I don’t think any of these studies refutes CICO in a theoretical way. The main problem with CICO is that it is simply not useful in any practical way: you can partially control calories in, but not calories out in any meaningful controllable way. Your body will spend the calories that it wants to, and this can vary significantly day to day depending on all sorts of factors. Measuring calories out is *very* hard, and is not possible in a practical setting. Frankly, the only way to know if you are spending more energy than you take in is to look at body mass changes over the medium to long term… you can’t trust the short term changes as that will be mostly water weight changes.
Added to this, we could start discussing that calories are really not in any way the proper units of measure in the dietary sphere. A calorie is a unit of heat energy, and we are not steam engines. We process the mass that we consume in a chemical way, not by combusting it… this results in a massive difference between what we are told is the energy in a food vs what our bodies can actually derive from it. We should really remove the word calories from the diet arena. We should be measuring mass: far more sensible.
I don’t think any of these studies refutes CICO in a theoretical way. The main problem with CICO is that it is simply not useful in any practical way: you can partially control calories in, but not calories out in any meaningful controllable way. Your body will spend the calories that it wants to, and this can vary significantly day to day depending on all sorts of factors. Measuring calories out is *very* hard, and is not possible in a practical setting. Frankly, the only way to know if you are spending more energy than you take in is to look at body mass changes over the medium to long term… you can’t trust the short term changes as that will be mostly water weight changes.
Added to this, we could start discussing that calories are really not in any way the proper units of measure in the dietary sphere. A calorie is a unit of heat energy, and we are not steam engines. We process the mass that we consume in a chemical way, not by combusting it… this results in a massive difference between what we are told is the energy in a food vs what our bodies can actually derive from it. We should really remove the word calories from the diet arena. We should be measuring mass: far more sensible.
I think we are in agreement. Fundamentally - people LOVE the simplification of calories but they are meaningless.