I don't think it's as simple as "Calories in, Calories out"

Hear me out before you flame me. I believe from experience the types of calories matter. I'll even go as far as saying that if you focus on eating "clean foods" (high protein + high fiber + high volume + high nutrients to calorie ratio) you would end up with a better body composition than somebody who just focused purely on CICO but who ate McDonalds in the long term.

Disclaimer: Yes, someone who eats 4000 calories of chicken breast and broccoli a day will be fatter than someone who eats 1300 calories of McDonalds a day in theory I get that because CICO is a scientific fact. BUT

Reality: Obese/Fat people aren't fat from eating 4000 calories of chicken and broccoli a day. The reality is that 2000 calories of "clean" food (defined above) feels way different from 2000 calories of junk. From personal experience, eating 4000 calories a day of junk food is piss easy. I believe anyone could do it consistently if they really wanted to. Yet, eating 1600 calories of high protein, high fiber food is extremely hard. You have to force feed yourself. This is why I believe the guy who focuses on eating clean > calories will win out in the end. Sure, the guy who tracks and eats 1300 calories of McDonalds will lose more weight faster. Short term, he will have better results. But can he keep that up for years? The lack of nutrition and the lack of satiety will eat at him until he caves and binges and becomes obese. Whereas the guy who eats chicken, broccoli, and rice will probably be stuffed at 1800 calories (assuming he eats lean cuts, lots of broccoli, etc). He will feel full and good, which makes his diet more maintainable and succesful logn term.

tl;dr - Food choice >>>>>> Calories in a practical sense

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  1. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    Pls respond to my post thanks.

  2. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    you might be onto something

  3. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    cico is shit promoted by fast food companies to give delusion that eating their shit is fine in "moderation". imagine measuring and counting everything you put ibto mouth. low fat is the way. fat you eat is fat you wear. simple as

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      google thermodynamics moron.

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        eating carbs increases burning carbs. increases leptin thermogenesis and fidgeting. lipogenesis peaks at 15 grams except when you iverdose fructose or ironically eat lots of sat fat. try getting fat on white rice. fat (added or greasy food) is needed only for cancer and heart disease. you cling to cico only for smug sense of superiority over lowfats and ketos.

        • 12 months ago
          Anonymous

          Are you moronic? All carbs end up as glucose in the blood thats then either burnt stored as glycogen or FAT if glycogen stores are full....

          • 12 months ago
            Anonymous

            98% of your bodyfat came from dietary fat

        • 12 months ago
          Anonymous

          >words words words
          >the science says…
          Yep, think I’m gonna coont calories anyways

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      wrong lad. you need to consume fat for hormone level. You need to cut out fricking sugar. Eat mainly meat and potatoes, drink water, sleep well. No sugar bullshit, and your health will be great. If you are cutting all the fat off your meat you are a fricking jester that has no business handling food.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      Nutrient balance is surprisingly easy with clean, low kcal dishes. While fastfood is cheap to mass produce and lacks essential nutrient content. It remains CICO for weight control. Nutrient balance remains a factor. Doesn't mean CICO is disproven. You are young and autistic. Please stop shitting up the board with your pseud threads.

      >muh corporations
      Eat right fatass. Your brain is a lump of fat.

      Nothing you morons are saying is inspirational or insightful. You just got conditioned to eat shit and grin.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Fricking this, its a psyop to normalise eating non-food garbage, because its within your "caloric needs". Its moronic.

      google thermodynamics moron.

      Ok

      The first law of thermodynamics is a version of the law of conservation of energy, adapted for thermodynamic processes. In general, the conservation law states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.

      >closed system

      Oh, lets read on and see what a closed system is in this context

      In a closed system (i.e. there is no transfer of matter into or out of the system), the first law states that the change in internal energy of the system (ΔUsystem) is equal to the difference between the heat supplied to the system (Q) and the work (W) done by the system on its surroundings. (Note, an alternate sign convention, not used in this article, is to define W as the work done on the system by its surroundings):

      >there is no transfer of matter into or out of the system

      Right. The human body is the definition of an OPEN system. Not a closed one. Therefore, talking about the first law of thermodynamics in the context of the human organism is nonsensical.

      And then there's the whole part where "energy" is a construct to begin with, and no such thing exists in reality. There is mass, and there is radiation and gravity. There is no "energy" as an independent, objectively existing entity.

      Food is not a source of calories. It is a source of mass, part of which mass we oxidise for what for lack of a better concept we call "energy", part of which we use for building material, and part of which we excrete. Nowhere in there are any calories, which is a measure of HEAT as determined by incineration of an object in a bomb calorimeter. Our enteric systems are not bomb calorimeters. You fricking moron. I could go on, but I won't, as its a waste of time and will go way over your head.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Post physique.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Then why does it work

  4. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    Yea no shit. Are people really so moronic as to not believe that a who ingests a correct amount of callories eating only pure sugar and junk is going to worse off than a gay who does it on a balanced diet?

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      you’ve hollowed lad, your words make no fricking sense!

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        The story revolves around Hal (Jack Black) who, taking his dying father's advice, dates only the embodiments of female physical perfection. But that all changes after Hal has an unexpected run-in with self-help guru Tony Robbins. Intrigued by Hal's shallowness, Robbins hypnotizes him into seeing the beauty that exists even in the least physically appealing women.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      Yes, but in my defense, everyone’s go to is “you’re fat because you eat too much food” rather than “you’re fat because you eat too much junk.”

      The narrative is the former when that’s a true, but surface level explanation. The real explanation is “You eat too much because too high of your food consumption is junk”

  5. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    You made no argument against CICO other than the fact that overeating on junk food is easier. No shit Sherlock.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      My argument is that somebody who focused on eating clean, but who didn’t track calories would have a better body composition long term the somebody who ate mainly junk, but tracked calories.

      I firmly believe focusing purely on calories instead of food eaten is a mistake.

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        Tracking calories is necessary still for big fat fatties and >people who naturally have a fricked up sense of hunger. Anyone who can overeat on clean food still needs hard numbers to stay on track.

  6. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    OP you're a fricking moron

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      junk food taste good :p
      clean food taste bland /:
      me have to force feed bland food because i no likey >.<
      therefore clean food harder to eat and make you more full!!!

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      This. Does moron OP consider nuts to be junk food? It's a "clean food" that can turn you into a fatass very rapidly.

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        I eat peanuts and cashews, around 50-100g a day, despite bring high in kcal, I don't convert all of those kcal into energy/fat. Mainly because my poop looks like a vegan chocolate protein bar after eating nuts.
        Not every last kcal gets digested. Peanuts suppresses hunger, and nuts are kinda healthy.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >my poop looks like a vegan chocolate protein bar after eating nuts.
          Chew more and eat slower

  7. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    PUFAs are anti-metabolic and induce torpor. Eat SFAs and sugar and your metabolic rate, body temperature and wellbeing will skyrocket. Simple as.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      you got your PUFAs mixed up with your PFAS moron

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      You got your PUFAs mixed up with your FUPAs moron

  8. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    The answer to 'Is it as simple as calories in, calories out' is the same as the answer to the question 'Could we go on a megabulk by drinking gasoline or eating uranium'

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      >I will do it again
      Every time

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      You can't metabolize gasoline or uranium. Cico is about food. Are you moronic?

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        And my point still stands.

  9. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    You're one step closer to discovering the Macronutrient idea where we care not only about how much energy we eat but also if what we eat is what our bodies need. Most of my life I struggled horribly before discovering this simple idea, only to later find there is a lot of data on it that people just don't seem to talk about. Nearly all diet plans can be broken down into ratios of Fat, Carb, and Protein, and very importantly that critical target ratio changes based on personal biology and goals which is why we keep failing to find one super diet that solves all our problems. Throw in related ideas like avoiding processed food and getting enough sleep, water and fiber and you got most of what you need.

    I suspect the reason why this is not talked about more is because it is tool focused and not answer focused approach, as each persons answer could be different thus it is hard to market and monetize. So instead we get rotating fad diets that reduce to Calorie counting. Someone struggling tries diet X which works wonders, diet X suddenly grows in popularity as more and more people (of body type X) are helped. Then the effectiveness of diet X is question as more and more people (not of body type X) start failing then later data shows something like 90% of people are hurt by diet X. Then someone struggling tries diet Y which works wonders, and everyone jumps to the next big thing. When looking back the simplest common element all the effective diets have is lower calories, so people assume calories must be the key. But that misses the type of calories and the population percentage helped. So diet X has calorie ratio X and it helps people with body type X, which is why there was such success with the small group of early adopters as those adopters seek out diet X because what they had originally didn't work. Later adopters jump onboard as part of hype only to fail because they have body type Y or Z or ... thus diet X can hurt them and is publicly abandoned.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      interesting theory. i would love for someone to make a decent study and prove this

  10. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    To put it simple: to keep calory in under control, portion control isn't the only way. Portion *quality* is far bigger of a deal.

  11. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    >I don't think it's as simple as "Calories in, Calories out"
    >Disclaimer: Yes, someone who eats 4000 calories of chicken breast and broccoli a day will be fatter than someone who eats 1300 calories of McDonalds a day in theory I get that because CICO is a scientific fact.
    Very cool thread, OP. You suck any dicks while making it or is it a in-between kind of thing for you?

  12. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's calories in vs calories out for simply weight loss. If you care more about preserving lean mass while losing weight you gotta pay attention to your protein intake. If you want to take it a step further - make sure you're getting adequate vitamins + minerals.

  13. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    >I dont think
    Didnt read further.

  14. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    It literally is, and I say this as someone who fell off the wagon a few times. Just get more willpower somehow. And when you bingeeat during your diet, don't beat yourself up, just start again, like a mindless robot.

    1,200 calories a day. Do it, and keep doing it until you become human again, which really means 12% bodyfat, but if you're not sure/are a really fat frick, 18.5 BMI will do for now.

    STOP making excuses. It doesn't help. I know from bitter experience.

  15. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    Calories is literally just a measure of energy you fricking moron. How much energy you eat during the day determines how much will be expended for sustainment of your body and how much will be stored in fat reserves

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      >How much energy you eat during the day determines how much will be expended
      yes. the thing is that carbs increase energy expediture but fat does not. there are also things like insulin sensitivit and nutrient partitioning.

  16. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    >anon discovers the satiety index
    there are so many studies out there judging various food by satiety, pick any. the results are very similar.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      pic related (for easy use). guess what, it's steak and potatoes.

  17. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    You guys are fricking moronic and can’t read. I (OP) am not saying CICO is incorrect. Im saying trying to reduce your calories by simply “eating less” is way less effective than focusing on the type of food you eat. Stop misrepresenting me. Frick all of you. I think only like 1 or 2 people in this whole thread understood my argument despite me restating it.

    • 12 months ago
      Anonymous

      No, your argument is just dumb and not saying anything that is unknown to anyone. Of course eating “better” foods is better for you than eating over processed shit. No one is saying you SHOULD eat shit food at a calorie deficit to lose weight. It’s just that you can do that and still lose weight. So when people try to argue what fad diet is the best to lose weight, the answer is do whatever is easiest for you to follow but in the end you need to follow CICO to lose weight. You could have the single greatest diet of nothing but the healthiest foods that give you all the nutrients you need. But if you consume more calories than you burn you won’t lose weight.

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        This. CICO isn't a diet. It's the foundational concept of any real weight loss diet program.

      • 12 months ago
        Anonymous

        The people on this board who post argumentatively about muh thermodynamics every day aren't doing it to give people reasonable advice about how they should try different things and listen to their bodies and find a diet that makes them look good and feel good. They do it to shut down such discussions and call people stupid for putting more thought into a strategy than "Just put down the fork and grit your teeth lmao".

        • 12 months ago
          Anonymous

          >reasonable advice
          What is this your first fricking week on IST? 90% of the shit posted here is by idiots who listened to a podcast or watched some YouTube video and think they’re experts. I don’t give a shit what you eat. In general, actual food and a balanced diet is gonna be better for you than over processed crap. If you ask me what specific foods interact with you gut bacteria best or what food at a molecular level digest fastest or what type of cheese interacts the least with your testosterone receptors I’m gonna tell you I don’t fricking know, and I doubt it fricking matters enough to care. But if you want the number on the scale to go down at the end of the day, you need to follow CICO

          • 12 months ago
            Anonymous

            I've been here since '08 you Black personbrained homosexual, and it was the misc before that. All of the discussions that have always happened here about a thousand different idiosyncratic diet ideas, from "eat oats and drink a gallon of milk" to "literally just eat meat until you aren't a whale anymore" are valuable, and simply applying yourself the absolute bare minimum amount and not taking every post at face value is not that fricking hard. You take an idea from here, you take an idea from there, you try something, you give it up - it's a process. The only people who contribute absolutely nothing are stupid homosexuals like you who just post "idk and idc lmao, I guess just do whatever" and then act smug like you said something smart. You are worthless noise. Shut up and lurk or leave my board.

            Perhaps, but on the other hand, a lot of people looking for alternative dieting strategies like to think they can cheat the principle of CICO with whatever magic juju their dieting approach allegedly provides. For instance, I see a lot of people suggest that with 16:8 fasting, you can eat whatever the frick you want during the 8-hour eating window, since the fasting magic of insulin response or whatever will account for stuffing your face with doritos for 8 hours. Or, (some) ketogays like to say that you can eat nothing but sticks of butter and bacon all day, and you'll be fine thanks to the magic of ketosis.

            It's a totally different story when you go into these dieting approaches with the understanding that they're a means of managing caloric intake first and foremost, and whatever other benefits they may provide are secondary. Reminding people of that is better for them in the long run than letting them believe they can eat however much they want as long as it involves drinking glasses of butter all day long.

            Some of the posts and ideas are moronic. You have to sift and sort. But nobody's trying to "cheat CICO" and break the laws of physics when they try different strategies for manipulating feelings of satiety and energy levels so that it can be easier to keep CO>CI. It's all fair play.

            Yes because having an in depth discussion about something that isn't true doesnt make it useful. Its still a massive waste of time and distraction

            It beats discussing literally nothing, like you dumb Black folk would have us all doing if you got your way. If you're not interested in sifting through discussions about what works and what doesn't and making up your mind about ideas you might want to try or not, there are at least three different greentext containment threads you can stick to going at all times. Stay there.

            • 12 months ago
              Anonymous

              >It beats discussing literally nothing
              Nope. Didnt read further

              • 12 months ago
                Anonymous

                >I don't like discussing fitness unless every poster says something I already think is true
                This board's quality would improve overnight if every poster who said this was banned. You should not be here.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Cope

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                hes right you know

            • 12 months ago
              Anonymous

              >But nobody's trying to "cheat CICO" and break the laws of physics when they try different strategies for manipulating feelings of satiety and energy levels so that it can be easier to keep CO>CI.
              Right, and I didn't say they are. Like I said, if you go into an alternative dieting strategy with the understanding that it will help you manage caloric intake, satiety, energy levels, and so on, that's fine. We're in agreement on that point. However, there absolutely are people who go into them with the idea that there's some magical aspect of the diet that'll allow them to eat like shit, and I would go so far as to say that this is the mainstream perception of most alternative diets. Most people doing keto, for example, aren't doing so because they think it's a handy way of managing caloric intake--they think it's because being in ketosis is magic, and they get sold on the idea of "you can eat as much bacon and cheese as you want!"

              In my own case, I ate at a 500 calorie deficit for a while, didn't like it, switched to 16:8 fasting, and it's been working wonders for me. However, I understand that's because my caloric intake has dropped substantially, and I personally find 16:8 to be more manageable. Maybe fasting has some secondary benefits that help this process along, but I'm still careful to count my calories and eat clean. I don't trick myself with the idea that I can eat like a hog for 8 hours and still lose weight.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >In my own case, I ate at a 500 calorie deficit for a while, didn't like it, switched to 16:8 fasting, and it's been working wonders for me. However, I understand that's because my caloric intake has dropped substantially, and I personally find 16:8 to be more manageable. Maybe fasting has some secondary benefits that help this process along, but I'm still careful to count my calories and eat clean. I don't trick myself with the idea that I can eat like a hog for 8 hours and still lose weight.
                And if you tried to start a thread about IMF and share this experience with other people while digging into these details about it, about half of the thread would be from pedantic purists saying, "This thread is moronic fad diet bullshit lmao, it's literally just thermodynamics, just shut up moron lmao". That's the cancer I'm talking about.

                The only thing we might disagree about is what kind of posters we think are worse for the quality of this board - Black personbrain monkeys who succumb to misconceptions like thinking drinking butter is magic, or Black personbrain monkeys who think that discussing anything other than a simplified thermodynamic estimate is pointless and should be shouted down at every opportunity. I think the former is an idiot you can ultimately still talk to, but the latter should just frick off and stop shitting up the board.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The only thing we might disagree about is what kind of posters we think are worse for the quality of this board - Black personbrain monkeys who succumb to misconceptions like thinking drinking butter is magic, or Black personbrain monkeys who think that discussing anything other than a simplified thermodynamic estimate is pointless and should be shouted down at every opportunity. I think the former is an idiot you can ultimately still talk to, but the latter should just frick off and stop shitting up the board.
                Yeah, fair enough.

        • 12 months ago
          Anonymous

          Perhaps, but on the other hand, a lot of people looking for alternative dieting strategies like to think they can cheat the principle of CICO with whatever magic juju their dieting approach allegedly provides. For instance, I see a lot of people suggest that with 16:8 fasting, you can eat whatever the frick you want during the 8-hour eating window, since the fasting magic of insulin response or whatever will account for stuffing your face with doritos for 8 hours. Or, (some) ketogays like to say that you can eat nothing but sticks of butter and bacon all day, and you'll be fine thanks to the magic of ketosis.

          It's a totally different story when you go into these dieting approaches with the understanding that they're a means of managing caloric intake first and foremost, and whatever other benefits they may provide are secondary. Reminding people of that is better for them in the long run than letting them believe they can eat however much they want as long as it involves drinking glasses of butter all day long.

        • 12 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yes because having an in depth discussion about something that isn't true doesnt make it useful. Its still a massive waste of time and distraction

  18. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    CICO is a "scientific fact", but citing it excessively as the beginning and end and everything in between of body composition is pedantic and useless. You can in fact have two diets, both of which contain the same amount of calories, and one of them can leave you feeling lethargic, hungry, and struggling to to have even half-decent workouts - while the other will have you functioning normally and blasting through hard workouts while hardly suffering from hunger at all.

    Can "muh willpower" make you stick to a moron's diet and end up with a half-decent result anyway? Probably. Can "muh willpower" close the gap between the shitty workouts you'll have on a bad diet because your body is literally mobilizing energy to muscle tissue less effectively? No, actually. If you don't dial in your diet beyond just calories counts you're leaving fat loss on the table and suffering stupidly and pointlessly while you do it. Don't be a moron.

  19. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    I’m not reading this. It’s all calories in and calories out

  20. 12 months ago
    Anonymous

    > CICO
    > israelite-oh

  21. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    You are touching on the psychological aspects of weight loss. Much like how autistic economists will predict the markets will do something because they assume everyone are rational actors, then be surprised when the opposite happens because humans aren't rational. CICO is simple math, undeniable math, but few autists and no normies are disciplined enough to stick to it hard. As you said, focusing on eating a healthy, balanced diet will yield the best results, because you'll end up automatically doing CICO.

  22. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    CICO is settled science, CHUD!

  23. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    You are very close to understanding what 'calories out' means!

  24. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Everything you said is correct and really obvious, but still, "weight loss" IS "as simple as CICO". Tons of other things such as how good you feel, how easy it is to maintain long term, how healthy you are, etc, are NOT as simple as CICO. But WEIGHT LOSS, is.

    Your weight loss in a given day is a direct function of your CICO. This is a useful fact because when someone is having trouble losing weight despite having improved their eating choices from a subjective perspective, the place to look is CICO. It is useful because when you want to start seeing results right away and then continue to optimize your diet throughout your fitness journey, the place to start is CICO. It is useful because tracking and planning CICO adds predictability to your weight loss goals in the long term.

    CICO is not even close to the only factor that matters when improving one's diet, but nobody is saying that. All anyone is saying is that weight loss is a direct function of CICO, and that piece of information is extremely useful to know.

  25. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    True, but this is more related to hunger. If I eat clean I can reasonably sustain a calorie deficit, but if I eat heavily processed food I'm hungry all the time.

    My scale equally well regardless if I eat 1500 calories of broccoli rice chicken or McDonalds, but good luck resisting the urge to eat when choosing the latter option.

  26. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Most fat goes straight to storage.

    Your body can make new fat out of carbs but it doesn't like to.

    Keeping calories constant, a high carb low fat diet will probably make you lose weight (or gain more slowly, depending on calories).

    This is because your body would rather raise your metabolism and burn off the carbs than do lipogenesis de novo.

    Of course this is still the CO part of CICO.

  27. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    If you're eating at McDonalds, you're usually drinking soda. The sugar rises your blood sugar and the calories will get instant convertet into fat. Same reason so many Americans are fat, even at home they can't just drink regular tab water...

  28. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    You can’t get the same macros from junk food that you can from clean food so what you are saying is already known and measured. Insulin and other hormones play a role and also the negative effects on blood pressure/sugar affecting the performance of your body plays a role.

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