this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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The number of people that don't believe that taking in fewer calories than you put out will cause you to lose weight still astounds me. Your body isn't some magic device that doesn't have to obey the laws of physics.
Some people mistake healthier with less calories.
I switched from a box of Little Debbie’s a day to a bag of trail mix! Why can’t I lose weight?
That olive oil you’re using is good for you, sure, but it’s not a freebee. It has calories. Things like this are often not even noticed or counted.
Tracking calories accurately is a balance between good data and time investment.
I didn't usually count oils and fats when I made food because I use so little. But I also wouldn't worry much about very low calorie vegetables either.
To be fair though my goal was to gain weight and meet macros, not to lose weight.
But either way at the end of the day even with really good apps making counting calories way easier than it used to be, there's still a line that needs to be drawn somewhere as to what your time is worth. If you're in the ballpark you're good unless you have very explicit needs to get more detailed data.
Absolutely true, and getting good data is really, really hard. In fact, the nutritional content on food labels (in the USA) is allowed to be over by as much as 20% by the FDA.
In addition to that the processes and formulas used to calculate those numbers are also far from precise .
However, this is only an estimate because not everything that burns and releases energy to heat the water can be digested by a person eating it. Fiber, for example, burns in the calorimeter but will just pass through your digestive system without giving up its energy.
Many food companies don't even test food like this. They simply estimate the calorie content based on the number of grams of fat, carbs, and proteins in the food. Still, unless and until someone comes up with a better way to determine the calories in a given measure of food, it's the best system we've got.
I'd also be willing to bet that the actual amount of calories someone gets from different kinds of food is dependent on their gut biome, and thus variable between people. Ime you really need to experiment on yourself to get a good idea of what will make you lose weight. Same probably applies if you're underweight and trying to gain.
Whilst this is true; your body does have some pretty neat tricks to maintain homeostasis; it can shift the energy budget around quite a bit to where it is needed.
Your body will down regulate some systems to try to keep your total energy balance within what is "normal" for each person.
Digestion uses quite a bit of energy; this is why sometimes you feel sleepy after eating; your brain has been down regulated to enable digestion.
Another common example is when runners get into "the zone"; this is your brain prioritising the required processes and reducing the energy of other parts, putting you into a semi trance....this is so your body can maintain an energy balance.
It is also why we sometimes feel sick if exercising hard and then eat quickly afterward; your gut is not ready for that job.
High energy process that can be "switched off" or at least significantly reduced:
Just because you have done some exercise; doesn't mean you have used more total energy that day....it seems counter intuitive; but your body likely shifted energy from one thing (immune system, brain) to muscles, for the time your were exercising.
In saying that exercising is so good for other things; physical and mental health are enhanced by exercise, there are so many good things about exercise, just don't rely on it for weight loss.
As the old saying goes "you can't out run a bad diet"; you are correct, if over the long term you eat fewer calories than your body requires, you will see an effect. But your body is a tricksy beast, it will do all it can to prevent this; it is why dieting is so hard in an age of abundant food.
Also people tend to focus too much on the "losing weight" part, as in getting the numbers down. Muscle weights more than fat, and having more muscles uses more energy; if you diet the wrong way and don't exercise, it's possible you lose weight but you also lose muscle mass, making it even harder to lose more weight and possibly making yourself unhealthier. Getting "thinner" and/or "healthier" might mean you don't actually lose that much weight, or even gain some
I try to focus on outcomes.
E.g. it takes me 28 minutes to bike too work, next month I want it to be around 25.....in a few months it would need nice to be at 20 minutes.
if people are so concerned , they should have thier routine blood test from the doctor every year. usually its covered as a preventative. tryglycerides, LDL/HDL, cholesterol, HBA1C, glucose average. also thyroid.
I'll just keep repeating this, but your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is not scientifically set in stone.
While it's accurate for I would say 90% of the population, rough estimate, there are many things that can cause your BMR to not be accurate, like thyroid issues or lack of musculature due to sedentary lifestyle or due to hormone imbalances or any number of myriad things.
I went and had mine tested and it cost me I believe $70 at a sports medicine place, and I burn approximately 200 calories less than my BMR chart says that I should.
So if I wanted to maintain my weight, and I ate the calories the internet says that I should every day, I would actually gain almost 20 lbs a year (a nice rough estimate is every 10 calories a day you cut from your diet you lose one pound a year).
And as I am working on losing weight, and I'm eating 500 calories under my BMR, I'm actually only eating 300 calories under my true BMR, which means my weight loss is incredibly slow.
So yes, while calories and calories out is true, there are external factors that make it difficult to get accurate numbers to compare against.
Therefore calories in calories out is much simpler to say than it is to do for some percentage of the population.
Not only is it not set in stone, it appears that your BMR is affected by what you do. If not provided with sufficient nutrition, the body seems to adapt and lowers BMR.
Getting the numbers in practice can be difficult but that's not the same as saying that CI/CO is bullshit, as many people do who don't understand that it's simple thermodynamics. If your fire isn't producing enough heat, you add more wood. You don't start to doubt that burning is exothermic.
The body isn't a fire and food isn't wood, so the analogy isn't a very good one.
And even if it was, wood in a fire pit does not burn uniformly.
The type of wood, the quality of the wood, the contents of the wood all affect how fast it burns and how hot it burns.
Very dry pine wood burns incredibly hot and very fast, whereas damp maple may self-extinguish. It may not be capable of maintaining its own fire due to its moisture content and the density of the fibers in the wood.
And while you can look at the whole and say this amount of wood emitted this many BTUs of heat energy, you can't say "this amount of wood being burned should emit this amount of heat in this period of time" when you're not taking into consideration the type of wood, the quality of wood, and even how the logs are arranged.
Science is about controlling variables, and when you have too many variables that are not being taken account of, you cannot get an accurate scientific measurement of the results of your experiment.
And that's not even taking into consideration the fact that the raw nutritional quality of foods grown in the western world at least has dropped precipitously, inducing people to eat more food to get the raw nutrition they need that's not just calories.
We know that calories are comprised of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and we can generally account for those, but the nutrition, the selenium, the zinc, the iron, the calcium, the phosphates, the everything else that makes up the food that we eat. If it's not there in sufficient qualities to meet what our bodies are calling for, then it's natural for us to overeat to attempt to fill in those nutritional deficiencies.
And when your brain has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your body has been fucked by not getting the nutrition it needs, and your food has been fucked by not delivering the nutrition you need, then once you're in that situation, it's not as simple as, oh, just don't eat that Twinkie.
So calories in, calories out is the truth.
Just like gravity is the truth.
But knowing the math, 9.8 meters a second squared, is not enough to go to the moon.
We literally burn sugar as fuel. Fires are just fast oxidation.
Yet, cico works.
You have completely missed the point of my entire rant.
Cico works, but "o" is a variable that can vary wildly from person to person, day to day based on environmental, genetic, and nutritional factors.
I'm confused. Your original comment was worded as if it stood in contradiction to cico.
Does not what you said just boil down to cico works, but knowing how much energy your body uses on a daily average (o in cico) is difficult to know and to not trust random values on the internet?
My original, original comment was that your BMR is not as sure as everyone claims it is on the internet.
If you go look up your BMR, it'll ask you your height and weight and age and gender and give you a number of calories you're going to automatically burn every single day, like it's gospel truth.
And if I stuck to that number, I would gain roughly 20 pounds a year, at least until the increase in weight and my metabolism and my calories actually balanced out.
Which means that finding out the O in CICO can be much more difficult for some people than other people.
And once your metabolism is fucked, there's not exactly a whole lot of information out there on how to unfuck it, other than "stay on a diet", which, as you've just seen, isn't necessarily easy, there's not hard numbers to follow, and "exercise", which is fine, but probably what I actually need to do is put on muscle, which means eating calories above how many I'm burning so that my body has the fuel to create more muscle.
So if I want to fix my body and lose the last 30 pounds I'm trying to lose, what I actually need to do is overeat until I put on like 10 pounds of muscle and then eat a high protein diet to maintain that muscle while I'm eating low carbs and low calories overall so that I can burn off as much of the fat as possible.
The problem is to put on 10 pounds of muscle can take 6 months to a year, and any time you're gaining weight, it's difficult to control what goes to muscle and what goes to fat. So even if I use a DEXA scan and measure until I've got 10 additional pounds of muscle, I might put on 20 pounds in the process, the rest of which would be fat.
This means all of the discipline I've had in maintaining my diet now has to change in order to fix my body, which now has to change in order to fix my metabolism, so that I can then go back to doing what I'm doing now and have it actually work the way it's supposed to, and if I fuck up along the way, and my body goes back to burning 200 calories a day under my BMR, then I just have to live on a fucking starvation diet which will get more and more strict and more and more extreme the closer I get to my goal.
And the worst part is that's just a theory. I don't have any way of proving that. I do know that a pound of muscle burns like four calories more per day than a pound of fat does, so that will improve my daily fat burn by 40 calories, which isn't exactly the 200 calories I'm under, but there's no fucking way in hell I'm gonna put on 50 pounds of muscle unless I start taking steroids.
So, going back to your original thing, I was never saying CICO did not work. I was saying that, once again, you have to actually know what the O is, and it's not the same for everyone, and it's not always easy to find out, and if it's fucked, it's not easy to fix.
The people that love going "CICO! CICO!", always overlook the actual complexity of the argument.
Yes. And you can carefully select the value for your case.
The only way to find it is to eat less and less until you lose weight tbh. Cico is vacuously true.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vacuously
Surprisingly, I agree with you! CICO is lacking in thought and intelligence when applied to human metabolism.
The second law of thermodynamics requires a closed system, humans are famously open what with their breathing, eating, pooping, and peeing.
CICO is like saying cars without fuel don't move, so if overfill the tank you should park your car. It misses the point, and that is the hormonal drivers in human fat mobilization.
Sugar/Carbs drive blood glucose, which drives blood insulin, which shuts down fat mobilization. Yes, you can lose weight eating only sugar, but it's making the entire process more difficult then it needs to be. For more details please see The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity - Beyond “Calories In, Calories Out” - 2018
I absolutely agree that cico could be very difficult psychologically and could demand health monitoring.
Eating a tapeworm also makes you lose weight, doesn't mean it's healthy. Not everyone can starve themselves thin in a healthy way.
You don't need to "starve" yourself. That journey can be milder (though longer).
This is what you're not getting. Some people do. Just getting to the point of not feeling like they're starving puts them over their calories out.
I can’t digest pork well (it runs right through me and frequently causes vomiting), so I don’t l eat it, but if I were to follow a diet with 500 calories of pork in it, I might get 100 from it. On the other hand, I digest beans and lentils incredibly well, with no noticeable gas. I can imagine that I might actually get 110 calories from a “100 calorie serving.” It is possible to determine your caloric intake despite this variation, but because people aren’t well educated about it, they see a mismatch in the math and reality and think it’s pointless to calculate it at all instead of realizing they need to adjust it for their specific digestive system.
What do you think about keto?
Basically it's "ditch all sugar", and the idea is that when you eat sugar, as it's toxic, the body tries to use up the energy from sugar, storing the rest for later. And vice versa, if you have no fastburning sugar, the bidy have to start to rely on breaking down that stored fat.
Of course, you cannot overcome physics, but it's not like we don't store everything we eat either (the body is fantastic but not like 100% efficient).
Some say you just eat less, and it's true that it's harder to cook without potatoes, rice, pasta... And sugar makes you want to eat more.
It's fascinating because we don't know more than around 10-15% of how metabolism works.
++ Keto works because its keeps insulin levels from going high, when insulin is high the body simply cannot metabolize stored fat (at all).
Doing low calorie works by itself, but its hard mode, eating a bunch of insulin spiking meals throughout the day makes it much harder to burn through that sugar, lower the insulin, and eventually metabolize stored fat.
Keto also works because the homogeneity of the meals induces many people to eat less.
If you were literally forced to only eat chicken and broccoli for every single meal, eventually you would become so disgusted you would eat enough to survive, and probably not anymore.
It's not just chicken and broccoli, a entire world of food is available!
you can build real food using all the proteins, all the veggies, and spices!
With every diet, named or not, the weight loss aspect always comes from "calories in vs calories out".
Some of them, like keto, change the way the body accesses the calories in food, but the math still holds. If your body can't access the calories in what you eat, they literally become "calories out" when you go to the bathroom later.
Other diets help with mentally being able to track calories better, or to just help you deal with how hard it is to eat fewer calories.
But no matter what, conservation of mass and energy always applies.
Mass is not conserved. And while CICO may be true in the same sense that spherical cows can be used as an approximation, the devil's in the details.
I didn't say just mass was conserved. I said that mass and energy, when taken together, are conserved. Mass is just another form of energy.
I assure you, ci/co is not a "spherical cow". Every single joule of energy is accounted for.
You forgot that we don't use 100% of the energy intake, like at all. That invalidates your assumptions IMO.
Huh? No I didn't, it's all accounted for.
Unused energy is stored, or passed out as waste (literally calories down the toilet).
So to follow a diet you should calculate not just caloric intake but also caloric euh, well, disposal 😅?
You can do whatever you want. All I'm saying is that you will lose weight if your calorie intake from all sources is less than your calorie output from all sources.