To think that 'eat less move more', everything in moderation and CICO is total bollox?

[Honestopinion23]

CICO stands for calories in vs calories out by the way.
I often read the weight loss section on here. Every day there are people embarking on any number of diets and body overhauls and I reckon about 95% of them are unsuccessful. Calorie counting, shake diets, you name it, people always gain the weight back before long. Even celebrities who seem to have done well with weight loss eventually gain it back, e.g. Pauline Quirke. I am watching that new amazon show with Melissa McCarthy and she is also back to being around the same size she was before starting her weight loss. Lisa Riley is another one who lost a lot of weight and most of it is back now. Clearly it's not working and people are making money out of telling fat people that they can be thin if only they want it bad enough or try hard enough. The scientific research shows that once you are morbidly obese, you have an absolutely miniscule chance of getting to and maintaining a normal BMI without surgery. Yes, there will no doubt be people popping up here saying they did just that but you are the exception.

The idea that if you just eat less than you burn is also flawed when a) your body adapts to lower amounts. For instance, those who have gastric bypass and eat v low calories forever still tend to be overweight/mildly obese because their bodies just can't get to a low BMI and b) you're fighting against intense hunger urges that someone who has always been normal weight just can't imagine dealing with.

If I was morbidly obese, I would ditch all the dieting crap, admit that I couldn't fix it and have surgery. I see so many dieting plans just blame the dieter for 'failure' when they're trying to do something impossible. If I was stage 1 obese or overweight, I'd go low carb no-processed for life because I think that is the only thing that switches off the hunger signals in the brain.

I really love the feeling of 'hungry' I get on a low carb diet. It's nothing like what I always thought hunger was. It's not 'Oh god, if I don't eat soon, I'll faint... I feel nauseous, my stomach is eating itself...', it's more 'I'll eat later this afternoon and I'm really looking forward to it!'

That's really interesting, I agree but had never really noticed until you wrote it.

I've done 16:8 fasting for years and the last hour or so before my first meal of the day was torture and I'd be watching the clock.

Since cutting out sugar and grains a few weeks ago, that's changed completely. I often get caught up at work and don't even realise it's well past the end of my fasting time. If I do get hungry it's just an awareness my stomach is empty, it's not uncomfortable or urgent.

Hopefully that means my body is too busy feasting on my love handles to bother sending me any distress signals

It's just hard. I used to be so thin. I was very active too.

Now I'm fat, not nearly as active, and tend to binge eat.

I know if I truly stuck to the right amount of calories and exercised daily, I would lose the weight. It's just really hard.

I need to sport of some sort.

@Hoesbeforebroes

I really love the feeling of 'hungry' I get on a low carb diet. It's nothing like what I always thought hunger was. It's not 'Oh god, if I don't eat soon, I'll faint... I feel nauseous, my stomach is eating itself...', it's more 'I'll eat later this afternoon and I'm really looking forward to it!'

That's really interesting, I agree but had never really noticed until you wrote it.

I've done 16:8 fasting for years and the last hour or so before my first meal of the day was torture and I'd be watching the clock.

Since cutting out sugar and grains a few weeks ago, that's changed completely. I often get caught up at work and don't even realise it's well past the end of my fasting time. If I do get hungry it's just an awareness my stomach is empty, it's not uncomfortable or urgent.

Hopefully that means my body is too busy feasting on my love handles to bother sending me any distress signals

Yes, I thought this was a good observation too.

Not RTFT but eat less and move more is not rubbish. If you exercise more and eat less, you will lose weight. People don't lose weight because they think they're eating less, but aren't. Or stroll along at a snail's pace and think that's exercise. You need to move fast enough to get slightly out of breath and get a sweat on.

@RantyAunty

It's just hard. I used to be so thin. I was very active too.

Now I'm fat, not nearly as active, and tend to binge eat.

I know if I truly stuck to the right amount of calories and exercised daily, I would lose the weight. It's just really hard.

I need to sport of some sort.

Finding the motivation is hard. We know what we need to do, but it's not always easy to get into the right headspace to do it. Plus I like food.

@RantyAunty

I know if I truly stuck to the right amount of calories and exercised daily, I would lose the weight. It's just really hard

I need to sport of some sort

Exercise is very good for you. No-one will dispute that! But it won't really help you lose weight, unless you do A LOT of it.

It's also, if you read the rest of the thread, not about the calories either! What you're trying to do is a prime example of why CICO really doesn't work. All it does is create a WOE (way of eating) you believe that you should follow, which is hard, and which makes you feel like you'r a failure when it doesn't work.

RTFT and you'll see countless explanations as to why this is.

@lockdownmadnessdotcom

Not RTFT but eat less and move more is not rubbish. If you exercise more and eat less, you will lose weight. People don't lose weight because they think they're eating less, but aren't. Or stroll along at a snail's pace and think that's exercise. You need to move fast enough to get slightly out of breath and get a sweat on.

Over 780 posts and you don't think this has already been dealt with?

Eat less/move more (another way of saying CICO) doesn't work in the long term as it fucks up your metabolism. Hence yo-yo dieting.

@Mercurial123

Not quite sure why you would want to argue with that though

I'm not arguing but it's really annoying that so many posters are just putting carbs and not stating if they are complex or refined. Low carb isn't the only way to lose weight and keep it off long term.

The very shallowest research into low carb diets will tell you about the different sorts of carbs and their different effects, so unless you're worried that somebody might take the unadvisable step of starting to eat low carb and use only one MN thread for their total research, you could make the assumption, along with the rest of us, about what carbs we're talking about. Just to save yourself from getting so annoyed.

Nobody has said that low carb is the only way to lose weight, or keep it off. Not sure where you've got that from. Discussing something and saying it's a good method doesn't exclude other methods.

@lockdownmadnessdotcom

Not RTFT but eat less and move more is not rubbish. If you exercise more and eat less, you will lose weight. People don't lose weight because they think they're eating less, but aren't. Or stroll along at a snail's pace and think that's exercise. You need to move fast enough to get slightly out of breath and get a sweat on.

Perhaps you ought to have RTFT

This is a bit like popping up in a lab and saying 'I've not looked at all the latest research, but... perhaps Earth isn't flat..?'

You've absolutely fallen for the rhetoric we were all discussing about 300 posts ago

Yep, if you eat less and exercise, you will lose weight. For a while. Then it will stop even though you’re trying really hard and you often feel hungry. You’ll get told it’s because you’re not putting enough effort in and that it’s because you went 200 calories over that one time or because you don’t go to the gym every day as you have a family and a busy job. Eventually, you ‘fall off the wagon’ because it feels hopeless. Then you decide to get back on the wagon again using the same methods. The cycle starts again.

Sound familiar?

Also, nearly everyone who has talked about their low carb journey has acknowledged that it doesn’t work for everyone. But there are several people who are dissing low carb who clearly don’t understand what it is (it’s not whole grains and it’s not a shit-tonne of protein for instance) so I think it’s fair enough to correct them.

By the way, I used to be quite anti-low carb and thought it was all about willpower and my lack of it. Then I tried it and it changed my relationship to food.

It has already been mentioned several times on this thread, but I really, really recommend - for anyone who is really interested and wants to know more about why CICO doesn't work, and why it's actually all about the hormones - reading Why We Eat (Too Much) by Dr Andrew Jenkinson.

Very clearly and well written, and explains why CICO doesn't work as a long-term weight loss method.

@Ontherebound34

By the way, I used to be quite anti-low carb and thought it was all about willpower and my lack of it. Then I tried it and it changed my relationship to food

Me too. I was very much rolling my eyes at anyone who thought CICO was the way forward. The thing is, CICO is the base of it all, so you can never say it's not true. But to boil the workings of the fuel mechanisms in the human body down to 4 letters... surely anyone can see that that must be oversimplifying.

It's like saying 'If you put petrol in your car, it will go. If you don't put petrol in your car, it won't go.' It is true, but it totally dismisses all the issues of 'is the fuel tank connected to the engine?', 'Does it have pedals and a steering wheel?', 'Is there a driver?', 'Are the wheels touching the tarmac?' etc.

The human body is SO complicated. And body fat is viewed as an abhorrent thing, when it's actually an amazing development of evolution that's allowed us to avoid extinction; we wouldn't be here without it. Our bodies really want it, and once they have it, they really want to keep it, because they know keeps us further from starvation when the food runs out. It's our energy savings account, and to poo-poo the body's drive to hold on to it as 'Oh, you just don't have any willpower' is to minimise one of our major natural drives towards evolutionary success. Some people can make themselves do it, just like some people can make themselves run a marathon, but to expect the majority to overcome an evolutionary process is too big an ask. We need to understand what's going on in our bodies, so that we can find the best way to encourage them to minimise these evolutionary urges. Low carb is a good way of doing that, for many, many people, and scientifically, it's a lot more likely to be adhered to, long term, than simply eating less and moving more, which essentially just makes you hungrier, as we all know, because we've all taken a long walk at some point, and then extra specially enjoyed our roast dinner as a direct result.

There's a really interesting piece here about how low carbing encourages your body to burn its own fat for fuel. From www.drinklmnt.com.

• 'I was very much rolling my eyes at anyone who thought CICO was the way forward.'

I meant 'wasn't the way forward'

Contradicted myself in the first line...

Just lost 1.5lb in 3 days by reducing my carbs properly (not just from my normal as discussed upthread). Aware it's probably water weight but pleased because it would not budget before!

I am still hungry all the time though ...

Article I WISH I could read in the Irish Times today by dr Donal O'Shea (who worked with Operation Transformation over a decade ago to reverse contestants' diabetes. With SUCCESS)

Although the article is behind a firewall, the comments are the same old "people just wont take responsibility for their behavior".

All the flat earthers still commenting. Nobody realising hunger isnt a behavior.

The message is going to take a long time to become mainstream . It must be so frustrating to be an obesity dr battling CICO mindset

@LadyOfLittleLeisure

Just lost 1.5lb in 3 days by reducing my carbs properly (not just from my normal as discussed upthread). Aware it's probably water weight but pleased because it would not budget before!

I am still hungry all the time though ...

That's good news. You must have been gleeful on the scales

Are you getting enough salt? I fast quite regularly, and when I'm hungry, I drink a bit of stock. It's salty, an makes the hunger go away.

Not something to overdo, obviously, but worth a thought. Often the body tells you it's hungry because it wants a specific thing. It's not 'I want food', it's 'I want food that has x in it because I need some x.'

This is a very interesting thread. I am obese 32.4 according to the BMI calculator. I am fairly active, tall weigh 15st 4lbs but 2 months ago I was around 16st 8lbs so I am losing weight currently. This is due to a suspected digestive issue which led to a GP advised dietary change. I have been vegetarian for over 30 years, already cook most meals from scratch, eat wholegrain etc. But to avoid irritation I was told to avoid spicy foods, onions, garlic, dairy, alcohol etc. I did that for a month. Switched to herb tea, boring and food etc. Lost a stone in weight. I have been reintroducing some things, love my curries for e.g and I have 1 coffee with plant milk then herb tea for the rest of the day, I am back to booze but no more than 1 bottle of wine over a few days. I am still losing weight at about a lb a week. I have not changed my diet with the intention to lose weight so it is more a side benefit, so I see this as a change in lifestyle, probably permanent, reducing dairy has been very beneficial. I still add a bit of feta to salad but I have more nuts and seeds.

I have always been very suspicious of the diet industry. I see it as profiting from (mainly) women's insecurity. My mother is and has been for years overweight and miserable and overly focussed on losing weight. Thinking how much better her life would be if she was slim, but eating her emotions. I always wanted to avoid that way of thinking. I have been resistant to weighing myself, tend to be the opposite of body dysmorphic thinking - I look in the mirror and usually see strong, curvy and capable not fat and useless. My healthy ego helps. I wish I could give mum some of that dgaf attitude!

But I am in my late 40s so bits of me are getting tired and rubbish so I have embraced change. If I lose weight as a result it should hopefully be sustainable. I don't think there is a one size fits all solution. Separation of feelings from eating, not equating weight with value in society and better role models for a healthy relationship with food are all helpful.

@FlemCandango

Alcohol is an interesting one. There's literally nothing our body can do with alcohol calories except burn them. We can't store them as fat, we can't use them to repair or regenerate or nourish anything at all. They are the emptiest calorie. There's a general misunderstanding that alcohol makes you fat but it doesn't on its own. What it does is gives your body calories which it has to prioritise using for movement. So if you eat whilst your body still has some alcohol calories to use up, everything you eat will be stored for later (often as fat)

This is why we see some heavy drinkers looking thin and malnourished. They often don't eat enough, because they're drinking lots of calories, but they're useless calories. So, no fat storage (in fact, burning of body fat) and severely limited proteins and fats (ie nourishment)

It's a bit like carbs but worse. Very little we can do with them, except move. Pretty empty calories, in terms of providing the body with a decent array of nourishment. But carbs can be stored as fat, which is very useful (evolutionarily speaking) and alcohol can't.

It's a shame it's so enjoyable, really.

I have few other vices these days so a bottle of wine in a week is ok. I see the weight issue with alcohol for me is the snacking alongside it. I have drastically cut snacking to avoid the salty irritants. One thing I am learning about my middle aged body is, that it is a sensitive finely tuned engine now, rather than the reliable bone shaker it used to be so I have to use the correct fuel!

@LadyOfLittleLeisure

Just lost 1.5lb in 3 days by reducing my carbs properly (not just from my normal as discussed upthread). Aware it's probably water weight but pleased because it would not budget before!

I am still hungry all the time though ...

@LadyOfLittleLeisure good news about the loss so far.

Re the hunger - you will be in a period of transition from burning carbs for fuel to burning fat. This generally takes longer than 3 days, so stick with it. On a low carb WOE the mantra is 'if you're hungry, eat!' (obviously sticking to low carb foods).

Make sure you're eating plenty of fat and also drinking lots of water (which also means, as @TheFoundations points out), keeping your salt intake up too.

Thanks @BIWI and @TheFoundations for the ideas and motivation. I was delighted to see the scales move after so long of plateau. My salt is low because I do get water retention if I have too much.

You may find that that changes on a low carb diet - just be aware that if you're drinking all the water (which you should be doing, and which will probably, count-intuitively, also help with the water retention!) that you may need more. Classic sign of this will be symptoms often called 'carb flu' (or 'keto flu'). The Diet Doctor explains this well

@LadyOfLittleLeisure

Thanks *@BIWI and @TheFoundations* for the ideas and motivation. I was delighted to see the scales move after so long of plateau. My salt is low because I do get water retention if I have too much.

Ah, yes, but you did just mention that you think the weight loss since 'proper' low carb was water weight, so you might find that you need to apply a different balance when low carbing. Honestly our bodies are all an individual adventure! Enjoy your explorations and your curiosities!