3.) It is painfully and obviously wrong. We don’t burn food, our metabolic processes are vastly different than the measuring techniques used in the lab.
But that doesn’t mean that it can’t also be right.
I put together a spreadsheet because I thought that calories were clearly stupid; I went around online and found formulas for calculating my caloric requirements. I put in my initial weight, and created two columns; one for my measured weight, and one for my predicted weight. And then I tracked everything I ate, over a three month period, as well as my body weight, and (using an electronic scale), my fat percentage.
And, much to my surprise, calorie consumption predicted body weight.
So, even if the assumptions behind calories have some clear holes in them, they nonetheless (for this sample size of one extremely skeptical individual) have at least -some- predictive value.
Even if everything you say is true (and, e.g., you weren’t recording completely bogus fat percentage numbers, you measured your weight consistently, the internet didn’t mislead you on calorie counts, etc. etc.), this gives you extremely weak evidence to expect that other people would benefit from doing the same.
It is weak evidence, bordering on if not outright in anecdotal, which is why I was careful to indicate that the predictive value is limited. And my body fat percentages probably were not precise—it’s an electronic scale—but they were at least consistent, which was enough for my accuracy purposes. And yes, I measured my weight consistently; I measured once in the morning when I got up for work, once in the evening while preparing for bed, and averaged these values.
I will also add that I follow a relatively well-balanced diet, and wouldn’t expect the results to hold as well if, for example, I consumed significantly fewer carbohydrates.
I started out an extreme skeptic. But I tested the theory instead of rejecting it. Well, to be completely accurate, I rejected it, and mocked some people who held to calories, and then later decided I should test my hypothesis instead of relying strictly on my intuition on how food works, and was entirely taken aback by the results.
As for your link, I’m not arguing for a position I think is a good one; if anything, my bias going into the experiment was expecting it to fail miserable. I’m defending one which I initially opposed, and still think is probably bad, but nonetheless works at least some of the time.
Congratulations. I revived this account, which I haven’t used for years, just to downvote your crazy ass.
The evidence for the general principle—that weight change tracks the difference between calories eaten and calories expended—is overwhelming.
I have seen no fitness advice that suggests it isn’t true. I have seen no fit person who doesn’t accept it.
For the past 6 years, I have reduced weight and controlled it very effectively based on this principle. Time and time again, I have become fatter when I stopped counting calories and ate to my heart’s content. Time and time again, I got my weight under control after I resumed calorie restriction.
If you want to show that calorie restriction doesn’t work, you first have to overthrow conservation of energy. And then, explain how come no one was fat in Dachau.
The original post said that nutrition was “fairly easy”, and that one should follow the rule of “calories in, calories out” and that one should eat “micronutrient dense food.” CI:CO is broken because it’s difficult to measure CI with any accuracy and intractably hard to measure CO. It ignores all sorts of subtleties like getting enough protein in your diet and the difference between bulking and cutting.
For example, good luck seeing gains if you’re eating 20% fat, 70% carb, and 10% protein on a 10-15% caloric deficit. All the micronutrients in the world won’t save that diet. But you’re still following CI:CO!
Sigh. If this point is really so hard for people to get, maybe it’s just not worth making. It’s probably easier to let LW devolve into a bunch of badly-sourced self help advice than to continue tilting at windmills.
It’s not so hard to measure calorie intake. Just memorize the relative base amounts of calories in the composing parts of one’s meals, and learn to judge when one is hungry from physiological cues (ergo gratia consistently drinking water in sufficient amount that the scratchy, parched feeling at the back of one’s throat indicates hunger and not thirst, the difference between digestive sensations and starving sensations, where one’s stomach is, etcetera).
Once one learns how to tell when one is hungry, and how hungry, they can estimate how many calories lasts one how long, and thus measure one’s average caloric need per hour, and therefore one’s caloric need per day. Since it takes about twenty minutes to have an accurate sensation of hunger or satiety, at first one’s estimates will only be accurate to within about 100 calories. As one tests their predictions of how many calories one needs per hour by: eating, judging when one will next be hungry based upon the estimated amount of calories consumed, then losing oneself in a non-stressing activity until one feels hunger sensations; noting the time one feels the sensations, if the time is when one predicted they would next be hungry, and if one is fairly certain one isn’t guilty of a bias or a bias blind spot (good on one if they can detect these); one can accurately estimate to within about 50 calories their caloric intake.
Caloric outtake could then be measured by being slightly hungry when going to sleep, and tallying up the total amount of ingested calories that day (caloric intake per 10-16 waking hours).
Please recognize that this advice is really quite far from what the original poster was proposing, and uses a radically different assessment of difficulty.
Your method of measuring caloric outtake is wrong, because the body doesn’t use only the calories ingested that day during that day. (Yes, perhaps the calories ingested from the past and used today can be balanced out by the calories ingested today and stored for the future, but that assumes a whole host of processes are weakly varying over a long period of time.)
Having said that, I prefer your method to any other method I’m familiar with, perhaps even to the point of implementation...
Your method of measuring caloric outtake is wrong, because the body doesn’t use only the calories ingested that day during that day.
I suppose so, but as long as one’s caloric intake caters to cues from physiological needs (which can be co-opted by MSG and to a lesser extent HFCS and sugar alcohols, and should thus be avoided at most costs), measuring one’s caloric outtake doesn’t really matter so much. I’m trying, but can’t see how knowing caloric outtake would be necessary when the sole criterion for calorie intake levels is physiological need, as determined by learning the cues. If one learns their average hourly caloric need at relative metabolic rest, one can judge whether they have over- or under-eated. Learning one’s average heart beats per minute, and what different degrees of elevated bpm feel like, they can additionally learn by what estimate exercise increases their caloric need.
The one caveat to this, though, would be if one has imbalanced ghrelin and leptin levels—that would disable one’s ability to trust their body’s cues. If this condition is a concern, I think it can be tested through blood work.
However, maintaining a steady rate of metabolic activity is crucial to learning one’s average caloric need per hour. Drinking cold water to just adequate levels of hydration (as judged by urine color), and consuming calories at a rate sufficient to maintain near-constant levels of digestion are of tremendous help in achieving this. I’d recommend erring on the side of unnecessarily diligent hydration (consistently clear urine) when learning what is the ‘just-right’ amount of hydration for one’s body; learning what this amount is may take a while.
I can go into detail about why maintaining near-constant levels of digestion is helpful, but I think it might be unnecessary, and will thus abstain.
Having said that, I prefer your method to any other method I’m familiar with, perhaps even to the point of implementation.
As you may have gathered, this is essentially what I do (at the most basic level). I cannot yet accurately judge its effectiveness as a strategy, considering I may still be young enough for my naturally-high metabolism to significantly confound other variables’ effects. There are also many other factors to consider, like blood sugar levels, inflammation, certain types of foods’ effect on immunological processes and such processes corresponding effects upon digestion, etcetera.
In general, though, the logic should be sound. In regard to its difficulty, since becoming fluent enough with one’s physiological cues takes a while, the effort expended may sum to a very high net amount of expended effort. During acclimation, however, only minimal amounts of effort would need to be expended at any one time (even less if one already has self-control/self-discipline).
I suppose so, but as long as one’s caloric intake caters to cues from physiological needs (which can be co-opted by MSG and to a lesser extent HFCS and sugar alcohols, and should thus be avoided at most costs), measuring one’s caloric outtake doesn’t really matter so much. I’m trying, but can’t see how knowing caloric outtake would be necessary when the sole criterion for calorie intake levels is physiological need, as determined by learning the cues.
We’re in complete agreement here.
What I’m arguing against in my comments above is the standard implementation of “calories in, calories out” (as seen in popular self-help dieting books and even in such august bodies as r/fitness, for example) does not involve learning physiological cues at all (rather, usually, ignoring them as “bad”) but instead attempting to count the calories in the food one eats, come up with some justification for a value for BMR, estimating additional expended calories due to exercise, and so on.
The more I think about your method, though, the more I like it.
I haven’t checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can’t track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it’s been easy. When I’m dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that’s after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.
I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn’t work.
Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.
My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.
There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA’s Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That’s before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.
So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they’re recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It’s unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.
All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can’t imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake,
If that’s the case, why does it work?
I agree that calorie content of any particular meal is hard to measure accurately, but over time, the calorie content of many meals should gravitate towards the average.
You’re going overboard by stating, not just that CI:CO is hard, but that it’s impossible.
You’re saying that my positive experience with CI:CO over the past 5 years, which I was able to confirm numerous times, is a fluke.
That’s you being offensive and arrogant. Yes, you should be tapping out.
Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. It happens to be the case that this thing works for you. That is only very weak evidence that it works for anyone else at all. All humans are not the same.
We recommend getting over being insulted and frustrated when things that work for you specifically turn out to be flukes, it’s not a surprising thing and sufficiently internalizing how many actual studies turn out to be flukes would make it the obvious result. Reality shouldn’t be strange or surprising or insulting!
It doesn’t only work for me. It’s how most people I know, who are into fitness, manage their weight. The “Calories In” part is not eating too much. The “Calories Out” part is maintaining your metabolism by eating small meals regularly, exercising, and eating lots of protein to gain and preserve muscle mass.
It works. It works for a lot of people.
In fact, aside from gastric bypass surgery, it’s the only reliable way to lose weight that I know. And gastric bypass surgery is a form of CI:CO!
And then we have a bunch of people on Less Wrong, all of whom appear to be convinced that human bodies can somehow violate the rules of thermodynamics. Or that the calorie content of foods varies so wildly no one can ever track it well enough to lose weight. Then when challenged, you resort to arguments like this:
The sun is dark green.
No, it’s bright yellow, I saw it this morning.
That’s anecdotal evidence. It’s no good as science. It’s green, stop spreading your bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that it was yellow every time I saw it in my life. It was never green.
More anecdotal evidence. What you see is not what other people see. Learn to science, man!
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but this conversation has become so ridiculous, I am left with no more credible explanations for this denialism than that you guys are chronically fat, and hiding behind excuses because you lack the will power to stop slurping Double Diet Mountain Dew. Then, you make endless posts about beating akrasia.
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but...
There is not ever any reason to bring the conversation down to this level. In the future, consider writing only the first half of a comment in which the second half is going to be needlessly offensive and contribute nothing.
Or, you know, that “tapping out” thing paper-machine did? Which you were mocking him about? That is an acceptable thing to do when you don’t think the argument is productive any longer. Reading between the lines, this is what you think as well. Except that for some reason you feel the need to signal it by insulting everyone.
3.) It is painfully and obviously wrong. We don’t burn food, our metabolic processes are vastly different than the measuring techniques used in the lab.
But that doesn’t mean that it can’t also be right.
I put together a spreadsheet because I thought that calories were clearly stupid; I went around online and found formulas for calculating my caloric requirements. I put in my initial weight, and created two columns; one for my measured weight, and one for my predicted weight. And then I tracked everything I ate, over a three month period, as well as my body weight, and (using an electronic scale), my fat percentage.
And, much to my surprise, calorie consumption predicted body weight.
So, even if the assumptions behind calories have some clear holes in them, they nonetheless (for this sample size of one extremely skeptical individual) have at least -some- predictive value.
Even if everything you say is true (and, e.g., you weren’t recording completely bogus fat percentage numbers, you measured your weight consistently, the internet didn’t mislead you on calorie counts, etc. etc.), this gives you extremely weak evidence to expect that other people would benefit from doing the same.
Not that this argument hasn’t been tried before.
It is weak evidence, bordering on if not outright in anecdotal, which is why I was careful to indicate that the predictive value is limited. And my body fat percentages probably were not precise—it’s an electronic scale—but they were at least consistent, which was enough for my accuracy purposes. And yes, I measured my weight consistently; I measured once in the morning when I got up for work, once in the evening while preparing for bed, and averaged these values.
I will also add that I follow a relatively well-balanced diet, and wouldn’t expect the results to hold as well if, for example, I consumed significantly fewer carbohydrates.
I started out an extreme skeptic. But I tested the theory instead of rejecting it. Well, to be completely accurate, I rejected it, and mocked some people who held to calories, and then later decided I should test my hypothesis instead of relying strictly on my intuition on how food works, and was entirely taken aback by the results.
As for your link, I’m not arguing for a position I think is a good one; if anything, my bias going into the experiment was expecting it to fail miserable. I’m defending one which I initially opposed, and still think is probably bad, but nonetheless works at least some of the time.
Congratulations. I revived this account, which I haven’t used for years, just to downvote your crazy ass.
The evidence for the general principle—that weight change tracks the difference between calories eaten and calories expended—is overwhelming.
I have seen no fitness advice that suggests it isn’t true. I have seen no fit person who doesn’t accept it.
For the past 6 years, I have reduced weight and controlled it very effectively based on this principle. Time and time again, I have become fatter when I stopped counting calories and ate to my heart’s content. Time and time again, I got my weight under control after I resumed calorie restriction.
If you want to show that calorie restriction doesn’t work, you first have to overthrow conservation of energy. And then, explain how come no one was fat in Dachau.
If someone sounds crazy to you, maybe you have misinterpreted them.
The original post said that nutrition was “fairly easy”, and that one should follow the rule of “calories in, calories out” and that one should eat “micronutrient dense food.” CI:CO is broken because it’s difficult to measure CI with any accuracy and intractably hard to measure CO. It ignores all sorts of subtleties like getting enough protein in your diet and the difference between bulking and cutting.
For example, good luck seeing gains if you’re eating 20% fat, 70% carb, and 10% protein on a 10-15% caloric deficit. All the micronutrients in the world won’t save that diet. But you’re still following CI:CO!
Sigh. If this point is really so hard for people to get, maybe it’s just not worth making. It’s probably easier to let LW devolve into a bunch of badly-sourced self help advice than to continue tilting at windmills.
It’s not so hard to measure calorie intake. Just memorize the relative base amounts of calories in the composing parts of one’s meals, and learn to judge when one is hungry from physiological cues (ergo gratia consistently drinking water in sufficient amount that the scratchy, parched feeling at the back of one’s throat indicates hunger and not thirst, the difference between digestive sensations and starving sensations, where one’s stomach is, etcetera).
Once one learns how to tell when one is hungry, and how hungry, they can estimate how many calories lasts one how long, and thus measure one’s average caloric need per hour, and therefore one’s caloric need per day. Since it takes about twenty minutes to have an accurate sensation of hunger or satiety, at first one’s estimates will only be accurate to within about 100 calories. As one tests their predictions of how many calories one needs per hour by: eating, judging when one will next be hungry based upon the estimated amount of calories consumed, then losing oneself in a non-stressing activity until one feels hunger sensations; noting the time one feels the sensations, if the time is when one predicted they would next be hungry, and if one is fairly certain one isn’t guilty of a bias or a bias blind spot (good on one if they can detect these); one can accurately estimate to within about 50 calories their caloric intake.
Caloric outtake could then be measured by being slightly hungry when going to sleep, and tallying up the total amount of ingested calories that day (caloric intake per 10-16 waking hours).
Note this may take one a couple of years.
[...]
Please recognize that this advice is really quite far from what the original poster was proposing, and uses a radically different assessment of difficulty.
Your method of measuring caloric outtake is wrong, because the body doesn’t use only the calories ingested that day during that day. (Yes, perhaps the calories ingested from the past and used today can be balanced out by the calories ingested today and stored for the future, but that assumes a whole host of processes are weakly varying over a long period of time.)
Having said that, I prefer your method to any other method I’m familiar with, perhaps even to the point of implementation...
I suppose so, but as long as one’s caloric intake caters to cues from physiological needs (which can be co-opted by MSG and to a lesser extent HFCS and sugar alcohols, and should thus be avoided at most costs), measuring one’s caloric outtake doesn’t really matter so much. I’m trying, but can’t see how knowing caloric outtake would be necessary when the sole criterion for calorie intake levels is physiological need, as determined by learning the cues. If one learns their average hourly caloric need at relative metabolic rest, one can judge whether they have over- or under-eated. Learning one’s average heart beats per minute, and what different degrees of elevated bpm feel like, they can additionally learn by what estimate exercise increases their caloric need.
The one caveat to this, though, would be if one has imbalanced ghrelin and leptin levels—that would disable one’s ability to trust their body’s cues. If this condition is a concern, I think it can be tested through blood work.
However, maintaining a steady rate of metabolic activity is crucial to learning one’s average caloric need per hour. Drinking cold water to just adequate levels of hydration (as judged by urine color), and consuming calories at a rate sufficient to maintain near-constant levels of digestion are of tremendous help in achieving this. I’d recommend erring on the side of unnecessarily diligent hydration (consistently clear urine) when learning what is the ‘just-right’ amount of hydration for one’s body; learning what this amount is may take a while.
I can go into detail about why maintaining near-constant levels of digestion is helpful, but I think it might be unnecessary, and will thus abstain.
As you may have gathered, this is essentially what I do (at the most basic level). I cannot yet accurately judge its effectiveness as a strategy, considering I may still be young enough for my naturally-high metabolism to significantly confound other variables’ effects. There are also many other factors to consider, like blood sugar levels, inflammation, certain types of foods’ effect on immunological processes and such processes corresponding effects upon digestion, etcetera.
In general, though, the logic should be sound. In regard to its difficulty, since becoming fluent enough with one’s physiological cues takes a while, the effort expended may sum to a very high net amount of expended effort. During acclimation, however, only minimal amounts of effort would need to be expended at any one time (even less if one already has self-control/self-discipline).
We’re in complete agreement here.
What I’m arguing against in my comments above is the standard implementation of “calories in, calories out” (as seen in popular self-help dieting books and even in such august bodies as r/fitness, for example) does not involve learning physiological cues at all (rather, usually, ignoring them as “bad”) but instead attempting to count the calories in the food one eats, come up with some justification for a value for BMR, estimating additional expended calories due to exercise, and so on.
The more I think about your method, though, the more I like it.
If you want to talk more about it, feel free. I think I laid out all the major caveats to consider.
I haven’t checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can’t track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it’s been easy. When I’m dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that’s after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.
I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.
I don’t know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don’t, and so they’re fat.
I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn’t work.
Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.
My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.
There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA’s Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That’s before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.
So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they’re recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It’s unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.
All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,
is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can’t imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?
I was right in the grandparent. I’m tapping out.
If that’s the case, why does it work?
I agree that calorie content of any particular meal is hard to measure accurately, but over time, the calorie content of many meals should gravitate towards the average.
You’re going overboard by stating, not just that CI:CO is hard, but that it’s impossible.
You’re saying that my positive experience with CI:CO over the past 5 years, which I was able to confirm numerous times, is a fluke.
That’s you being offensive and arrogant. Yes, you should be tapping out.
Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. It happens to be the case that this thing works for you. That is only very weak evidence that it works for anyone else at all. All humans are not the same.
We recommend getting over being insulted and frustrated when things that work for you specifically turn out to be flukes, it’s not a surprising thing and sufficiently internalizing how many actual studies turn out to be flukes would make it the obvious result. Reality shouldn’t be strange or surprising or insulting!
It doesn’t only work for me. It’s how most people I know, who are into fitness, manage their weight. The “Calories In” part is not eating too much. The “Calories Out” part is maintaining your metabolism by eating small meals regularly, exercising, and eating lots of protein to gain and preserve muscle mass.
It works. It works for a lot of people.
In fact, aside from gastric bypass surgery, it’s the only reliable way to lose weight that I know. And gastric bypass surgery is a form of CI:CO!
And then we have a bunch of people on Less Wrong, all of whom appear to be convinced that human bodies can somehow violate the rules of thermodynamics. Or that the calorie content of foods varies so wildly no one can ever track it well enough to lose weight. Then when challenged, you resort to arguments like this:
The sun is dark green.
No, it’s bright yellow, I saw it this morning.
That’s anecdotal evidence. It’s no good as science. It’s green, stop spreading your bullshit.
I’m pretty sure that it was yellow every time I saw it in my life. It was never green.
More anecdotal evidence. What you see is not what other people see. Learn to science, man!
Ad hominems are the last thing to resort to, but this conversation has become so ridiculous, I am left with no more credible explanations for this denialism than that you guys are chronically fat, and hiding behind excuses because you lack the will power to stop slurping Double Diet Mountain Dew. Then, you make endless posts about beating akrasia.
There is not ever any reason to bring the conversation down to this level. In the future, consider writing only the first half of a comment in which the second half is going to be needlessly offensive and contribute nothing.
Or, you know, that “tapping out” thing paper-machine did? Which you were mocking him about? That is an acceptable thing to do when you don’t think the argument is productive any longer. Reading between the lines, this is what you think as well. Except that for some reason you feel the need to signal it by insulting everyone.