Does the math of CICO always work?

mehreen_xo
mehreen_xo Posts: 78 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Ofc it's a law of physics and is not wrong but what I mean is if I was to work out my deficit from food and my burn from excercise for the entire week, and eat like this for many weeks, will the deficit divided by 3500 definitely be how many pounds I will lose? I know things like TOM/unexpected meals out etc come into play but roughly?! Thank you!
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Replies

  • L1zardQueen
    L1zardQueen Posts: 8,754 Member
    edited July 2017
    I think, even the 3500 calories are a rough estimate.
  • estherdragonbat
    estherdragonbat Posts: 5,283 Member
    My experience is that it varies. I chose to eat at maintenance for two weeks and lost normally. My first week back to deficit, I was up slightly (0.2). The next week I stayed the same, then had a modest loss (something like 0.4 or 0.6) and went back to losing normally.

    Could I have been slightly over my maintenance calories and my body just didn't catch up for a few days? Oh, yeah. It was Passover and I couldn't write stuff down or weigh/measure, so as much as I tried to estimate along the lines of "This recipe makes 4 servings and I'm taking 1/4 of it", etc., there was plenty of room to be off/over. I wasn't exercising as much as usual. It was also TOM.

    Could've been a change to my sodium intake; I was visiting my parents and they go low-salt. When I went home and went back to 'normal' for me, it could have sparked extra water retention. I also started stepping up my workouts a bit, adding dumbbells to resistance tubes. More water retention potential.

    But all this started happening the week after I'd brought my calories back down from maintenance, where I was actually expecting to stabilize/gain slightly.

    My n=1? Your body may not bill/credit you promptly, but it will eventually demand you settle the account.
  • SafioraLinnea
    SafioraLinnea Posts: 628 Member
    Sometimes there are delayed results but it balances out and the vast majority of the time it is accurate enough for my purposes.
  • L1zardQueen
    L1zardQueen Posts: 8,754 Member
    jemhh wrote: »
    No. This article discusses why.

    http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/3500-calorie-rule.html/

    Awesome article.
  • celestestar
    celestestar Posts: 41 Member
    CICO is a concept that works. Only problem is that it is all estimates and maybe estimating the wrong activity level
  • mathjulz
    mathjulz Posts: 5,514 Member
    The math is going to be only as good as the values used for each variable. Calories in is still an estimate, although you can get kind of close by measuring and weighing everything. Calories out is a lot harder to estimate, MFP and all other calculators use general averages. The calorie burn on machines can be off by a lot; even HRMs can give you readings that aren't especially close. You can get a better idea, over time, of your calories out by closely tracking the intake and monitoring what's happening with your weight.

    Add to that the fact that not all weight lost or gained is fat. 3500 calories a pound equates to fat specifically, it will be different for muscle. And, as you already mentioned, water retention/release as well as different amounts of material in the digestive tract can also throw off your readings. That's why we weigh periodically: to make sure our efforts are on track to lose or maintain (or gain, if that's a goal).

    There's nothing wrong with the formula itself; it's the estimates where you have problems.
  • Seffell
    Seffell Posts: 2,221 Member
    Yes. I have kept spreadsheets with data and with one exception where I started taking hormones my total loss over, say, 6 months was EXACTLY equal to the deficit over those 6 months.
  • rybo
    rybo Posts: 5,424 Member
    Read the article in this thread
    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10576091/energy-equation-the-best-article-ive-ever-read
  • savithny
    savithny Posts: 1,200 Member
    The problem with doing the math yourself is that everything on both sides of the = is estimated. We know more and more about the values that we're estimating, but we also know that they're not exact, and they vary enough that people have to figure otu their own balance.

    But yes, science approximates. Math approximates. Mathematical modelling is based on a set of assumptions and approximations, and scientific discoveries of relationships between events often are not "X causes Y" but X and Y are statistically related in the followin gway."

    So: We estimate the number of calories a specific food provides, but it can vary based on how the food is prepared (cooked or not, chopped or mashed or whole, growing conditions at the farm). We estimate the number of calories a specific person needs to live, but it can vary based on the individual (lean mass, metabolism, hormones), and we estimate the number of calories a specific exercise will burn, but that also varies (some people develop more efficient movements, and "effort expended" measurements are very subjective).

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