I'd add to this that loosing weight simply requires a calorie deficit. There is no requirement that you must eat large portions of meat to loose weight.
With that being said, eating low carb may be an easier way for some. Don't want to discount that.
My understanding is that that is an old way of thinking that sounds good but doesn't work.
You need to put in the right type of calories: high GI foods will make it harder for you to lose weight by stimulating insulin production which in turns stimulates your cells to sequester all the sugar in your blood and turn it into fat (and you get lethargic and hungry as a bonus). You also need to exercise as your diet continues: your body will slowly burn muscle mass if your intake decreases for long enough, and with less muscle you burn less and eventually hit a wall. Exercise replenishes that muscle mass (assuming you eat enough protein). It's complicated.
I'm not a medical doctor, the above is just my understanding, so take it with a grain of salt.
While this is mostly true…there are other factors at play that can make this deficit difficult. I went for 2 months without losing a pound despite a net -1000kcal between diet, exercise, and my “probable” BMR. My suspicion is that my BMR dropped when my body realized it was basically in a famine state and decided to conserve every calorie it could any way it could.
That's almost certainly not what happened. While your body will get more efficient in starvation conditions it takes time and doesn't start instantly. There are certain biases that people have with weight loss and eating that are very common and result in less results than you expect.
There's a good chance your "probable" bmr was overestimating calorie burn. If you were basing calories burned in exercise from what a machine at the gym was telling you, it almost certainly overstated the calorie burn. Unless you meticulously weighed everything you put in your mouth you probably ate more calories than you think you did. Even if you did measure everything carefully and accurately, there's some degree of error in the nutrition data on packaging.
The truth is that you probably didn't have a 1000 cal daily deficit for 2 months. That kind of deficit should drop your weight by about 15 lbs in that time. Even fairly extreme fluid fluctuations wouldn't cover that weight loss unless you started dehydrated and fairly overweight.
> That kind of deficit should drop your weight by about 15 lbs in that time.
The fact that you think that there is a number like this shows you are using extremely old thinking about how even the CICO model works. There is no way to predict weight/gain loss amount based on calories across individuals.
Also, even if there is some error in BMR, calorie burn rate, calorie intake, I very much doubt it was `-1000 calories +- 1000 calories`. Exercising is at most 2-300 calories per day. If you are making an effort to count calories, you will notice if you're eating an extra 200 calories of food. So let's say from these that they were at 1000 +- 200. Unless they got their BMR extremely wrong, then something else was happening. And after a month, even if they were at a ~200 calorie deficit, they should have still noticed clear fat loss.
I can make any cardio machine at the gym tell me I've burned far, far more than this.
> f you are making an effort to count calories, you will notice if you're eating an extra 200 calories of food.
The person I was replying to mentioned in another reply that they managed to lose 170 lbs which is a huge achievement. Someone with that kind of weight to lose has been overeating for a long time. Dropping calories to the point that they will just maintain there weight may feel very restrictive. I'm not surprised someone in this situation might underestimate their intake. It also doesn't take much to eat an extra 200 calories. Thats less than 2 tbsp of butter or oil. Pour too much salad dressing on your kale and now you're a couple hundred calories over what you thought.
> And after a month, even if they were at a ~200 calorie deficit, they should have still noticed clear fat loss.
The usual numbers you hear for weight loss are 3500 cals per lb of fat. A month at a 200 calorie deficit would give you 6000 calories. To make this easy let's say this leads to a 2 lb loss of fat, muscle, etc. I'd argue that when undertaking a lifestyle change a 2 lb change in weight could be hidden by other factors like hydration, more/less food in your digestive tract, etc.
> The fact that you think that there is a number like this shows you are using extremely old thinking about how even the CICO model works. There is no way to predict weight/gain loss amount based on calories across individuals.
But that's one of the few numbers you can predict with pretty good accuracy.
Figuring out diet, exercise, and BMR is the hard part. Expecting a pound of fat to go away per 3000 calories is the easy part.
> Figuring out diet, exercise, and BMR is the hard part. Expecting a pound of fat to go away per 3000 calories is the easy part.
Well, here you've moved from "estimated deficit per day" to "exact total deficit". Sure, thermodynamics tells you with absolute certainty that if you've lost 1 pound of fat in 1 week, you've overall had 3000 Cal deficit in that month.
But that doesn't mean you can say "if you know your BMR at time t, eat exactly this much and exercise exactly this much, you will definitely have a 3000 Cal deficit over 1 week". This would assume already that BMR doesn't vary with exercise and diet. It also assumes that food digestion doesn't vary with exercise and diet. Both of these are assumptions that we don't really know. And even if they are true for 1 week, they are almost certainly not true for 1 year.
You're getting downvoted because, I assume, you didn't include the possibility of magic as a an explanation in your analysis.
Rookie mistake in these threads. While it may superficially seem like yours was the best explanation for lack of weight loss -- that OP made a simple error and over-estimated his caloric deficit (and further didn't adjust the deficit when receiving data to the contrary)-- what you need to account for are the "other factors" which currently exceeds our understanding of biology and physics.
Using these 'other factors' it's possible to do everything right, and still not lose weight (through no fault of your own).
There are all sorts of things that control weight gain/loss outside CICO. Most notably, BMR can vary wildly with hormonal and endocrine issues. It's not at all improbable that BMR can be affected significantly by dieting in some individuals, a priori. It could also be affected by other lifestyle changes that happened together with the dieting, such as medication.
> There are all sorts of things that control weight gain/loss outside CICO.
Not really, but that doesn't mean CICO is actionable.
> Most notably, BMR can vary wildly with hormonal and endocrine issues.
That's not outside of CICO, since BMR is a central element of “calories out”. Of course, it is a reason CICO is not as simple as advocates make it out to be (and there are more problems like that on both the CI and CO sides.)
> at's not outside of CICO, since BMR is a central element of “calories out”. Of course, it is a reason CICO is not as simple as advocates make it out to be (and there are more problems like that on both the CI and CO sides.)
That was basically my point. BMR can fluctuate making CICO a piss poor oversimplified explanation for weight loss. My example was real, it did happen to me. My calories in was meticulously recorded. Calories out is less accurate, but the calories burned in exercise were not dramatically inaccurate enough to explain the lack of progress. The only other factor outside my conscious control was BMR.
> CICO a piss poor oversimplified explanation for weight loss
Kinda reads like an embarrassing cope, tbh. Blaming mystical 'other factors' is stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. At the end of the day, CICO is all that matters. To deny this is to say that you have a metabolism not based on consuming external matter.
Your lack of progress can entirely be explained by just making a plain, good old fashion error with your in/out expenditure. Something we all literally do. We don't need magic involved to explain it. Your body gave you data that you were wrong, but you ignored it, threw up your hands, and now blame "other factors."
Want to lose weight? Use this One Weird Trick those dummy gym bros with no understanding of science have been using since forever.
1. Reduce your calories
2. monitor your weight
3. adjust 1. based on 2.
Hardly. I did adjust…I added calories, and my weight loss resumed. And like I said, if my BMR was not normative for my age, weight, and activity level, it was the culprit.
What you folks on here are referring as “mystical” and “magical” is not either. In fact the opposite. It’s evolution. Your body’s sympathetic nervous system evolved to react and adjust to help keep you alive during periods of stress. Starvation is a stressor, it’s ridiculous to think that our bodies simply shrug it off and keep operating business as usual. Once the stressor was removed the body decided to “resume normal processing” it became easier to lose weight.
FWIW, I am not saying that a prolonged period of starvation would not result in weight loss, but I am saying your body on limited fuel will conserve the fuel it gets any way IT can.
> The truth is that you probably didn't have a 1000 cal daily deficit for 2 months.
Uh yes, this is pretty much exactly what I said. But left out from my original post was how my weight loss began again when my caloric intake increased.
This was about at a 125lbs in to a ultimate 170lb loss. CICO doesn’t have a good explanation for plateaus in a long weight loss journey. It also doesn’t factor weight gain due to muscle build.
My ultimate point being it’s not a simple math equation.
