this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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The strategy is writing down the number of calories you think you’ve absorbed and trying to balance that with the amount you’re burning. Weight loss happens when the calories absorbed are fewer than those burned, but people can’t really be certain about either number.
My sister has celiacs that went undiagnosed until her twenties. Before that, she might have eaten a dinner roll that was measured at 120 calories. Of that, she would have absorbed probably something, but not 120 calories, because her body recognized it as poison and pushed it through as fast as possible. She was at one point eating 4500 calories a day, but she absorbed nowhere close to that. Because she wasn’t aware of her celiac’s, her math on both sides of the equation was wrong.
Celiac’s is obviously an abnormality, but there’s no way to know if your system is more or less efficient at harvesting energy from specific foods without a very thorough long term exclusion diet.
When people use the weight loss strategy of CICO, they’re assuming that their digestion and energy expansion are standard, so that the numbers they write down are correctly calibrated to their actual intake and use of calories.
I’m simply trying to explain that CICO isn’t one of a number of strategies, it is the only possible method for what people call “weight loss”
If you take out more energy from a system than you put in then there is a net loss in energy. That’s CICO.
People say it doesn’t work because they rarely count what they put in their body correctly and then rather than claim what they did is fallible they claim that the system is wildly different from person to person or a disease or medication is causing the problem.
The primary reason CICO doesn’t work for people is they are underestimating what goes in and overestimating what goes out.
I think that’s plausible, though I don’t know if it has been studied. It also coexists with the idea that what an individual actually digests can differ a lot from what is listed as a calorie count for a given food.