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.