> 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!
The sugar/honey/HFCS thing is interesting. As far as I know, both honey and HFCS are about half-fructose/half-glucose, and should work roughly the same.
But sucrose is a molecule in which those two sugars are chemically bonded together. I think in nutrition terms that's probably nothing interesting, because there's an enzyme that splits them apart. But it does make a difference for tooth decay because s.mutans can make its polysaccharide out of sucrose but not out of the two basic sugars.
I'm currently in the weird position of approving of honey and HFCS but not of sucrose (table sugar), but only on dental health grounds. I don't think any of the three is important for obesity.
Yea, I'm very open to the idea that something else about HFCS is messed up vs. honey or sugar. Maybe they put so much glyphosate in it that it gets into your system. Or the molecule thing you mention. I've also heard HFCS has other "carbs" that aren't being counted via USDA/FDA rules for some reason.
But I don't think the fructose content can explain it being much worse than table sugar, which Americans were eating 100-150g of per day in the 1920s and 1940s.
Classic motte-and-bailey for the CICO folks. "The carbarians are within the gate ['just eat less'], everyone quick to the higher ground ['lol laws of thermodynamics'].
Agreed. I used to think that the motte-and-bailey was a dishonest rhetorical technique, but having seen quite a lot of this sort of thing recently, I think people really can't see the difference between CICO (the law of physics) and CICO (the stupid plan).
Almost everyone seems to confuse the two all the time, and our side is just as bad with our continuous attempts to "own the CICOists".
I start to wonder if all motte-and-bailey things work like that.
Agreed, it's the same thing in their mind. You're literally claiming you can fly in their world view. If you point out the motte & bailey, they get angry. I've yet to see a single CICOpath even be able to decipher, let alone address, the critique. "So you're saying physics isn't real?"
CI is more contentious than CO. Some people interpret ‘calories in’ to mean macronutrients swallowed regardless of what the body does with the nutrients, while others only consider calories to be ‘in’ if they are utilised or stored.
If you're after a real law of physics, that error goes in CO! Because you've got to measure the energy content of everything you excrete.
The real problem is CO. It's impossible to measure it unless you've got yourself locked in a calorimeter under the supervision of some scientists. Most of CO is your heat output. Calories burnt by exercise is a small effect compared to day to day thermogenesis.
That's actually how Atwater (a clever and careful man) worked out the energy content of the macronutrients in the first place. Groundbreaking and important work and you would think someone had bothered to replicate it and finish it off properly, but apparently not....
There is a real law of physics buried in there somewhere, but it's useless in practice for weight-loss, and also both obvious and tautologous. No nutrition experiment is ever likely to overturn the law of conservation of mass-energy. It's implied by the symmetries of spacetime.
The real argument is: "If you restrict your calorie intake, will you lose weight?" I think the answer to that is probably usually: "Yes, but it will be uncomfortable, unsustainable without superhuman willpower, won't work as well as you think because your metabolism will adjust to famine conditions, and all that weight will come back on the minute you stop willpowering."
It might *also* put you into some sort of long-term famine-survival calorie storing mode, which is probably not what you want. And starvation may even have epigenetic effects *on your children*, if the Dutch are to be believed.
But humans are complex beasts. Starvation dieting might even work for some people. I think we have quite a lot of evidence from the last half century that that's not usually the case, though.
Well, mathematics is the stuff that's true in all possible worlds. To know which mathematical models apply in our world, you have to do experiments. That's the physics bit.
There are possible worlds where conservation of energy isn't true. In fact the original law was modified in the early years of the 20th century when we noticed that Newtonian physics wasn't quite true. Not that that's likely to be an issue here!
The hot new scientific method for CO measurement is "doubly labeled water" as discussed by Herman Pontzer in his scientific papers and in his book *Burn.* It requires ingesting water that contains special H and O isotopes (deuterium and oxygen-18) and then measuring their presence in urine.
Yea, I just listened to a podcast with John Speakman on this, who's another DLW guy. Very cool method and it's come way down in price. Still very expensive, but now it's like $1,000 instead of $10,000 per person, hah. I hope it'll come down to consumer levels soon and spreads more, so adult men will stop estimating their TDEEs at 2,000kcal/day while exercising 5x/wk...
This is definitely what Giles Yeo (author of *Why Calories Don't Count*) argues. He walks the reader through "actual" vs. "effective" calories and discusses the thermic effect of food (TEF). This leads him to recommend eating lots of fiber and protein because they have higher TEFs than carbs and fat.
I thought the community might enjoy reading this economics paper from 2003. The authors are Nobel-caliber economists, so I mean no disrespect, and I presume they wrote the best paper they could given the available knowledge of the time.
It's interesting to see how little progress The Science™ has made on understanding obesity between then and now. And how many of the arguments of this paper still pervade the scientific discourse across many disciplines.
There's a whole "Calories In versus Calories Out" section that begins with the sentence, "Arithmetically, people get heavier if they consume more calories or expend fewer calories." I am impressed they phrased it this way instead of appealing to the "laws of thermodynamics."
Yea, I mean, that's the definition of the thing. If more calories entered your body they didn't just ephemerally float around in there, they likely got stored as body fat. Because that's the only mechanism we have for storing more than tiny amounts of energy (some glycogen, but way less than fat).
Like saying "Arithmetically, when people get richer, the number in their bank account increases." Correct, that's what "richer" means.
Semaglutide/Ozempic is the final trial of CICO based method of fat loss. By killing appetite without addressing underlying metabolic issues, it is the realization of the CICO dream for better or worse. And I assume we will see a lot of *worse*, starvation ain't pretty.
Have you ever read the stuff from the self-proclaimed "Glucose Goddess" Jessie Inchauspé? Her story is that glucose spikes are bad (not that sugar or HFCS per se is bad). Using continuous glucose monitor (CGM) readings she works backwards to see what causes glucose spikes and then avoids those things. She came up with 10 "hacks" to keep glucose curves flat:
1. Eat foods in the right order: Start with vegetables, then protein and fat, and end with carbs and sweets. This will slow down the absorption of sugar and prevent spikes and crashes.
2. Add a green starter to all your meals: Eat some raw or cooked vegetables before your main meal. This will fill you up with fiber and nutrients, and reduce the amount of calories and carbs you consume.
3. Stop counting calories: Focus on the quality and quantity of carbs, not calories. Choose low-glycemic carbs that release glucose slowly and steadily, and avoid high-glycemic carbs that cause rapid and high glucose spikes.
4. Flatten your breakfast curve: Eat a savory breakfast or sweeten your morning smoothies with low-glycemic fruits, such as green apples or berries. This will prevent a morning glucose surge and keep you energized and satisfied until lunch.
5. All sugars are the same. Eat it if you really love it and it's worth the corresponding glucose spike.
6. Pick dessert over a sweet snack. The best time to eat something sweet is after you’ve already eaten a meal with fat, protein, and fiber. When we eat sugar on an empty stomach, we’re throwing our system into a postprandial spin, riding on a big glucose and fructose spike.
7. Add a bit of vinegar before you eat: Add some vinegar to your salad dressings, stews, or drinks. Vinegar can lower the glycemic index of foods and improve insulin sensitivity, which means less glucose in your blood and more in your cells.
8. After you eat, move: Exercise after your meals, even if it’s just a 10-minute walk. Physical activity can help your muscles use glucose more efficiently and lower your blood sugar levels.
9. Savoury snacking: Snack on protein-rich and low-carb foods, such as nuts, cheese, eggs, or hummus. These will keep you full and prevent glucose dips and cravings between meals.
10. Don’t eat your carbs naked: Pair your carbs with protein, fat, and fiber. These will slow down the digestion and absorption of carbs, and reduce the glycemic impact of your meal.
I'll let you decide which camp this approach fits under, but it sure doesn't seem like CICO. I view it as an attempt to find first-order approximations to the biochemical pathways diagram you posted.
I'm still looking into the claims from the book Glucose Revolution, but thought you might find it interesting in any case (if you haven't yet come across it).
I haven't read the Glucose Goddess yet, but she's come up a few times in the comments here.
I've worn a CGM for half a year and done keto for 8 years, and the CGM confirmed that I basically never have glucose spikes. I've found glucose control to not be a very good indicator for fat loss. Since I've never even been prediabetic, it was more a gadget for me than actionable/useful.
I will say I could confirm the "move after you eat" thing. It was bizarrely effective - even less than 1,000 steps, not even around the block just a quick walk back and forth, would reliably lower my post-prandial glucose by 20mg/dL. Or increase it to "normal operating range" if I'd been sedentary for hours.
Sounds like she's more focused on diabetes control than weight loss, and overall in the low-carb/low-glycemic index camp?
I'm still technically in that camp because I do keto and don't have any/many glucose spikes (the highest carbs I get are from lattes), but I don't think it's sufficient to explain obesity, at least in me.
Interesting! Glad to know that some of Glucose Goddess' stuff checks out. I agree that she is definitely not a CICOpath.
She mentions that some of her followers lose tons of weight, but it's just anecdotal and unclear what (if any) other changes these people are making and not telling her about.
That, plus a lot of people actually just magically lose weight doing low-carb/keto without any further restrictions. Twitter is full of them. I'm jealous! Wish I could eat ribeyes all day and see the pounds melt off, haha.
Great post, thank you for your dedication to your journey and your willingness to share. Respectfully, I think we are missing here a few items that are in my view incontrovertible:
1. Pontzer (the book "Burn" I keep recommending) clearly and beyond any doubt proved that a hunter-gatherer in Africa and a western couch potato in North America spend the same amount of energy based on height and weight irrespective of diet or physical activity. Working out has tremendous health benefits reducing inflammation and fighting the loss of bone density and muscle mass, but it is not remotely good for weight loss.
2. Pontzer results lend credibility to the idea that our bodies behave like systems. So if you reduce your calories it will compensate by slowing down your metabolism, and if you consume more it will speed it up... to a point. The "lipostat" theory seems to hold true. You can't get any better than double labelled water to measure energy output!
3. Almost 100 years ago Ancel Keys showed that reducing your food by half leads to poor health and not weight loss. If you want to follow the caloric model, aim for a 200 calorie deficit per day TOPS. And you should stick to that plan for 2-3 years, not 30 days. It is slow, steady and based on my lived experience, it works. Just makes for a boring blog, LOL.
4. Elephant in the room: Why GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic seem to work so darn well? They slow down digestion, yes. But they also alter the perception of fullness, they work on your brain. They seem to also reduce addiction to alcohol or drugs. Which brings me to my hastily put together conclusion:
The high fat, or high carb low fat, or even the high-satiety plant-based diet all do something similar: it triggers satiety in a way your brain understands.
Highly processed foods alter the signals the brain receives, and there is a gut-brain connection. So over time the body is overwhelmed with excess calories that are easily digestible and highly palatable, and people start gaining weight. Which lead to cardiac troubles, pre-diabetes, etc.
My personal experience aligns of course with this view, In 2012 I was 200 pounds (91 kilos) and by 2017 I was 138 pounds. I was losing very little every month, but steadily. So far I have not regained the weight. I follow the NOVA description of foods and stay with lots of vegetables and fruits, lean meats and pulses. I do keep my calorie intake to 2,100. If I go below 1,800 for more than a week, I start losing weight. And I do HIIT for 45 minutes 5 days a week not to lose or maintain weight, but to reduce inflammation and keep my bone density and muscle mass. I am 50 so it is kind of downhill for me, ha.
1. Yea I agree with that. I haven't read Burn yet, but it's on my shelf. Probably next after Omega Balance, which I'm currently reading. His results confirm what almost anyone who's ever tried to work off weight has experienced, lol.
2. I don't see how this shows the lipostat theory holds true. I don't believe in the lipostat. If there was a lipostat, how did I reprogram it to -100lbs, then +100lbs, and this time, so far, -65lbs again? Doesn't make sense to me.
3. Nobody has time to try something for 2-3 years just to see if it works. I think any serious fat loss diet, especially in an obese person, should show serious results after 30 days. Probably before that, but there are lots of things that work in the short term but not the long term, and if you can make it 30 days, that's a good start.
4. GLP-1 receptors also seem to inhibit the hyperphagia produced by linoleic acid oxidation products. We don't know how they work, and for many people, they don't work.
I don't believe in the "highly processed food" thing because I gained 100lbs cooking my own, home-cooked meals 95% of the time from fresh ingredients. If I can gain 100lbs on whole, unprocessed foods, and lose 65lbs doing 1 small thing different, I think "highly processed foods" is the wrong heuristic.
Congrats on the weight loss. I think the "whole foods" thing can work for some people, but it never did for me. I never lost weight in years of paleo, coming from a SAD. I gained 100lbs eating 95% home-cooked, whole foods from fresh ingredients.
I lost tons of weight by doing weird little tricks that have nothing to do with "whole foods." So I think, for many people, the princess is in another castle. Though I have nothing against whole foods, I just don't think they're enough to explain it all.
Great points. On the lipostat, the re-programming is extremely tough and you may never be able to change your set-point... I think it explains why once you gain weight you can't easily make those pounds go away. Not settled science as Pontzer, I agree. Homeostasis seem plausible, though given its prevalence across species.
On the "whole foods" I should have said "whole foods promoting satiety". I eat a lot of potatoes, kabocha squash, mushrooms -the legal kind- Brussels sprouts, cabbage, daikon radish, cauliflower and broccoli; mostly from frozen because it is way cheaper. Lentils and black beans from dry, super cheap as well. Steel-cut oats, apples and berries (frozen, again). For animal protein lean fish (frozen haddock, Pollock, basa) and chicken breast. Pretty much no condiments in liquid form, I just roast in the oven and season with cumin, paprika, garlic powder and allspice.
Semiglutide or GLP-1 drugs work for a majority like nothing we have seen before. It looks like close to 80% generally lose 5% of their initial weight and close to half will get into the 15% territory (see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796491). Losing weight is hard, if you agree that your body is fighting you all the way, so those results are impressive.
Lastly, and this is just an opinion, I am unsure that the number on the scale is as meaningful as a blood panel showing that cholesterol, liver function, kidney function and sugar levels are good; and that your blood pressure is within the healthy range. Those health markers, I posit, are more important that your body weight. But what do I know!
It is hard to find knowledgeable people like you, very much enjoying this. Take care.
> On the lipostat, the re-programming is extremely tough and you may never be able to change your set-point... I think it explains why once you gain weight you can't easily make those pounds go away.
But then how did I suddenly reprogram mine to -100lbs, then +100lbs, now -65lbs again? Did mine just "glitch?" Just doesn't feel like a set point to me.
Satiety seems to be very specific and different from person to person. I get zero satiety from protein or fiber or being physically full. The experience of being bloated to the point of physical pain, yet "starving," is very common for me. E.g. on the potato diet I couldn't eat enough and I was starving yet in physical pain most of the time. Hated it.
On the other hand, on ex150 my food is extremely energy dense. I eat less than 2lbs of mass per day, and 2/3 or 3/4 of that is water (from meat, vegetables, sauce, and heavy cream). I am never "full" in the physical sense, yet extremely satiated. Also almost no protein (<45g/day).
5% of initial weight isn't particularly good. I'm 22% (292 to 227lbs) down, with 2/3 of it in the first few months and half a year of fruitless (=no weight loss) experiments last summer.
My body wasn't fighting me on this at all, it was, in the willpower sense, "effortless." Ate to satiety every day.
My liver function, kidney function, and glucose levels are all good. Blood pressure will be affected by weight. On cholesterol, I don't agree with the mainstream what the "healthy" or "optimal" levels are.
So by that standard, I am very healthy, healthier than my weight at least :)
> I’ve eaten 1,000kcal/day for 2 months straight and lost 0lbs.
You know I'm on your side here! But I am frankly sceptical of this.
If you mean 'and my weight never changed a bit', then your energy expenditure would have had to drop by exactly 1000kcals/day instantly, which is a bit too good to be true.
If you mean 'and I lost some weight but not much and I was cold and really hungry and then it all came back once I stopped doing that', then you could phrase this differently to avoid confusion.
The metabolism is byzantine in its complexity. - dozens of interdependent thermostats. I notice that I stop fidgeting on any day when I've gone on a big hike or long bike ride, and that's only one unconscious mechanism into which I at least have some some visibility.
In fact, i'm on day three of a SMTM potato riff, and find that I require deliberate interoception to make sure i'm eating enough. Why? Because calorie restriction doesn't work for me -- I'll just stop moving without realizing that I have, will find the ambient temp suddenly much lower than it was before, find more excuses to 'have a lie-in' as I think you Brits call it, not to mention all the other power-saving shifts happening under the hood.
Saturated fat, sauerkraut, and hot sauce. It's largely in solidarity with a friend who needs the weight loss more than I do, but I'm being strict about it. So far the biggest difference is how many more meals I need to eat -- instead of a single calorie-dense one it's three. I wake up hungry in the morning, which hasn't happened in years.
Haha might take some getting used to. Good luck! Sounds like a good trial and might give us more swampy data points. Plus some points for palatability with the kraut and hot sauce ;)
> I’ve eaten 1,000kcal/day for 2 months straight and lost 0lbs.
Is perfectly possible, it doesn't violate any law of physics. If our host is actually claiming that in its most literal sense then I will believe him. He is careful and measures things. But it is a surprising statement. It requires that his body instantly adapted perfectly to the reduced energy intake without drawing on any of the considerable available fat stores. I think if it's true he must have been (a) completely unable to access stored fat and (b) literally starving hungry, cold and ill, and in some danger.
If it's true in the more hand-wavy sense of 'I did lose a few pounds to start with but then the effect stopped and it all came back on the minute I stopped starving myself', then it seems much more likely.
Yup, in the literal sense. Very easy to explain with CICO:
CI -> down to 1,000kcal/day
CO -> down to 1,000kcal/day
QED
Doesn't require an instant change, just a few days or less. Maybe I lost half a pound the first few days or so, I don't recall now. But it was pretty much entirely flat the entire time.
I was not hungry, not starving, not cold, not ill, not in danger. In fact, it was maybe the most relaxed period of my life.
Maybe it means I can't eat carbs? Or I can't swamp? I think I was relatively "metabolically fixed" already at the time, as I'd lost some weight before this and TONS right after when I went keto. So yea, you'd think that I would've lost a ton of fat..
Then again that 1 meal was much higher in protein than ex150. IIRC I was doing 200g of chicken, plus some protein from the rice/beans.. 200g of lean chicken are already 50% higher protein than ex150 is in total.
Those people were doing hard physical labor, so their floor was probably quite a bit higher. Plus illness, infections, stress, shitty sleep (I imagine lol).
For me this was during probably the most relaxed and least stressed period of my life, during a 2 year sabbatical. I didn't do shit all day, just sleeping in and hanging out with friends.
I believe him. When I was in my early 20s I ate 800 calories per day for a month, not fussing with any particular macros, and didn’t lose any weight. At the time, 3000+ calories a day of low carb made me lose 4lbs per week.
Not instantly, but within a few days, which is quite normal. I ate the exact same meal every day. One meal of rice, beans, some chicken, a tiny bit of butter for fat, some non-caloric vegetables, cooked in broth. I weighed it out so it would be pretty much exactly 1,000kcal (natural fluctuations of course not corrected for) and ate that same meal as my lunch, every day, for 2 months straight. I had previously lost a bunch of weight on it, but for these 2 months, nothing.
Intriguingly, during this episode, I didn't get starvation symptoms at all. So I must've been just at the limit of what my body could lower its metabolism to. I suspect that at this point I was already somewhat "metabolically healed." This was just before I started doing keto, as a reaction to "1,000kcal OMAD stopped working" I decided to give keto a try - and then that fixed my Non-24, so In ever looked back.
I think a healthy human metabolism should be able to massively increase/decrease metabolic rate to the available intake. This is how we survived ice ages, famines, dry seasons..
I wouldn't have been able to power through 2 months of starvation symptoms. Usually I barely last 1-2 days. But then, "usually," I'm not metabolically in order.
This is all fascinating. Very hard for me to wrap my head around brotein causing overweight or preventing weight loss but I find it very intriguing. Have you addressed the mechanisms for such already in your writings? If so would you mind linking to them? Or the best argument you have seen from Brad M or others? Thanks
If you dive into the archive he did a full post solely on a bunch of studies that seem to indicate that protein (specifically BCAAs) + PUFAs create obesity. It's really quite fascinating!
Simulating the metabolic pathways under different diets would be interesting. There was a recent blog post on Hacker News about doing that with the minimal cell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066165
I've enjoy your work, but ironically I'm post-fuel partitioning in my thinking partly as a result of reading your stuff! I thought: if it's true you can drink heavy cream to your heart's content and still lose weight, then that pretty much confirms that CICO is garbage. But it didn't work for me. Then I retried the cream experiment (but this time while enforcing a calorie deficit) and the weight started coming off. Don't get me wrong, I think hormones play a considerable role but to deny the importance of calories entirely is also simplistic (not that you're doing that). At the end of the day, food gives us energy, and our fat stores are energy stores, so I don't think it's tautological to say "reducing your energy intake forces your body to tap into long-term energy stores, thereby helping you lose weight". I mean, that's what happens during fasting, and in my view keto diets are basically just diets that simulate the hormonal effects of fasting.
Fasting doesn't work for the vast majority of people who try it, I'd say significantly less than even keto. So I don't think that "diets that work just emulate fasting." I never saw much success fasting.
Am I getting right that you basically saw this:
1. Regular calorie restriction diets you didn't lose weight
2. Chugging ad lib cream didn't make you lose weight
3. Chugging cream in moderation (calorie restricted) made you lose weight
Is that accurate? In that case, I'd argue fuel partitioning is still primary: you had to get your fuel partitioning right, and THEN you could begin restricting calories.
I'm pretty open to the idea that, even on a fuel-partitioned diet, you can't eat infinite energy and still lose weight. E.g. when I accidentally consumed about 4,000kcal/day via HWC lattes at Starbucks, I didn't lose much weight even though everything else was mostly kept the same.
But FP is still primary in that, unless you fix it, you cannot simply restrict calories. That's why fasting works for almost nobody, I think. If calorie deficits were primary, we could all just fast our way to abs, and most fat loss advice would work, which it doesn't.
So "deficit" works in the context of "fixed fuel partitioning" I'd say.
Not quite. I have lost considerable weight using calorie restriction, fasting, and keto protocols at various times. I find all to be effective but in my experience the common denominator has been calorie restriction.
Now, what's nice about keto or heavy cream diets is that they make it easier to restrict calories because they tend to suppress appetite, and it's also just hard to overeat foods high in fat. But in my experience as soon as you pump up calorie intake sufficiently, the weight loss stops or even reverses.
One important point: the FP argument emphasizes the importance of insulin in fat accumulation, so FP folks often say: "it's not the calories it's the carbs!" But calorie restriction alone (sans keto) tends to improve markers of insulin sensitivity, so it's not necessarily an either/or. Calories consumed meaningfully impacts insulin levels, and perhaps insulin levels meaningfully impact calories consumed--it may be bidirectional causality but I don't think we can say there's no connection.
You might be in a different category then - I've never been able to lose weight restricting calories. My metabolism seems to be supremely effective at simply adjusting and burning less energy. Lucky you!
Concerning the insulin: many low-carbers are all about insulin, but it might not be (just) insulin. Protein also significantly raises insulin.
So unless the "calorie restricted diet" was equal in carbs + protein and only fat was cut, I wouldn't put too much into that: of course restricting the foods that spike insulin causes less insulin spiking.
There might also be secondary effects on insulin if one were to do this, but I haven't even seen anyone try.
Fat is stored energy. Food gives us energy. Reducing food intake forces the body to tap into its long-term energy stores, which means burning fat.
To be clear, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, and I know calorie restriction doesn't work for everyone, but I don't see how it's tautological to say "eating less makes you leaner".
Is it tautology or just kinda...how it works? (If this question sounds naive please understand--I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who used to be all in on the fuel partitioning hypothesis).
> Fat is stored energy. Food gives us energy. Reducing food intake forces the body to tap into its long-term energy stores, which means burning fat.
I agree with that, but that would just make it tautological. In that scenario, "caloric deficit" literally equals "fat lost." It's just a more vague, abstract restatement of the fact that less fat tissue is now present in the body.
In terms of operative advice, this is clearly not how it works and not very helpful for most obese people: just from a black box approach, we can see that simply "forcing" the body to burn fat doesn't actually result in (very much) fat being burned.
What actually happens it that the person goes into starvation mode while having dozens or hundreds of pounds of fat available.
I like the tanker truck analogy: imagine you're driving a giant gasoline tanker truck. It has its own fuel tank (with say 250 gallons of fuel, I don't actually know how much they hold lol) and the giant tank on the back.
If you run out of the fuel in your own "little" semi truck tank, and you don't have the giant, big tanker connected to it, it doesn't matter that you have "lots of fuel" on you - you can't get at it.
This seems to be the situation for most obese people. The question is, why? And how do we fix that?
I think these "magical" diets fix fuel partitioning and therefore "unclog" the pipe from the giant tanker truck to the semi's truck, enabling it to suddenly access the enormous amounts of stored fuel it should've had access to the whole time.
> Is it tautology or just kinda...how it works?
Well, we definitely know it's not how it works, because it works for almost nobody who's obese.
> To be clear, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, and I know calorie restriction doesn't work for everyone, but I don't see how it's tautological to say "eating less makes you leaner".
This is the weird motte & bailey.
"eating less -> leaner" is not tautological, it's just largely wrong. But it also doesn't at all follow from "CICO" which is tautological. CICOpaths seem to switch between these 2 (incompatible) positions the whole time.
"eating less -> leaner" does not follow from CICO because CO and CI are not necessarily fixed when you mess with the other. In fact, they clearly are not, which is easy to try, well-known in the literature, and we know the mechanisms.
What you eat, and how much you eat, leads to your body adjusting CO. Increasing CO also increases CI via appetite, a well-known and easily testable phenomenon. "Work up an appetite."
So "eat less" could easily lead to "burn even less than you saved in eating" and could therefore easily lead to "weight gain" instead of "weight loss."
That's why "eating less makes you leaner" is usually not true, at least for the metabolically impaired.
Look, it’s true that maintaining a caloric deficit isn’t easy. But just because advice is hard to follow doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
After years of being on a very similar wavelength to the one you’re currently on, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way around limiting intake for achieving true leanness.
We can try all kinds of weird approaches (trust me, I have) including drinking inordinate amounts of heavy cream, limiting PUFAs, whatever. At the end of the day, fat stores are energy stores. Losing weight means using up those energy stores. Doing this requires limiting intake one way or another.
I know you think I’m “not even wrong” but I think this is just how it works. Sure caloric restriction is REALLY HARD for most people. But hard advice isn’t necessarily wrong advice.
I know we won’t resolve this here. But I just think that this is actually really simple. If you wanna get lean, you gotta limit intake for a period of time. If that’s tautological, it’s because fat stores are energy stores, so of course fewer calories in = less fat. That’s just how it works.
I know you will not agree with me but thanks for taking the time to reply. I still enjoy your work : )
> 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!
The sugar/honey/HFCS thing is interesting. As far as I know, both honey and HFCS are about half-fructose/half-glucose, and should work roughly the same.
But sucrose is a molecule in which those two sugars are chemically bonded together. I think in nutrition terms that's probably nothing interesting, because there's an enzyme that splits them apart. But it does make a difference for tooth decay because s.mutans can make its polysaccharide out of sucrose but not out of the two basic sugars.
I'm currently in the weird position of approving of honey and HFCS but not of sucrose (table sugar), but only on dental health grounds. I don't think any of the three is important for obesity.
Yea, I'm very open to the idea that something else about HFCS is messed up vs. honey or sugar. Maybe they put so much glyphosate in it that it gets into your system. Or the molecule thing you mention. I've also heard HFCS has other "carbs" that aren't being counted via USDA/FDA rules for some reason.
But I don't think the fructose content can explain it being much worse than table sugar, which Americans were eating 100-150g of per day in the 1920s and 1940s.
Classic motte-and-bailey for the CICO folks. "The carbarians are within the gate ['just eat less'], everyone quick to the higher ground ['lol laws of thermodynamics'].
Agreed. I used to think that the motte-and-bailey was a dishonest rhetorical technique, but having seen quite a lot of this sort of thing recently, I think people really can't see the difference between CICO (the law of physics) and CICO (the stupid plan).
Almost everyone seems to confuse the two all the time, and our side is just as bad with our continuous attempts to "own the CICOists".
I start to wonder if all motte-and-bailey things work like that.
Agreed, it's the same thing in their mind. You're literally claiming you can fly in their world view. If you point out the motte & bailey, they get angry. I've yet to see a single CICOpath even be able to decipher, let alone address, the critique. "So you're saying physics isn't real?"
CI is more contentious than CO. Some people interpret ‘calories in’ to mean macronutrients swallowed regardless of what the body does with the nutrients, while others only consider calories to be ‘in’ if they are utilised or stored.
Yea, they usually refuse to define what they mean by CI or CO, or deficit, or balance. "Semantics!"
If you're after a real law of physics, that error goes in CO! Because you've got to measure the energy content of everything you excrete.
The real problem is CO. It's impossible to measure it unless you've got yourself locked in a calorimeter under the supervision of some scientists. Most of CO is your heat output. Calories burnt by exercise is a small effect compared to day to day thermogenesis.
That's actually how Atwater (a clever and careful man) worked out the energy content of the macronutrients in the first place. Groundbreaking and important work and you would think someone had bothered to replicate it and finish it off properly, but apparently not....
There is a real law of physics buried in there somewhere, but it's useless in practice for weight-loss, and also both obvious and tautologous. No nutrition experiment is ever likely to overturn the law of conservation of mass-energy. It's implied by the symmetries of spacetime.
The real argument is: "If you restrict your calorie intake, will you lose weight?" I think the answer to that is probably usually: "Yes, but it will be uncomfortable, unsustainable without superhuman willpower, won't work as well as you think because your metabolism will adjust to famine conditions, and all that weight will come back on the minute you stop willpowering."
It might *also* put you into some sort of long-term famine-survival calorie storing mode, which is probably not what you want. And starvation may even have epigenetic effects *on your children*, if the Dutch are to be believed.
But humans are complex beasts. Starvation dieting might even work for some people. I think we have quite a lot of evidence from the last half century that that's not usually the case, though.
It's not a law of physics, it's a law of accounting. You can do the same with money.
Money In, Money Out. Balance. Deficit. Surplus. These are accounting terms.
Well, mathematics is the stuff that's true in all possible worlds. To know which mathematical models apply in our world, you have to do experiments. That's the physics bit.
There are possible worlds where conservation of energy isn't true. In fact the original law was modified in the early years of the 20th century when we noticed that Newtonian physics wasn't quite true. Not that that's likely to be an issue here!
This just underlies my favorite explanation for the obesity epidemic: gravity has increased!
To lose weight, I advise people to get as far away from the center of gravity as possible.
The hot new scientific method for CO measurement is "doubly labeled water" as discussed by Herman Pontzer in his scientific papers and in his book *Burn.* It requires ingesting water that contains special H and O isotopes (deuterium and oxygen-18) and then measuring their presence in urine.
Yea, I just listened to a podcast with John Speakman on this, who's another DLW guy. Very cool method and it's come way down in price. Still very expensive, but now it's like $1,000 instead of $10,000 per person, hah. I hope it'll come down to consumer levels soon and spreads more, so adult men will stop estimating their TDEEs at 2,000kcal/day while exercising 5x/wk...
This is definitely what Giles Yeo (author of *Why Calories Don't Count*) argues. He walks the reader through "actual" vs. "effective" calories and discusses the thermic effect of food (TEF). This leads him to recommend eating lots of fiber and protein because they have higher TEFs than carbs and fat.
Ah yes, motte & bailey is the name for this. I keep thinking of it as a "flip flop" haha.
I thought the community might enjoy reading this economics paper from 2003. The authors are Nobel-caliber economists, so I mean no disrespect, and I presume they wrote the best paper they could given the available knowledge of the time.
It's interesting to see how little progress The Science™ has made on understanding obesity between then and now. And how many of the arguments of this paper still pervade the scientific discourse across many disciplines.
There's a whole "Calories In versus Calories Out" section that begins with the sentence, "Arithmetically, people get heavier if they consume more calories or expend fewer calories." I am impressed they phrased it this way instead of appealing to the "laws of thermodynamics."
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533003769204371
Yea, I mean, that's the definition of the thing. If more calories entered your body they didn't just ephemerally float around in there, they likely got stored as body fat. Because that's the only mechanism we have for storing more than tiny amounts of energy (some glycogen, but way less than fat).
Like saying "Arithmetically, when people get richer, the number in their bank account increases." Correct, that's what "richer" means.
Semaglutide/Ozempic is the final trial of CICO based method of fat loss. By killing appetite without addressing underlying metabolic issues, it is the realization of the CICO dream for better or worse. And I assume we will see a lot of *worse*, starvation ain't pretty.
Agreed. Seems to work for some, but boy are there side effects. Plus a significant number of people don't see any/good results.
Have you ever read the stuff from the self-proclaimed "Glucose Goddess" Jessie Inchauspé? Her story is that glucose spikes are bad (not that sugar or HFCS per se is bad). Using continuous glucose monitor (CGM) readings she works backwards to see what causes glucose spikes and then avoids those things. She came up with 10 "hacks" to keep glucose curves flat:
1. Eat foods in the right order: Start with vegetables, then protein and fat, and end with carbs and sweets. This will slow down the absorption of sugar and prevent spikes and crashes.
2. Add a green starter to all your meals: Eat some raw or cooked vegetables before your main meal. This will fill you up with fiber and nutrients, and reduce the amount of calories and carbs you consume.
3. Stop counting calories: Focus on the quality and quantity of carbs, not calories. Choose low-glycemic carbs that release glucose slowly and steadily, and avoid high-glycemic carbs that cause rapid and high glucose spikes.
4. Flatten your breakfast curve: Eat a savory breakfast or sweeten your morning smoothies with low-glycemic fruits, such as green apples or berries. This will prevent a morning glucose surge and keep you energized and satisfied until lunch.
5. All sugars are the same. Eat it if you really love it and it's worth the corresponding glucose spike.
6. Pick dessert over a sweet snack. The best time to eat something sweet is after you’ve already eaten a meal with fat, protein, and fiber. When we eat sugar on an empty stomach, we’re throwing our system into a postprandial spin, riding on a big glucose and fructose spike.
7. Add a bit of vinegar before you eat: Add some vinegar to your salad dressings, stews, or drinks. Vinegar can lower the glycemic index of foods and improve insulin sensitivity, which means less glucose in your blood and more in your cells.
8. After you eat, move: Exercise after your meals, even if it’s just a 10-minute walk. Physical activity can help your muscles use glucose more efficiently and lower your blood sugar levels.
9. Savoury snacking: Snack on protein-rich and low-carb foods, such as nuts, cheese, eggs, or hummus. These will keep you full and prevent glucose dips and cravings between meals.
10. Don’t eat your carbs naked: Pair your carbs with protein, fat, and fiber. These will slow down the digestion and absorption of carbs, and reduce the glycemic impact of your meal.
I'll let you decide which camp this approach fits under, but it sure doesn't seem like CICO. I view it as an attempt to find first-order approximations to the biochemical pathways diagram you posted.
I'm still looking into the claims from the book Glucose Revolution, but thought you might find it interesting in any case (if you haven't yet come across it).
I haven't read the Glucose Goddess yet, but she's come up a few times in the comments here.
I've worn a CGM for half a year and done keto for 8 years, and the CGM confirmed that I basically never have glucose spikes. I've found glucose control to not be a very good indicator for fat loss. Since I've never even been prediabetic, it was more a gadget for me than actionable/useful.
I will say I could confirm the "move after you eat" thing. It was bizarrely effective - even less than 1,000 steps, not even around the block just a quick walk back and forth, would reliably lower my post-prandial glucose by 20mg/dL. Or increase it to "normal operating range" if I'd been sedentary for hours.
Sounds like she's more focused on diabetes control than weight loss, and overall in the low-carb/low-glycemic index camp?
I'm still technically in that camp because I do keto and don't have any/many glucose spikes (the highest carbs I get are from lattes), but I don't think it's sufficient to explain obesity, at least in me.
Interesting! Glad to know that some of Glucose Goddess' stuff checks out. I agree that she is definitely not a CICOpath.
She mentions that some of her followers lose tons of weight, but it's just anecdotal and unclear what (if any) other changes these people are making and not telling her about.
That, plus a lot of people actually just magically lose weight doing low-carb/keto without any further restrictions. Twitter is full of them. I'm jealous! Wish I could eat ribeyes all day and see the pounds melt off, haha.
Great post, thank you for your dedication to your journey and your willingness to share. Respectfully, I think we are missing here a few items that are in my view incontrovertible:
1. Pontzer (the book "Burn" I keep recommending) clearly and beyond any doubt proved that a hunter-gatherer in Africa and a western couch potato in North America spend the same amount of energy based on height and weight irrespective of diet or physical activity. Working out has tremendous health benefits reducing inflammation and fighting the loss of bone density and muscle mass, but it is not remotely good for weight loss.
2. Pontzer results lend credibility to the idea that our bodies behave like systems. So if you reduce your calories it will compensate by slowing down your metabolism, and if you consume more it will speed it up... to a point. The "lipostat" theory seems to hold true. You can't get any better than double labelled water to measure energy output!
3. Almost 100 years ago Ancel Keys showed that reducing your food by half leads to poor health and not weight loss. If you want to follow the caloric model, aim for a 200 calorie deficit per day TOPS. And you should stick to that plan for 2-3 years, not 30 days. It is slow, steady and based on my lived experience, it works. Just makes for a boring blog, LOL.
4. Elephant in the room: Why GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic seem to work so darn well? They slow down digestion, yes. But they also alter the perception of fullness, they work on your brain. They seem to also reduce addiction to alcohol or drugs. Which brings me to my hastily put together conclusion:
The high fat, or high carb low fat, or even the high-satiety plant-based diet all do something similar: it triggers satiety in a way your brain understands.
Highly processed foods alter the signals the brain receives, and there is a gut-brain connection. So over time the body is overwhelmed with excess calories that are easily digestible and highly palatable, and people start gaining weight. Which lead to cardiac troubles, pre-diabetes, etc.
My personal experience aligns of course with this view, In 2012 I was 200 pounds (91 kilos) and by 2017 I was 138 pounds. I was losing very little every month, but steadily. So far I have not regained the weight. I follow the NOVA description of foods and stay with lots of vegetables and fruits, lean meats and pulses. I do keep my calorie intake to 2,100. If I go below 1,800 for more than a week, I start losing weight. And I do HIIT for 45 minutes 5 days a week not to lose or maintain weight, but to reduce inflammation and keep my bone density and muscle mass. I am 50 so it is kind of downhill for me, ha.
Thanks for your excellent newsletter!!
1. Yea I agree with that. I haven't read Burn yet, but it's on my shelf. Probably next after Omega Balance, which I'm currently reading. His results confirm what almost anyone who's ever tried to work off weight has experienced, lol.
2. I don't see how this shows the lipostat theory holds true. I don't believe in the lipostat. If there was a lipostat, how did I reprogram it to -100lbs, then +100lbs, and this time, so far, -65lbs again? Doesn't make sense to me.
3. Nobody has time to try something for 2-3 years just to see if it works. I think any serious fat loss diet, especially in an obese person, should show serious results after 30 days. Probably before that, but there are lots of things that work in the short term but not the long term, and if you can make it 30 days, that's a good start.
4. GLP-1 receptors also seem to inhibit the hyperphagia produced by linoleic acid oxidation products. We don't know how they work, and for many people, they don't work.
I don't believe in the "highly processed food" thing because I gained 100lbs cooking my own, home-cooked meals 95% of the time from fresh ingredients. If I can gain 100lbs on whole, unprocessed foods, and lose 65lbs doing 1 small thing different, I think "highly processed foods" is the wrong heuristic.
Congrats on the weight loss. I think the "whole foods" thing can work for some people, but it never did for me. I never lost weight in years of paleo, coming from a SAD. I gained 100lbs eating 95% home-cooked, whole foods from fresh ingredients.
I lost tons of weight by doing weird little tricks that have nothing to do with "whole foods." So I think, for many people, the princess is in another castle. Though I have nothing against whole foods, I just don't think they're enough to explain it all.
Great points. On the lipostat, the re-programming is extremely tough and you may never be able to change your set-point... I think it explains why once you gain weight you can't easily make those pounds go away. Not settled science as Pontzer, I agree. Homeostasis seem plausible, though given its prevalence across species.
On the "whole foods" I should have said "whole foods promoting satiety". I eat a lot of potatoes, kabocha squash, mushrooms -the legal kind- Brussels sprouts, cabbage, daikon radish, cauliflower and broccoli; mostly from frozen because it is way cheaper. Lentils and black beans from dry, super cheap as well. Steel-cut oats, apples and berries (frozen, again). For animal protein lean fish (frozen haddock, Pollock, basa) and chicken breast. Pretty much no condiments in liquid form, I just roast in the oven and season with cumin, paprika, garlic powder and allspice.
Semiglutide or GLP-1 drugs work for a majority like nothing we have seen before. It looks like close to 80% generally lose 5% of their initial weight and close to half will get into the 15% territory (see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796491). Losing weight is hard, if you agree that your body is fighting you all the way, so those results are impressive.
Lastly, and this is just an opinion, I am unsure that the number on the scale is as meaningful as a blood panel showing that cholesterol, liver function, kidney function and sugar levels are good; and that your blood pressure is within the healthy range. Those health markers, I posit, are more important that your body weight. But what do I know!
It is hard to find knowledgeable people like you, very much enjoying this. Take care.
> On the lipostat, the re-programming is extremely tough and you may never be able to change your set-point... I think it explains why once you gain weight you can't easily make those pounds go away.
But then how did I suddenly reprogram mine to -100lbs, then +100lbs, now -65lbs again? Did mine just "glitch?" Just doesn't feel like a set point to me.
Satiety seems to be very specific and different from person to person. I get zero satiety from protein or fiber or being physically full. The experience of being bloated to the point of physical pain, yet "starving," is very common for me. E.g. on the potato diet I couldn't eat enough and I was starving yet in physical pain most of the time. Hated it.
On the other hand, on ex150 my food is extremely energy dense. I eat less than 2lbs of mass per day, and 2/3 or 3/4 of that is water (from meat, vegetables, sauce, and heavy cream). I am never "full" in the physical sense, yet extremely satiated. Also almost no protein (<45g/day).
5% of initial weight isn't particularly good. I'm 22% (292 to 227lbs) down, with 2/3 of it in the first few months and half a year of fruitless (=no weight loss) experiments last summer.
My body wasn't fighting me on this at all, it was, in the willpower sense, "effortless." Ate to satiety every day.
My liver function, kidney function, and glucose levels are all good. Blood pressure will be affected by weight. On cholesterol, I don't agree with the mainstream what the "healthy" or "optimal" levels are.
So by that standard, I am very healthy, healthier than my weight at least :)
Thanks for the post, EX! Loving the info!!
Thanks!
> I’ve eaten 1,000kcal/day for 2 months straight and lost 0lbs.
You know I'm on your side here! But I am frankly sceptical of this.
If you mean 'and my weight never changed a bit', then your energy expenditure would have had to drop by exactly 1000kcals/day instantly, which is a bit too good to be true.
If you mean 'and I lost some weight but not much and I was cold and really hungry and then it all came back once I stopped doing that', then you could phrase this differently to avoid confusion.
Or do you mean something else entirely?
The metabolism is byzantine in its complexity. - dozens of interdependent thermostats. I notice that I stop fidgeting on any day when I've gone on a big hike or long bike ride, and that's only one unconscious mechanism into which I at least have some some visibility.
In fact, i'm on day three of a SMTM potato riff, and find that I require deliberate interoception to make sure i'm eating enough. Why? Because calorie restriction doesn't work for me -- I'll just stop moving without realizing that I have, will find the ambient temp suddenly much lower than it was before, find more excuses to 'have a lie-in' as I think you Brits call it, not to mention all the other power-saving shifts happening under the hood.
Oh, cool! What's your riff?
Saturated fat, sauerkraut, and hot sauce. It's largely in solidarity with a friend who needs the weight loss more than I do, but I'm being strict about it. So far the biggest difference is how many more meals I need to eat -- instead of a single calorie-dense one it's three. I wake up hungry in the morning, which hasn't happened in years.
Haha might take some getting used to. Good luck! Sounds like a good trial and might give us more swampy data points. Plus some points for palatability with the kraut and hot sauce ;)
Agreed that there's endless complexity.
And:
> I’ve eaten 1,000kcal/day for 2 months straight and lost 0lbs.
Is perfectly possible, it doesn't violate any law of physics. If our host is actually claiming that in its most literal sense then I will believe him. He is careful and measures things. But it is a surprising statement. It requires that his body instantly adapted perfectly to the reduced energy intake without drawing on any of the considerable available fat stores. I think if it's true he must have been (a) completely unable to access stored fat and (b) literally starving hungry, cold and ill, and in some danger.
If it's true in the more hand-wavy sense of 'I did lose a few pounds to start with but then the effect stopped and it all came back on the minute I stopped starving myself', then it seems much more likely.
Yup, in the literal sense. Very easy to explain with CICO:
CI -> down to 1,000kcal/day
CO -> down to 1,000kcal/day
QED
Doesn't require an instant change, just a few days or less. Maybe I lost half a pound the first few days or so, I don't recall now. But it was pretty much entirely flat the entire time.
I was not hungry, not starving, not cold, not ill, not in danger. In fact, it was maybe the most relaxed period of my life.
Maybe it means I can't eat carbs? Or I can't swamp? I think I was relatively "metabolically fixed" already at the time, as I'd lost some weight before this and TONS right after when I went keto. So yea, you'd think that I would've lost a ton of fat..
Then again that 1 meal was much higher in protein than ex150. IIRC I was doing 200g of chicken, plus some protein from the rice/beans.. 200g of lean chicken are already 50% higher protein than ex150 is in total.
Well, if you say it, I believe you. But I am puzzled. If CO is down to 1000kcal/day, how are you maintaining your body temperature?
That's a concentration-camp diet. It should kill you eventually. Certainly you should not enjoy it!
Those people were doing hard physical labor, so their floor was probably quite a bit higher. Plus illness, infections, stress, shitty sleep (I imagine lol).
For me this was during probably the most relaxed and least stressed period of my life, during a 2 year sabbatical. I didn't do shit all day, just sleeping in and hanging out with friends.
I have done some long fasts and without fail I always notice that I get really, really cold.
Yup, same. Also lethargic and I lose the ability to concentrate, hopping from video to blog post to article every 20 seconds.
I believe him. When I was in my early 20s I ate 800 calories per day for a month, not fussing with any particular macros, and didn’t lose any weight. At the time, 3000+ calories a day of low carb made me lose 4lbs per week.
Breaking the laws of thermodynamics (if you don't understand the laws of thermodynamics^^) for fun and profit :)
Not instantly, but within a few days, which is quite normal. I ate the exact same meal every day. One meal of rice, beans, some chicken, a tiny bit of butter for fat, some non-caloric vegetables, cooked in broth. I weighed it out so it would be pretty much exactly 1,000kcal (natural fluctuations of course not corrected for) and ate that same meal as my lunch, every day, for 2 months straight. I had previously lost a bunch of weight on it, but for these 2 months, nothing.
Intriguingly, during this episode, I didn't get starvation symptoms at all. So I must've been just at the limit of what my body could lower its metabolism to. I suspect that at this point I was already somewhat "metabolically healed." This was just before I started doing keto, as a reaction to "1,000kcal OMAD stopped working" I decided to give keto a try - and then that fixed my Non-24, so In ever looked back.
I think a healthy human metabolism should be able to massively increase/decrease metabolic rate to the available intake. This is how we survived ice ages, famines, dry seasons..
I wouldn't have been able to power through 2 months of starvation symptoms. Usually I barely last 1-2 days. But then, "usually," I'm not metabolically in order.
Yes, Rogan pulled most of his videos off of YouTube after he moved to Spotify. You view the obesity debate episode for free at Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6civXCl6aIUJGFyHqkiPlQ
Oh, very cool thanks! I'll add the link to the post.
This is all fascinating. Very hard for me to wrap my head around brotein causing overweight or preventing weight loss but I find it very intriguing. Have you addressed the mechanisms for such already in your writings? If so would you mind linking to them? Or the best argument you have seen from Brad M or others? Thanks
If you dive into the archive he did a full post solely on a bunch of studies that seem to indicate that protein (specifically BCAAs) + PUFAs create obesity. It's really quite fascinating!
Yep, the article is here:
https://www.exfatloss.com/p/show-me-the-bcaa-studies
Thanks!
That post broke my brain when I read it last night. 🤯
Happy to be of service ;)
Thanks
Simulating the metabolic pathways under different diets would be interesting. There was a recent blog post on Hacker News about doing that with the minimal cell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066165
Also, in case anyone wants to read up on some other CICO books, I recently reviewed two (*Burn* and *Why Calories Don't Count*) at https://tyleransom.substack.com/p/should-the-calorie-die
I've got Burn on my shelf! Will check out the other one.
I've enjoy your work, but ironically I'm post-fuel partitioning in my thinking partly as a result of reading your stuff! I thought: if it's true you can drink heavy cream to your heart's content and still lose weight, then that pretty much confirms that CICO is garbage. But it didn't work for me. Then I retried the cream experiment (but this time while enforcing a calorie deficit) and the weight started coming off. Don't get me wrong, I think hormones play a considerable role but to deny the importance of calories entirely is also simplistic (not that you're doing that). At the end of the day, food gives us energy, and our fat stores are energy stores, so I don't think it's tautological to say "reducing your energy intake forces your body to tap into long-term energy stores, thereby helping you lose weight". I mean, that's what happens during fasting, and in my view keto diets are basically just diets that simulate the hormonal effects of fasting.
Fasting doesn't work for the vast majority of people who try it, I'd say significantly less than even keto. So I don't think that "diets that work just emulate fasting." I never saw much success fasting.
Am I getting right that you basically saw this:
1. Regular calorie restriction diets you didn't lose weight
2. Chugging ad lib cream didn't make you lose weight
3. Chugging cream in moderation (calorie restricted) made you lose weight
Is that accurate? In that case, I'd argue fuel partitioning is still primary: you had to get your fuel partitioning right, and THEN you could begin restricting calories.
I'm pretty open to the idea that, even on a fuel-partitioned diet, you can't eat infinite energy and still lose weight. E.g. when I accidentally consumed about 4,000kcal/day via HWC lattes at Starbucks, I didn't lose much weight even though everything else was mostly kept the same.
But FP is still primary in that, unless you fix it, you cannot simply restrict calories. That's why fasting works for almost nobody, I think. If calorie deficits were primary, we could all just fast our way to abs, and most fat loss advice would work, which it doesn't.
So "deficit" works in the context of "fixed fuel partitioning" I'd say.
Not quite. I have lost considerable weight using calorie restriction, fasting, and keto protocols at various times. I find all to be effective but in my experience the common denominator has been calorie restriction.
Now, what's nice about keto or heavy cream diets is that they make it easier to restrict calories because they tend to suppress appetite, and it's also just hard to overeat foods high in fat. But in my experience as soon as you pump up calorie intake sufficiently, the weight loss stops or even reverses.
One important point: the FP argument emphasizes the importance of insulin in fat accumulation, so FP folks often say: "it's not the calories it's the carbs!" But calorie restriction alone (sans keto) tends to improve markers of insulin sensitivity, so it's not necessarily an either/or. Calories consumed meaningfully impacts insulin levels, and perhaps insulin levels meaningfully impact calories consumed--it may be bidirectional causality but I don't think we can say there's no connection.
You might be in a different category then - I've never been able to lose weight restricting calories. My metabolism seems to be supremely effective at simply adjusting and burning less energy. Lucky you!
Concerning the insulin: many low-carbers are all about insulin, but it might not be (just) insulin. Protein also significantly raises insulin.
So unless the "calorie restricted diet" was equal in carbs + protein and only fat was cut, I wouldn't put too much into that: of course restricting the foods that spike insulin causes less insulin spiking.
There might also be secondary effects on insulin if one were to do this, but I haven't even seen anyone try.
What do you make of the following reasoning:
Fat is stored energy. Food gives us energy. Reducing food intake forces the body to tap into its long-term energy stores, which means burning fat.
To be clear, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, and I know calorie restriction doesn't work for everyone, but I don't see how it's tautological to say "eating less makes you leaner".
Is it tautology or just kinda...how it works? (If this question sounds naive please understand--I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who used to be all in on the fuel partitioning hypothesis).
> Fat is stored energy. Food gives us energy. Reducing food intake forces the body to tap into its long-term energy stores, which means burning fat.
I agree with that, but that would just make it tautological. In that scenario, "caloric deficit" literally equals "fat lost." It's just a more vague, abstract restatement of the fact that less fat tissue is now present in the body.
In terms of operative advice, this is clearly not how it works and not very helpful for most obese people: just from a black box approach, we can see that simply "forcing" the body to burn fat doesn't actually result in (very much) fat being burned.
What actually happens it that the person goes into starvation mode while having dozens or hundreds of pounds of fat available.
I like the tanker truck analogy: imagine you're driving a giant gasoline tanker truck. It has its own fuel tank (with say 250 gallons of fuel, I don't actually know how much they hold lol) and the giant tank on the back.
If you run out of the fuel in your own "little" semi truck tank, and you don't have the giant, big tanker connected to it, it doesn't matter that you have "lots of fuel" on you - you can't get at it.
This seems to be the situation for most obese people. The question is, why? And how do we fix that?
I think these "magical" diets fix fuel partitioning and therefore "unclog" the pipe from the giant tanker truck to the semi's truck, enabling it to suddenly access the enormous amounts of stored fuel it should've had access to the whole time.
> Is it tautology or just kinda...how it works?
Well, we definitely know it's not how it works, because it works for almost nobody who's obese.
> To be clear, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy, and I know calorie restriction doesn't work for everyone, but I don't see how it's tautological to say "eating less makes you leaner".
This is the weird motte & bailey.
"eating less -> leaner" is not tautological, it's just largely wrong. But it also doesn't at all follow from "CICO" which is tautological. CICOpaths seem to switch between these 2 (incompatible) positions the whole time.
"eating less -> leaner" does not follow from CICO because CO and CI are not necessarily fixed when you mess with the other. In fact, they clearly are not, which is easy to try, well-known in the literature, and we know the mechanisms.
What you eat, and how much you eat, leads to your body adjusting CO. Increasing CO also increases CI via appetite, a well-known and easily testable phenomenon. "Work up an appetite."
So "eat less" could easily lead to "burn even less than you saved in eating" and could therefore easily lead to "weight gain" instead of "weight loss."
That's why "eating less makes you leaner" is usually not true, at least for the metabolically impaired.
Look, it’s true that maintaining a caloric deficit isn’t easy. But just because advice is hard to follow doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
After years of being on a very similar wavelength to the one you’re currently on, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way around limiting intake for achieving true leanness.
We can try all kinds of weird approaches (trust me, I have) including drinking inordinate amounts of heavy cream, limiting PUFAs, whatever. At the end of the day, fat stores are energy stores. Losing weight means using up those energy stores. Doing this requires limiting intake one way or another.
I know you think I’m “not even wrong” but I think this is just how it works. Sure caloric restriction is REALLY HARD for most people. But hard advice isn’t necessarily wrong advice.
I know we won’t resolve this here. But I just think that this is actually really simple. If you wanna get lean, you gotta limit intake for a period of time. If that’s tautological, it’s because fat stores are energy stores, so of course fewer calories in = less fat. That’s just how it works.
I know you will not agree with me but thanks for taking the time to reply. I still enjoy your work : )