Fuel-Partitioning causes Obesity

Spoiler: not settled.

The Taubes vs. Guyenet debate

There are many ways to split the diet/nutrition space, but many are not particularly interesting to me.

Maybe the biggest split that I’m aware of, or that I think is the most important, is the difference between mainstream “CICO” thought and “Fuel Partitioning.”

The CICO people call their model EBM, or Energy Balance Model. If you say that energy balance is a simplification and not a very useful dieting tool, they get mad at you. How could you possibly think the Energy Balance Model was about balancing energy?! C’mon, man! (Yes, this literally happened to me. Also, according to a serious nutrition scientist, no serious nutrition scientists believes in CICO and that’s a straw man argument.)

The biggest representatives of the Fuel Partitioning paradigm are low-carbers with the CIM, or Carbohydrate Insulin Model.

This split was perfectly illustrated a few years ago in a debate between mainstream nutrition scientist Stephan Guyenet and nutrition writer Gary Taubes of Good Calories, Bad Calories fame.

The debate was held on the Joe Rogan podcast and it was a perfect example of the dysfunctional discourse in the nutrition space. It mainly consisted of both contenders accusing the other of acting in bad-faith, misrepresenting The Science, and general dishonesty. There was yelling.

The “debate” ended after over 3 hours (IIRC) by an annoyed, tired Rogan, who was unable to contain the participants and had no way of verifying/refuting their respective claims. (Unfortunately, it seems the video has been taken off YouTube now, maybe since Joe Rogan’s podcast got bought by Spotify?)

Edit: Someone pointed out in the comments (great as always!) that the episode can be accessed for free here: #1267 - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet

But the debate “awakened” something in me at the time, or maybe it just made me realize something I hadn’t noticed: there were competing paradigms about what caused obesity, and I was clearly not in the mainstream, CICO camp.

At the time I didn’t know the term Fuel Partitioning, and I was pretty invested in low-carb/keto as the be-all, end-all, but even now that I’m somewhat post-keto in my nutrition paradigm, I feel much closer aligned with Taubes and the low-carb/keto people than the mainstream, CICO believers.

What is Fuel Partitioning?

To vaguely describe both positions:

Mainstream CICO/EBM: Obesity is caused by excess energy intake or insufficient energy burned, resulting in a caloric surplus, resulting in more adipose tissue.

Fuel Partitioning/low-carb: Obesity is caused by incorrect partitioning of energy eaten between “available to burn” and “fat storage.” This causes inappropriately high fast storage and insufficient energy to burn, resulting in extra appetite because the body can’t “get to” much of the food that’s been eaten. This results in a “caloric surplus.” In the low-carb paradigm, the thing that controls the fuel partitioning is assumed to be excess carb intake.

I’ll try to refer to these positions as EBM and FP from now on, but I use them somewhat interchangeably with “CICO” or “mainstream” and “low-carb” or “keto.”

So what exactly is the difference between EBM and FP?

Neither camp is a unified block with exactly one opinion on anything, but the main difference (to me) seems to be the role of “excess calories.”

EBM tends to view calories as “causal,” meaning the eating of too many calories causes fat gain. (There are subtly different views of what causes this excess caloric intake, from genetics to lack of willpower to ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods created by evil food scientists in multinational corporations who hate you.)

FP tends to view excess calories as a result of something else going wrong. I.e. the causality is reversed. (There are subtly different views of what exactly causes incorrect fuel partitioning, or what the subsequent mechanisms for fat gain and excess caloric intake are, or if CICO even holds within the FP paradigm.)

Can you give me a neat visualization of the 2 positions that’s totally impartial and balanced and doesn’t negatively portray one or the other?

No. Best I can do is this.

Roche map of known metabolic pathways, indicating it’s slightly complicated:

Map of known metabolic pathways

And, representing EBM, there’s what I call the “Bucket of Calories” model:

Slightly simplified EBM

You can probably tell why I think the mainstream CICO/EBM model is so laughable that only an academic, or a very small child, could believe it.

Why am I on Team Fuel Partitioning?

Simply, because it explains reality much better.

As I’ve written about before, CICO is clearly insufficient to lose fat, and it is also a useless accounting tautology and so has zero predictive or operative value. Saying someone lost/gained fat because he had a caloric deficit/surplus is like saying somebody got rich by putting more money into his bank account than he took out.

It’s not wrong. It’s not even wrong. It’s missing the entire question, and probably involves going down a few grades because you must’ve missed something important years ago.

CICO is meaningless and its adherents are dishonest about that

Whenever you talk to CICOpaths about CICO, they keep flip-flopping about their position and then get angry when you point it out. They accuse you of debating “semantics.” Yes, semantics is “what do things mean.” If you don’t know what the words mean, you don’t know what you’re saying. This is the case for most CICOpaths.

To them, CICO is both an axiom of physics, impossible to disprove - but also an operational instruction for how to lose weight & a scientific hypothesis.

They say things like “show me a study in which CICO has been disproven” - but of course you can’t disprove axioms or tautologies. It would be silly to even try, and demonstrate that you didn’t understand the scientific method.

On the other hand, things that cannot be disproven are not scientific - they are axiomatic, tautological, maybe even true, but not scientific.

You wouldn’t run an experiment to test if 2 parallels ever meet. You wouldn’t run an experiment to validate the Pythagorean theorem. You wouldn’t run an experiment to validate/disprove that there are an infinite amount of real numbers. It would be silly to do so.

So what is CICO? Is it an axiomatic tautology that cannot be disproven, yet has no value in fat loss?

Or is it a scientific hypothesis that can be experimentally tested and verified or disproven?

Or is it a fat loss strategy that can instruct obese people how to reverse their obesity?

In the same discussion with the same CICOpath, every CICOpath I’ve ever met has switched and flip-flopped between these constantly, without even noticing.

If you ask what CICO is, they answer with the tautology. If you say that tautologies aren’t scientific and can’t be verified, they assert that it’s scientific and has been heavily verified. Where are they studies, they scream, disproving CICO?

When you then point out that CICO in no way predicts that “eat less & exercise more” is a useful fat loss strategy, they huff & puff and call you a science hater and denier.

CICO is an idea so bad you can’t unthink it.

My own experiences invalidate naive “operative CICO” many times

As detailed in 19 Fat Loss Experiments I’ve tried & failed at, I’ve tried pretty much everything to lose weight. Yes, including “eating less” and “exercising more,” which was of course a horrible failure.

I’ve eaten 1,000kcal/day for 2 months straight and lost 0lbs. I’ve lost a few pounds in 4 weeks of eating 4,200kcal/day (meticulously counted everything) and again eating around 3,900kcal/day over 6 weeks recently (more estimated but daily food intake was almost entirely the same each day).

When I tell people this, they straight up don’t believe me. CICO is infallible, so I must be lying, or I must’ve miscounted. They ask me to try it again, and this time, REALLY, TOTALLY, count EVERYTHING. They seem to be sincere in this nonsense.

It’s a cult.

Telling someone to “eat less & exercise more” doesn’t at all follow from CICO, but CICOpaths usually assert it does.

This is easily verifiable; it works for almost nobody. Yes, you can starve yourself a little bit, but it’ll come right back the second you stop starving yourself.

Maybe you can do this as a bodybuilder, where your professional life depends on you starving yourself for a few weeks or months, get in contest shape, and then recover.

But you can’t starve yourself for the months to years it’ll take to reverse obesity, and you can’t keep starving yourself for the remaining years of your life to keep it off. Or, some people can, but it takes a severe metabolic toll and is very unhealthy and miserable.

Even CICOpaths themselves complain about how hard this is. There are entire sections of mainstream nutrition science dedicated to the question of why “dieting doesn’t work,” and their entire model of dieting is CICO.

There are definite “magic tricks” in fat loss

Reeeee magic, yells the CICOpath.

But they exist. And they aren’t “magic” at all, just proper understanding of human metabolism, if you believe in the Fuel Partitioning paradigm.

There are clearly, OBVIOUSLY diets that work MUCH better for fat loss than others, at least for some people. Some people diet unsuccessfully for decades, then they discover some “magic” diet (keto/carnivore/low-BCAA/low-PUFA/low-fat, ..) and suddenly the pounds melt off, they spontaneously eat less, and they reach their goal weight without any real effort. They report not having to use any willpower, and not feeling deprived, ever. These people often lose 50lbs, 75lbs, 100lbs, even 150lbs.

CICOpaths will decry this as “they just reduced calories.” They claim these people could’ve lost weight just as well doing any other calorie-restricting diet.

This is such a ridiculous claim as to beggar belief. As anybody who’s ever lost a ton of weight knows, most diets don’t work whatsoever - meaning there is a ton of cost (deprivation, willpower) and zero gain (no weight loss whatsoever beyond an initial 2-5lbs of water weight).

Then, you try a Fuel Partitioning diet, and suddenly you spontaneously sustain a 1,000kcal/day deficit without feeling any deprivation or having to use any willpower?

Trying to brush this over with cries for cAlOrIes! is the most ludicrous cope I’ve ever seen.

If there are an infinite number of ways to “reduce calories” but some of them require tons of willpower, starvation symptoms, feeling like shit for years, whereas others work much better and have none of these downsides, it’s laughable to claim that “they all work the same.”

Yea, you can penny-pinch and save on your lattes to finally save up for that Ferrari. Or you can go to medical school, become a doctor, and make a lot more money. Claiming that “all Ferraris are bought with money” is a waste of breath.

“Reee, you’re vastly oversimplifying the EBM!” cries the CICOpath.

Yes, I am. But that’s because the EBM is a smoke screen. Adding infinite complexity so they don’t have to admit they simply don’t know anything.

The current mainstream hypothesis is that people are obese because food tastes good.

No shit, Sherlock. Did you have to read every Arthur Conan Doyle novel to figure that one out?

Experimental methodology, and why I no longer believe in CIM, but still in FP

Black box experiments

When it comes to dieting, I use a black box first approach. I do a thing, and it has to produce results. For me, the optimal fat loss experiment is about 30 days, to be done pretty strictly to avoid confounding factors, and it better have a big effect size.

Losing 2lbs in 30 days isn’t weight loss, it’s 2 tall glasses of water. I consider 5lbs to be moderate weight loss, especially if we’re starting at a high weight and are new to the diet. I lost 20lbs in my first month on ex150. A lot of it was water weight, but a lot of the 2-5lbs on CICO diets will be water weight, too - meaning actual fat loss was much lower.

That said, a sustained 5lbs/mo is decent weight loss pace, especially if you can keep it up as the water weight loss fades away.

This black box testing method is how I discovered ex150 - I began testing low-protein ketogenic diets by accident, and found them to work insanely well. It still took me about a year to get over the “brotein good!” brainwashing and admit to myself that excess protein was keeping me obese.

Once I designed a low-protein ketogenic diet, the weight fell of like crazy. 45lbs in a few months, 65lbs in total so far. Ad libitum eating all around, no willpower or deprivation needed.

Back Testing & Predictions

When you come up with a new hypothesis of what causes obesity, you should obviously back test it. Back testing is common in investment and financial circles: if I had done this investment strategy from 1950 to 1980, how much money would I have made/lost? How about 1980 to 2020?

But back testing is only half the issue. For any given series of data points, you can fit an infinite number of curves. Not all of them will accurately predict the next data point (though still an infinite number).

In order to test your hypothesis further, you have to make predictions: if I put 10 people on ex150, the vast majority of them (7) will lose a significant amount of weight (9.6lbs on average). Exactly that happened when I ran my ex150 trial.

Two decades of disproving “eat less & move more”

The last point is, the common mantra to “eat less & move more” that people erroneously deduce from CICO, just didn’t ever work for me.

Like most people, I tried to follow mainstream dogma when I first got interested in weight loss, nearly 20 years ago. And, like for most people, it never worked.

In any testable form, CICO fails miserably for almost everybody. Especially the “tough nut” cases, people like myself who seem to defy common nutrition knowledge.

Protein keeps me fat. Eating heavy cream makes me lose weight. Eating fiber is terrible for my digestions.

I’m open to the possibility that these “scientific truths” are valid for SOMEONE, but that someone isn’t me. And, apparently, not for the vast majority of overweight and obese people out there.

After 20 years of trying something (CICO) I became utterly convinced it’s not true, and not useful. I’m done giving it “another chance.”

Fuel Partitioning, on the other hand, seems clearly true: I’ve hit the “magic button of effortless weight loss” several times. It was just a question of what exactly caused the issues I was having with Fuel Partitioning, and what fixed them.

Sticking with the CIM: an unforced error?

I am an idiot: gaining 100lbs on keto

People sometimes ask me: “Why did you keep doing keto if you gained 100lbs (back) on it?”

Part of it is the therapeutic effect: keto fixes a severe circadian rhythm disorder I have.

But if I’m honest, I was probably in denial that keto had stopped working in terms of weight loss for maybe 5 years. It was only when I had repeatedly reached 300lbs eating ketogenic as heck that I was able to admit to myself that something was different.

What was it about keto that had stopped working? I’m still not sure, but I now suspect it was seed oils + excess protein.

Why the CIM is clearly insufficient

When you talk to low-carb or keto people, they’re often in denial that carbs can work for some (many!) people. Heck, the entire continent of Asia ate 80% or so carbs for millennia. Some hunter-gatherers eat very high carb, some even very high sugar.

Just like the Inuit prove you can be fine eating almost entirely meat & fish, there are populations out there eating 94% sweet potatoes.

When you point this out to a convinced ketard, you’ll often get very dishonest responses. I’d be fine if a ketard like myself answered: “Hey, maybe carbs work for some people, that’s great. Maybe it’s genetics. Maybe I’m just unlucky. I need ketosis for therapeutic reasons. Or maybe I just like it. To each his own.”

But what you get in actuality is explaining away reality, just like from CICOers.

“I just visited Asia, and the people there are getting fat and diabetic now, too!”

Yes, after millennia of eating mostly rice, they’re getting fat and diabetic NOW. That’s a point AGAINST the CIM, not for.

Refining CIM

Even before I was somewhat post-keto, the low-carbers had long begun refining their CIM, making it more complicated. This was likely because, in its naive form, like the EBM, it was clearly wrong. See: Asia. See also: tons of Americans and Europeans in the 1950s who ate white bread and added 5 spoons of sugar to their coffee/tea and were lean and healthy.

A popular refinement is the “sugar did it” hypothesis: starch may be fine, but sugar is bad! It spikes your glucose very quickly. That’s bad!

Another refinement: it’s not all sugar, it’s just fructose. Fructose is in High Fructose Corn Syrup, which is made by corporations. Corporations, I say!

What’s that? High Fructose Corn Syrup contains 42-55% fructose compared to table sugar’s 50%/50%? Humbug! It’s ultra-processed, everybody knows!

Now, I agree that a model needs to be complex enough to encompass a certain number of parameters, or it might not be useful. But this looks an awful lot like the EBM crowd trying to cover up their tracks: when do you admit you were wrong?

I was wrong about keto being non-obesogenic, or always causing fat loss. Just as it’s hard to convince someone that X is obesogenic when he’s lost 100lbs doing X, it’s eventually pretty convincing if he gains the 100lbs back while still doing X.

And if doing Y then makes him effortlessly lose 65lbs again, he might just change his mind. (For Y = cutting out PUFAs and severely restricting protein.)

Why the CIM might be true in context (hint: PUFAs)

Now a lot of diet ideas persist even though they’re just total nonsense and pretty much don’t do anything.

I don’t think low-carb/keto is one of those. Low-carb/keto works for a whole lot of people. I’d say maybe 20% of people will hit “magic fat loss” when going low-carb, and maybe 25-30% with keto. Carnivore is even higher, maybe 35-40%. (All these numbers are just estimates on my part from hanging around these communities for 2 decades, there are no official numbers.)

That’s nice, but not enough. It hasn’t made a dent in the obesity epidemic.

My own case was fascinating: losing 100lbs effortlessly doing keto seems like a massive success story. But gaining it all back while still on keto seems like a huge failure.

So what was different between fat-loss-keto and fat-gain-keto? What makes keto work for 25% or so of people, but not the rest? How come Chinese rice farmers in 1800 were lean and healthy while eating tons of carbs?

The truth is clearly slightly more complicated, if not necessarily a smoke screen like the EBM’s forced complexity.

My best guess is that low-carb/keto helps you in a certain context. If you’re not in that context, you don’t need it, eat as many carbs as you like. If you’re in that context, low-carb/keto might be enough, or it might not be enough. Even if it’s not enough, you might accidentally do keto a certain way, resulting in fat loss.

I think that’s what happened to me: I started keto while living in Asia, where meat is expensive, meat portions are small, and people get the majority of their energy from rice. Having cut out the rice, I was left with very tiny meat portions and I supplemented with cream & butter from the exotic grocery store (because most Asian countries don’t exactly have a ton of dairy in their cuisine, heavy cream is somewhat rare). So I was accidentally restricting protein.

Many of these countries also use palm oil or palm kernel oil for cooking, because it’s traditional, because these grow close by, and because they are cheap there. So I was accidentally reducing my PUFA intake dramatically.

Upon returning to the U.S., I ballooned almost immediately, unstoppably. I was now doing proper “U.S. Reddit Keto” with pounds of ribeye, ground beef, and bacon every day. Many a roasted chicken. Very high protein, very high PUFA. Even though I never cooked with seed oils myself, on the rare occasions that I ate out at restaurants, I’d order the salad with extra dressing. In retrospect, the dressing was probably pure soybean oil. The bacon was basically canola oil. Fatty chicken is basically canola oil. Farmed fish is nearly as PUFA-rich as canola oil.

CIM: part of the puzzle, for some. Not enough.

So is the CIM false? Not entirely. It helps some people in a certain context. Most Western people these days live in that context, namely swimming in a sea of PUFA, and having lots of PUFA stored in their body fat from decades of consuming it.

Still, low-carb/keto doesn’t work for everyone in the West. It works for more people if you also restrict protein, and probably if you cut out PUFAs on top.

It’s a useful tool, but we should be honest about what it can and cannot do.

Carbs alone can’t explain the obesity epidemic,
and low-carb/keto alone can’t solve it.

The sooner ketards can admit that,
the sooner we can find a better solution.

Fuel Partitioning is still King

But keto did work “magically” for me once, and, with some modifications on ex150, it still currently does. I’ve been a ketard for over 8 years now, I feel better than on any other diet, it fixes a condition with no known cure, and I just plain love it. I’m likely a ketard for life. (Unless dePUFAing myself eventually turns out to fix my Non-24.)

But most people don’t have Non-24, some people don’t love heavy cream as much as I do, and not everyone needs to do keto to reverse obesity.

Yet there are enough other crazy diets on the horizon now that have similar “magical” weight loss results. There’s the Potato Diet, which Slime Mold Time Mold have run several trials on (one’s still running, care to join?). There’s the Emergence/Glass Noodle Diet by Brad Marshal.

And so it’s a little more complicated than “Carbs → Insulin → Obesity” but probably not much more complicated. So far, “Cut out PUFAs, restrict protein, then pick either keto or low-fat” seems to work amazingly well for 70%+ of the people who’ve tried it. Many even lose weight without having to choose between fat and carbs, as demonstrated in SM TM’s latest potato riff trial - some people lost tons of weight eating potatoes with butter and heavy cream, aka “swamping.”

These are people who’ve had problems losing weight for years to decades. They weren’t “just” reducing calories, they were pushing the “magic button” that fixed their Fuel Partitioning.

That’s why I’m still Team Fuel Partitioning all the way.

Did I paint the Super Saiyan aura onto Pokemon characters? You can’t prove that!