The Truth about "Calories"

[tubby]

Zydeceltico said:

Man - you lot have a serious amount of spare time on your hands...................... the entire post is TL;DR, or as I read it: T(damned)L;(Def)DR.

your mileage may vary - LOL

Thanks for that truly priceless contribution to the conversation we are having here.

 

[lessthanhalf]

I would not go so far as to say the CO half of CICO cannot be estimated at all. It just takes a change in weight before you can see it. Measuring weight loss is straightforward, and in my own case it ran at a remarkably steady 6 kg per month. Take 6 x 7700kcal/kilo of fat and that works out to a 46200kcal/month deficit, roughly 1540 kcal/day, against an intake of about 1600kcal/day. It only comes out that high because at 145kg the extra body mass itself burns calories, and I suspect energy expenditure is generally elevated in an overweight, overfed state - which is the only explanation I have for burning through over 3000 kcal/day while doing essentially nothing, lying down 23 plus hours a day. Curiously enough, after I had shed a good deal of weight and become more active, I never saw energy expenditure shift at all, judged by weight loss rates, between zero activity and walking 3 hours per day.

 

[tubby]

lessthanhalf said:

I would not go so far as to say the CO half of CICO cannot be estimated at all. It just takes a change in weight before you can see it. Measuring weight loss is straightforward, and in my own case it ran at a remarkably steady 6 kg per month. Take 6 x 7700kcal/kilo of fat and that works out to a 46200kcal/month deficit, roughly 1540 kcal/day, against an intake of about 1600kcal/day. It only comes out that high because at 145kg the extra body mass itself burns calories, and I suspect energy expenditure is generally elevated in an overweight, overfed state - which is the only explanation I have for burning through over 3000 kcal/day while doing essentially nothing, lying down 23 plus hours a day. Curiously enough, after I had shed a good deal of weight and become more active, I never saw energy expenditure shift at all, judged by weight loss rates, between zero activity and walking 3 hours per day.

Is that not more or less what I told you 12 hours back?

tubby said:

yrrdead said:

Fair enough - for most people it does the job well enough, and that is reason enough to stick with it. Checkers, not chess, as I said. Log what you eat, log your weight, hold the deficit.

Calorie figures being easy to come by is exactly what makes the approach usable. That the picture isn't as black and white as some assume barely matters for 99.9% of people.

Threads like this just push more people into imagining they're some rare anatomical unicorn. Any time a title shows up promising the "Truth", my eyes roll on their own.

"You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else." - TD

I'm with you on the premise. Where I part ways is in throwing out calorie tracking as a tool just because it doesn't tell the whole story. The tool still earns its keep.

​#-

Does it, though? CICO is the story mainstream literature pushes harder than any other, and everyone has heard it. Were it working well, GLP drugs would not be the phenomenon they now are.

bbbilly said:

having crossed swords with you a couple of times in past threads, on both sides of the argument, i think this is very well put together, though i would add one more thing.

what you take in is not 100% of what reaches your stomach - what counts is how much of it your body can actually break down. Plenty of what we eat isn't digestible at all: fiber, those corn husks we all know about, certain fats that travel straight through the GI tract. Others are easier or harder to extract depending on a person's stomach enzymes and on things like insulin resistance. Miss that and your arithmetic can be off by a meaningful margin, which is how people end up convinced they cannot shift any weight. None of it makes the CICO idea wrong. You were simply working from the wrong figures.

the same thing happens on the other side of the ledger. Put yourself in a deficit and your body fights hard to hold its energy use steady by trimming all the incidental movement - the foot tapping, the pen flicking at your desk. That rarely gets counted, and it widens the gap between the sums and reality. Before GLP drugs, when i dropped 100lbs in my early 20s, the day after a heavy squat session i would be so wiped at work that i'd sit down on my break and stare at the wall, sometimes forgetting to breathe at all, like some kind of walking apnea, gasping for air for no reason beyond holding my breath.

the Minnesota starvation work from the 40s is a good illustration - the researchers kept adjusting each man's diet individually so that everyone stayed on the same 25% weight reduction.



so there are a number of ways in which the CICO model can mislead a given individual. Give someone a full picture of all those variables and the arithmetic would work out for everybody, and i suspect most of the arguing would evaporate.

In fairness to them, part of this is already built into the calorie figures. When i set out how a bomb calorimeter works, i skipped the correction factors that get applied to the raw result, to keep the explanation from sprawling. Estimating the fiber content and deducting the energy that burning that fiber yields is one of them. It is a rough adjustment, since different kinds of fiber are digested to different degrees, and your gut microbiome can sometimes turn fiber into fats your body is then able to use. The "calories" attached to plant protein are shaky for a similar reason: the figure comes from measuring total nitrogen in a sample, and not every bit of that nitrogen sits inside protein. There is plenty of room to sharpen the correction factors and make the model hew closer to reality. Even so, hormones - and possibly other forces - would still outrank calories. Better measurement is possible; what calories give you is an upper limit on the energy on offer, not a reliable forecast of what your body will do with it.

lessthanhalf said:

What really needs answering is whether changing the macronutrient split shifts internal physiology in a way that makes long-term fat loss more likely.

Keto diets do demonstrably blunt appetite - ketones act on the brain's satiety and hunger circuits directly. The size of that effect is modest, though, and almost certainly smaller than what the GLP drugs deliver. As for long-term studies showing sustained major loss over years from diet and exercise alone, past the 5-10% mark, I haven't come across them. By all means point me at any large-scale work that says otherwise.

Part of what people dislike about CICO is that human estimates of intake are wildly unreliable, so the numbers refuse to add up. Almost nobody factors in how much weight loss itself lowers energy expenditure - through the loss of metabolically active tissue and through the body throttling output in response to a prolonged deficit - nor the fact that this low-burn state can stick around for years, or indefinitely, after a big loss.

At 145kg the rate the sums predicted matched my actual loss exactly - 6kg a month, from the crudest of tools. A big mismatch only showed up many months later, once energy expenditure had fallen so far that the very same intake produced no loss at all by the time i was down to 75kg. Few calculators will show you a 50% drop in expenditure after weight loss, or that the drop persists for 3 years afterwards.

Hunger responses can be nudged to a degree by what you eat and in what pattern. My own approach leans instead on keeping intake consistent so that nutrient levels and hormonal responses stay steady, dodging glycaemic loads and steering clear of calorie-dense food - a long way from a keto-style diet.

That is the million dollar question, and my own answer is that macronutrient ratios on their own are not it. What keto gives us is a proof of concept: insulin levels can be manipulated, and doing so is a workable route to losing weight. Nobody is going to give themselves type 1 diabetes as a slimming strategy, effective as it would undoubtedly be. Push insulin down and hold it there, as keto does, and fat can come off quite quickly even while eating what looks like a high-calorie diet.

Build a diet on macros and you end up collapsing together things that deserve to be kept apart. Sugar and starch, for instance, are nowhere near the same thing. Starch breaks down readily into glucose, which nearly every cell in the body can burn. Sugar is a 50:50 blend of glucose and fructose. Hardly any cells can use fructose directly; like alcohol, it has to go through the liver before it becomes something more useful. Worse, fructose at high levels in the blood may do more damage than glucose at comparable levels, so a large quantity is probably not a great idea. That is before you even reach the hormonal side. Think about how fructose shows up in nature: traditionally a fall food. There is a hypothesis that fructose together with omega 6 fats - mostly nuts before modern industry got involved - acts as a seasonal signal to mammals that late summer is turning into autumn, exactly when laying down extra fat would pay off ahead of a winter with less food around. Some hibernators appear to bear this out: tree squirrels denied omega 6 fats in the diet fail to enter hibernation properly and die over the winter. This area deserves far more attention than it has had, and lumping every kind of fat together under one label may be steering us wrong and keeping us from conclusions we would reach if we told them apart.

lessthanhalf said:

What really needs answering is whether changing the macronutrient split shifts internal physiology in a way that makes long-term fat loss more likely.

Keto diets do demonstrably blunt appetite - ketones act on the brain's satiety and hunger circuits directly. The size of that effect is modest, though, and almost certainly smaller than what the GLP drugs deliver. As for long-term studies showing sustained major loss over years from diet and exercise alone, past the 5-10% mark, I haven't come across them. By all means point me at any large-scale work that says otherwise.

Part of what people dislike about CICO is that human estimates of intake are wildly unreliable, so the numbers refuse to add up. Almost nobody factors in how much weight loss itself lowers energy expenditure - through the loss of metabolically active tissue and through the body throttling output in response to a prolonged deficit - nor the fact that this low-burn state can stick around for years, or indefinitely, after a big loss.

At 145kg the rate the sums predicted matched my actual loss exactly - 6kg a month, from the crudest of tools. A big mismatch only showed up many months later, once energy expenditure had fallen so far that the very same intake produced no loss at all by the time i was down to 75kg. Few calculators will show you a 50% drop in expenditure after weight loss, or that the drop persists for 3 years afterwards.

Hunger responses can be nudged to a degree by what you eat and in what pattern. My own approach leans instead on keeping intake consistent so that nutrient levels and hormonal responses stay steady, dodging glycaemic loads and steering clear of calorie-dense food - a long way from a keto-style diet.

Weigh every bite on a scale, be as rigorous as you like: the calorie number is still only a rough estimate. With heavily processed food it is a somewhat better one. Pulverized wheat, refined fat and sugar pressed into a slab of food-like product will be highly bioavailable, so the figure printed on the label is probably close. Eat actual food instead and bioavailability becomes far more of a lottery.

And there you have landed on the crux of my whole argument. Calories out is such a wildcard, so unknown a quantity, that for most people it can never really be pinned down. With no laboratory-grade equipment to measure it, it has to be derived rather than observed. You can work out last month's average by tracking what went in, weighing the loss, and back-calculating what the outgoing side must have been. None of that tells you what the outgoing side will be next month. It is much like investing: explaining why the S&P moved yesterday is easy, calling where it goes tomorrow is not. So how does anyone "do CICO" when CO cannot be known? What people actually do when they say that is hold CI under some line and hope and pray CO stays steady enough for the weight to come off.

Grogu said:

I have argued the CICO case on this forum more than once. What I will concede is that I have never paid the CO half much attention beyond the broad strokes. Extra expenditure, thermogenesis or a hormonal shift never made me raise my intake; what I did do was bring intake down at the macro level after losing more than 100lbs.

The bottom line for me is simple: I want the weight gone, and managing intake is what has worked, in my case at least. If there is a route to losing weight that doesn't involve watching intake, I am happy to hear it. Is there a concrete plan on the table, or is this all still theory?

My argument, as with yrrdead, is this: were CICO effective, you and I would not be sitting in this forum hunting hormonal routes to weight loss. What the actual answer is, i cannot say. Had i known, i would have opened with it. What i can say is that a great deal of intriguing research points to food choices having unexpected effects on weight. Keto has come up from me before as a proof of concept. I am not selling it - it is roughly pointed in the right direction, but i know people who gained on it too. Something is clearly there. It just has not been pinned down.

Edit: How I put it may have been confusing, since I drew the distinction using "estimate" and "derived," and both words can be read several ways. What I meant was that with sophisticated equipment you could measure it directly, though even then you would only ever have an estimate, because the equipment itself carries imprecision. My contrast was between that approach, a direct measurement, and solving for the value by algebra, where calories out is never measured at all but inferred from other quantities you do know - plus the assumption that the CICO model holds. On reflection I could have worded that more tightly, and that one is on me.

 

[tubby]

lessthanhalf said:

I would not go so far as to say the CO half of CICO cannot be estimated at all. It just takes a change in weight before you can see it. Measuring weight loss is straightforward, and in my own case it ran at a remarkably steady 6 kg per month. Take 6 x 7700kcal/kilo of fat and that works out to a 46200kcal/month deficit, roughly 1540 kcal/day, against an intake of about 1600kcal/day. It only comes out that high because at 145kg the extra body mass itself burns calories, and I suspect energy expenditure is generally elevated in an overweight, overfed state - which is the only explanation I have for burning through over 3000 kcal/day while doing essentially nothing, lying down 23 plus hours a day. Curiously enough, after I had shed a good deal of weight and become more active, I never saw energy expenditure shift at all, judged by weight loss rates, between zero activity and walking 3 hours per day.

Same story here. Before GLP drugs, bolting exercise on made almost no difference for me. Some difference, sure, but next to nothing set against the dietary changes I was making at the time.

The calorie crowd would argue that CO rises with exercise, but the person either eats more - hunger hormones pushing them - or CO falls during the rest of the day, which shrinks the net gain once you total it over 24 hours.

 

[tubby]

Also, for anyone curious about the particular studies behind the claims in my OP and in one of the replies, here are the sources:

In this one, a drug that suppresses glucagon broke the vicious cycle in rats with type 1 diabetes and returned their blood sugar to normal without any need for insulin injections:

An orally available compound suppresses glucagon hypersecretion and normalizes hyperglycemia in type 1 diabetes - PubMed



Suppression of glucagon hypersecretion can normalize hyperglycemia during type 1 diabetes (T1D). Activating erythropoietin-producing human hepatocellular receptor type-A4 (EphA4) on α cells reduced glucagon hypersecretion from dispersed α cells and T1D islets from both human donor and mouse...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This article is about that rat feeding study I brought up earlier (the GLP group lost more weight than a second group given no GLP at all, calories matched to the GLP group):

Loading…

uncertaintyprinciples.suspi...n-pair-feeding-in-mice-free-feeding-in-humans

The ground squirrel work I mentioned earlier is this one - the diets were altered to change the fatty acid composition. Look at the results and you will see that the squirrels given more omega-6, and less of the other fats, put on more weight and then hibernated successfully. The groups given less omega-6, and more of the other fats, either failed to enter hibernation at all or came out of it again quickly. Which backs up the notion that different fats have different metabolic effects in the mammals eating them:


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236821460_The_Influence_of_Dietary_Fatty_Acids_on_Hibernation_by_Golden-Mantled_Ground_Squirrels_Spermophilus_lateralis

 

[wellhellothere]

Right, so what does any of this actually mean for a person trying to drop some weight? Should we be judging food by its calorie count or not? Is the advice to eat whole foods only? Which calories count as good and which as bad - that is really what I am asking.

 

[tubby]

wellhellothere said:

Right, so what does any of this actually mean for a person trying to drop some weight? Should we be judging food by its calorie count or not? Is the advice to eat whole foods only? Which calories count as good and which as bad - that is really what I am asking.

The OP is not really "advice" in the first place, and it never claims to tell you how to lose weight. What it does is explain why the loud insistence on the "calories" approach is anything but scientific, and why its foundations are far shakier than most people realise. I take it that nearly everyone accepts a newspaper horoscope should not be treated as serious life guidance - yet plenty of those same people assume weight loss is nothing more than a calorie counting exercise, simply because medical and nutritional authorities keep repeating it.

Which particular way of eating would work, or work best, for you is not something I can say. Every one of them carries its own pros and cons, and different people do better or worse on each. GLPs work very well (and you are here, after all), so that is probably the path with the most behind it for you. If you do want to explore the dietary routes, the advice I can usefully give is to look into the major online communities one by one and spend a little time immersed in each. Perhaps try each on for size for a month or two and see how it treats you. You could even give the "calories" approach a go if it appeals, though holding success with that one is hard work in the absence of a GLP.

 

[Hotlongs]

wellhellothere said:

Right, so what does any of this actually mean for a person trying to drop some weight? Should we be judging food by its calorie count or not? Is the advice to eat whole foods only? Which calories count as good and which as bad - that is really what I am asking.

Check what nuts are listed as, calorie-wise, if you want an idea of how useless cico can turn out to be. Research measuring the energy (kcal/kJ) actually absorbed found nuts delivering up to 26% fewer calories than we had assumed.

Absorption rates are shifted by fiber as well.

 

[Cumulus]

Hotlongs said:

wellhellothere said:

Right, so what does any of this actually mean for a person trying to drop some weight? Should we be judging food by its calorie count or not? Is the advice to eat whole foods only? Which calories count as good and which as bad - that is really what I am asking.

Check what nuts are listed as, calorie-wise, if you want an idea of how useless cico can turn out to be. Research measuring the energy (kcal/kJ) actually absorbed found nuts delivering up to 26% fewer calories than we had assumed.

Absorption rates are shifted by fiber as well.

aww man. So my grandma refusing to let me eat the salted nuts out of that tin she kept in her car was nonsense. She was convinced a single handful would make me fat! Those kcal numbers on the label were what convinced her, lol.

Time to get out there and live the nut eating life!