to do to stop it from happening.
Every time I've successfully lost weight, I've done it by creating a caloric deficit. CICO didn't somehow mysteriously stop working to cause me to regain the weight. What stopped working was my willpower, dedication, motivation and adherence.
We're humans. We're not machines which can be dialed in to a particular setting and counted on to precisely and effortlessly maintain that setting indefinitely. I don't see why that's so difficult for people to realize and understand. The principles behind CICO work, but it isn't as simple as running an equation and eating that exact amount. You may have to watch, weigh, measure, learn and adjust as you go to compensate for individual variations. We're not all special snowflakes, but we're not all 100% identical in every regard either. Activity levels, hormones, satiety, personal taste, willpower, emotional tolerance, age, environmental factors - these all can vary. If you took ten people who were 5'8" and 185 lbs. and put them on identical, controlled calorie deficits for 6 months, there probably wouldn't be two of the ten whose weight loss results were perfectly identical. But I'll 100% guarantee that if every one of them was truly in an accurately measured caloric deficit, every one of them would lose weight.
Same here. I lost 50ish pounds by eating at a calorie deficit and then after several years of maintenance I decided to step away from it all this summer. I was going through a really rough time with personal issues and made the conscious decision to stop tracking calorie intake, stop measuring out portion sizes, stop eating within my maintenance calorie goals, stop walking and I stopped paying any sort of attention to my weight (scale went in the closet and I deleted the app that I had been tracking my daily weigh-ins for years). Shockingly-I gained weight
And even more shocking-since getting back on track this week and tracking my calorie intake again, using my food scale again, adhering to serving sizes again, walking again and staying within my calorie goals again I've lost weight. It's like magic. Or science 
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snickerscharlie wrote: »
You aren't going to solve the obesity epidemic by perpetuating people's false beliefs that they must be a special snowflake which is what's preventing them from losing weight.
Bottom line? If they aren't losing, they're eating in excess of what their body can burn off.
I don't think anyone disputes that - but if the problem were that simple then we'd all be a healthy weight. But we aren't, and the problem is just not as simple as people make it out to be.
I'm not saying people should start chiming in with the "me too's" and make excuses for why they're fat. I'm simply saying that the problem has been oversimplified to the point where society has apparently chosen to simply persecute individuals for their failure to maintain a healthy weight, when clearly there is more than just an individual force at play.
If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
Be honest with yourself. How often is there something really simple to do in the house like bringing out the trash but you procrastinate it anyway? Or if you personally never do something like that think of other people.
And now imagine what happens when it is not something that takes 5 minutes but a year or more of consistency to succeed.8 -
stevencloser wrote: »snickerscharlie wrote: »
You aren't going to solve the obesity epidemic by perpetuating people's false beliefs that they must be a special snowflake which is what's preventing them from losing weight.
Bottom line? If they aren't losing, they're eating in excess of what their body can burn off.
I don't think anyone disputes that - but if the problem were that simple then we'd all be a healthy weight. But we aren't, and the problem is just not as simple as people make it out to be.
I'm not saying people should start chiming in with the "me too's" and make excuses for why they're fat. I'm simply saying that the problem has been oversimplified to the point where society has apparently chosen to simply persecute individuals for their failure to maintain a healthy weight, when clearly there is more than just an individual force at play.
If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
Be honest with yourself. How often is there something really simple to do in the house like bringing out the trash but you procrastinate it anyway? Or if you personally never do something like that think of other people.
And now imagine what happens when it is not something that takes 5 minutes but a year or more of consistency to succeed.
Indeed. It's simple and certainly not easy...2 -
stevencloser wrote: »snickerscharlie wrote: »
You aren't going to solve the obesity epidemic by perpetuating people's false beliefs that they must be a special snowflake which is what's preventing them from losing weight.
Bottom line? If they aren't losing, they're eating in excess of what their body can burn off.
I don't think anyone disputes that - but if the problem were that simple then we'd all be a healthy weight. But we aren't, and the problem is just not as simple as people make it out to be.
I'm not saying people should start chiming in with the "me too's" and make excuses for why they're fat. I'm simply saying that the problem has been oversimplified to the point where society has apparently chosen to simply persecute individuals for their failure to maintain a healthy weight, when clearly there is more than just an individual force at play.
If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
Be honest with yourself. How often is there something really simple to do in the house like bringing out the trash but you procrastinate it anyway? Or if you personally never do something like that think of other people.
And now imagine what happens when it is not something that takes 5 minutes but a year or more of consistency to succeed.
Exactly this.0 -
snickerscharlie wrote: »
You aren't going to solve the obesity epidemic by perpetuating people's false beliefs that they must be a special snowflake which is what's preventing them from losing weight.
Bottom line? If they aren't losing, they're eating in excess of what their body can burn off.
I don't think anyone disputes that - but if the problem were that simple then we'd all be a healthy weight. But we aren't, and the problem is just not as simple as people make it out to be.
I'm not saying people should start chiming in with the "me too's" and make excuses for why they're fat. I'm simply saying that the problem has been oversimplified to the point where society has apparently chosen to simply persecute individuals for their failure to maintain a healthy weight, when clearly there is more than just an individual force at play.
If you want to believe that "CICO is the way", go ahead - but you're going to see that basic concept fail people repeatedly for various reasons - reasons that will undoubtedly be oversimplified to it being a "personal failing", which I think is an incorrect approach.
Knowing how something works, and then not being able to accurately and consistently apply it over a period of time, with all the complexities and distractions that life offers - does not mean that the concept failed people. By definition I guess it truly is a "personal failing" but doesn't mean that the person is a failure. You seem to be ignoring the VAST grey area between short term weight loss success and long term maintenance of a healthy weight.
The fact of the matter is that the principle of CICO is simple, but the implementation and adherence of it for an extended period of time is not easy.
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Wheelhouse15 wrote: »It's definitely not the same for everyone. There are going to be some general concepts that will be mostly true for most people ("foods with a high fiber/water content will fill you up faster" "protein and fiber help you feel full for longer" "eating a large amount of starch/sugar on its own will leave you feeling hungrier sooner"), but there's more to it than that. Physiologically, yes, people are quite similar. But, as a few people have said or alluded to, there's a huge psychological component to satiety, plus people's hormonal responses to food can vary widely.
Once you eat the food, did your body produce the proper type and amount of hormones in response? Did your brain and other organs accept, interpret, and respond to the hormones in the proper way? Did you eat a sufficient amount/type of foods and nutrients but still feel unsatisfied because your meal lacked a food you enjoy the taste of? Is there an issue in your life that drives you to continue to eat even after you physically feel full?
Side note re: CICO - I am a legit, honest-to-god, special snowflake who for YEARS did everything correctly on the logging side, followed my Fitbit, and religiously ate at a calorie goal that, per MFP, should have allowed me to lose 1-2lbs per week, and yet lost basically nothing. Medical testing eventually revealed that my body simply burns ~25-30% fewer calories per day than what would be expected for someone with my stats and activity level - my metabolism is more comparable to someone 11 inches shorter and 65 years older than I am - such that what I thought was a 500-1000/day deficit was really closer to maintenance (which, honestly, I knew already based on the math, but I resisted believing it until a knowledgeable doctor put numbers in front of me). CICO is still true for me, just as it is for everyone else on this planet. It just took me a little more work to nail down the "CO" side - now that I have, I'm finally having slow but steady success by simply eating fewer calories than what I now know I'm actually burning each day.
Nice post as it shows that CICO can be more complex for some because the CO side can vary more for some, which is why many of us always advocate doing a systematic reduction of calories to see how your body is reacting. I think you are statistically a true 1 in a million with that much lower of a metabolism than the mean.
Yup. At the time I did the test, various RMR calculators put mine somewhere between 1,700 and 2,200 per day. Turned out it was actually 1,350. I figured out what age/height would produce that same RMR in the calc that Fitbit uses, changed my Fitbit profile to match that, and started eating 500 calories less than my new TDEE. In the 28 weeks since I made that change, I've lost 29.5lbs, after losing 18 pounds total in the 3 years and 10 months prior to that.
I'm basically the poster child for CICO. No matter how much you're struggling despite doing everything "right," you don't need to eliminate one or more foods/food groups or follow a special diet or drink green smoothies or heal your leaky gut or whatever the heck is popular just to lose weight - trust me, I tried a lot of it. You just need to figure out a truly accurate CICO equation and stick to it. To bring it back to the OP, though, how you achieve that is necessarily different for everyone. People are going to have a different mental/emotional and to some degree physical response to different foods and overall ways of eating. Whatever method one person decides to believe in and apply to their life is fine if it works for them (as long as it's not endangering their health), but it may not work for someone else, and that's ok too.12 -
Wheelhouse15 wrote: »It's definitely not the same for everyone. There are going to be some general concepts that will be mostly true for most people ("foods with a high fiber/water content will fill you up faster" "protein and fiber help you feel full for longer" "eating a large amount of starch/sugar on its own will leave you feeling hungrier sooner"), but there's more to it than that. Physiologically, yes, people are quite similar. But, as a few people have said or alluded to, there's a huge psychological component to satiety, plus people's hormonal responses to food can vary widely.
Once you eat the food, did your body produce the proper type and amount of hormones in response? Did your brain and other organs accept, interpret, and respond to the hormones in the proper way? Did you eat a sufficient amount/type of foods and nutrients but still feel unsatisfied because your meal lacked a food you enjoy the taste of? Is there an issue in your life that drives you to continue to eat even after you physically feel full?
Side note re: CICO - I am a legit, honest-to-god, special snowflake who for YEARS did everything correctly on the logging side, followed my Fitbit, and religiously ate at a calorie goal that, per MFP, should have allowed me to lose 1-2lbs per week, and yet lost basically nothing. Medical testing eventually revealed that my body simply burns ~25-30% fewer calories per day than what would be expected for someone with my stats and activity level - my metabolism is more comparable to someone 11 inches shorter and 65 years older than I am - such that what I thought was a 500-1000/day deficit was really closer to maintenance (which, honestly, I knew already based on the math, but I resisted believing it until a knowledgeable doctor put numbers in front of me). CICO is still true for me, just as it is for everyone else on this planet. It just took me a little more work to nail down the "CO" side - now that I have, I'm finally having slow but steady success by simply eating fewer calories than what I now know I'm actually burning each day.
Nice post as it shows that CICO can be more complex for some because the CO side can vary more for some, which is why many of us always advocate doing a systematic reduction of calories to see how your body is reacting. I think you are statistically a true 1 in a million with that much lower of a metabolism than the mean.
Yup. At the time I did the test, various RMR calculators put mine somewhere between 1,700 and 2,200 per day. Turned out it was actually 1,350. I figured out what age/height would produce that same RMR in the calc that Fitbit uses, changed my Fitbit profile to match that, and started eating 500 calories less than my new TDEE. In the 28 weeks since I made that change, I've lost 29.5lbs, after losing 18 pounds total in the 3 years and 10 months prior to that.
I'm basically the poster child for CICO. No matter how much you're struggling despite doing everything "right," you don't need to eliminate one or more foods/food groups or follow a special diet or drink green smoothies or heal your leaky gut or whatever the heck is popular just to lose weight - trust me, I tried a lot of it. You just need to figure out a truly accurate CICO equation and stick to it. To bring it back to the OP, though, how you achieve that is necessarily different for everyone. People are going to have a different mental/emotional and to some degree physical response to different foods and overall ways of eating. Whatever method one person decides to believe in and apply to their life is fine if it works for them (as long as it's not endangering their health), but it may not work for someone else, and that's ok too.
I'm going to start tagging you into every "CICO doesn't work because I'm a special snowflake" thread I encounter on these boards, mmmkay?
TIA!4 -
WinoGelato wrote: »Wheelhouse15 wrote: »It's definitely not the same for everyone. There are going to be some general concepts that will be mostly true for most people ("foods with a high fiber/water content will fill you up faster" "protein and fiber help you feel full for longer" "eating a large amount of starch/sugar on its own will leave you feeling hungrier sooner"), but there's more to it than that. Physiologically, yes, people are quite similar. But, as a few people have said or alluded to, there's a huge psychological component to satiety, plus people's hormonal responses to food can vary widely.
Once you eat the food, did your body produce the proper type and amount of hormones in response? Did your brain and other organs accept, interpret, and respond to the hormones in the proper way? Did you eat a sufficient amount/type of foods and nutrients but still feel unsatisfied because your meal lacked a food you enjoy the taste of? Is there an issue in your life that drives you to continue to eat even after you physically feel full?
Side note re: CICO - I am a legit, honest-to-god, special snowflake who for YEARS did everything correctly on the logging side, followed my Fitbit, and religiously ate at a calorie goal that, per MFP, should have allowed me to lose 1-2lbs per week, and yet lost basically nothing. Medical testing eventually revealed that my body simply burns ~25-30% fewer calories per day than what would be expected for someone with my stats and activity level - my metabolism is more comparable to someone 11 inches shorter and 65 years older than I am - such that what I thought was a 500-1000/day deficit was really closer to maintenance (which, honestly, I knew already based on the math, but I resisted believing it until a knowledgeable doctor put numbers in front of me). CICO is still true for me, just as it is for everyone else on this planet. It just took me a little more work to nail down the "CO" side - now that I have, I'm finally having slow but steady success by simply eating fewer calories than what I now know I'm actually burning each day.
Nice post as it shows that CICO can be more complex for some because the CO side can vary more for some, which is why many of us always advocate doing a systematic reduction of calories to see how your body is reacting. I think you are statistically a true 1 in a million with that much lower of a metabolism than the mean.
Yup. At the time I did the test, various RMR calculators put mine somewhere between 1,700 and 2,200 per day. Turned out it was actually 1,350. I figured out what age/height would produce that same RMR in the calc that Fitbit uses, changed my Fitbit profile to match that, and started eating 500 calories less than my new TDEE. In the 28 weeks since I made that change, I've lost 29.5lbs, after losing 18 pounds total in the 3 years and 10 months prior to that.
I'm basically the poster child for CICO. No matter how much you're struggling despite doing everything "right," you don't need to eliminate one or more foods/food groups or follow a special diet or drink green smoothies or heal your leaky gut or whatever the heck is popular just to lose weight - trust me, I tried a lot of it. You just need to figure out a truly accurate CICO equation and stick to it. To bring it back to the OP, though, how you achieve that is necessarily different for everyone. People are going to have a different mental/emotional and to some degree physical response to different foods and overall ways of eating. Whatever method one person decides to believe in and apply to their life is fine if it works for them (as long as it's not endangering their health), but it may not work for someone else, and that's ok too.
I'm going to start tagging you into every "CICO doesn't work because I'm a special snowflake" thread I encounter on these boards, mmmkay?
TIA!
Ha! Feel free! I think we'll be pretty busy... 2
Oh, I better not.
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