re: Stupid things people say to dieters

Serious question(s).

If the simple premise CICO is the only factor that guides weight loss, why are we getting fatter and sicker as a society?

Does society as a whole lack the impulse control to regulate what they eat (except for the few people with discipline)?

One must acknowledge that other factors play a role. Care to comment on the human microbiome?

Care to comment on patient with lipodystrophies who accumulate fat preferential on the upper or lower extremites while the other aspect of the body is lean? Does CICO drive that in asymmetric fashion or abberant hormonal pathways?

Care to comment on a growing child? Do they grow because one day they decide to binge eat and consume more calories or due to the influence of growth hormone and other factors.

Care to comment on the pregnant woman? Does she put on weight because she volitional decides to eat more when finding out she is pregnant or is this process driven by hormones.

You miss the point of causality. I am more interested in rooting out the CAUSE of obesity, not debating the mathematics of thermodynamics (which just describes the process). As an offshoot, constructing a SUSTAINED diet/lifestyle that one can COMPLY with must take into account:

-the influence of your environment (stress)
-exposures (good and bad including exercise)
-quality of the diet/macronutrient composition
-the status of your gut micro biome
-sleep

These factors not only play a role in the myopic sense of short term weight loss, but more importantly they influence your overall health, mental well being and disease prevention. If any of these factor are not optimal it can impact your overall well being.

If one were to go on the twinky diet long term, they would suffer some grave consequence (but the CICO numbers can "work" in the short term with regards to weight).

Those studies are good science. They haven't been molested by today's "bioscience" brought to us today. Carbs are NOT an essential nutrient, this is known fact. Humans need protein and fat to survive.

If you read them, you'd see one study provided patients 1,000 calories of a set diet, those on high fat lost the most.

They then found a weight maintenance amount of food for a certain number of calories and replaced them with ethanol, they lost weight. They then took the ethanol calories and replaced them with chocolate milk, they then gained weight. it proves that not all calories are the same.

Some people over eat, 4-5k calories, a day on a high fat diet and struggle to gain weight. They replace those diets with high carb, which results in weight gain. The reason I mention these studies is to show that calories, as a way to measure food/weight-gain, is a terrible way to go. Besides, let's not get into the fact that the calorie model is over 60 years old.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote about his all meat diet in his book " not by break alone" and many people wrote on this study. LINK they ate only meat for a year. The fattier the meat the better. The doctors at the time didn't believe his reports on the Inuit. I've done it for a month myself, with no problems. No scurvy when you have enough fat.

But hey, it's all good. The Germans had some great studies before and after WWI. Sadly, these studies were lost in the shuffle.