Health and Fitness

[skullman80]

Wife knows I'm following CICO, and sent me this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... egime.html

I didn't know CICO was the new "it" diet???

That article actually says CICO doesn't work the farther you read into it. Pretty silly. It takes about starvation mode(which is a myth) etc.

[dodint]

Wife knows I'm following CICO, and sent me this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... egime.html

I didn't know CICO was the new "it" diet???

Honestly, what the **** are we doing out here?

[columbia]

High fiber diet?

[beerman]

Wife knows I'm following CICO, and sent me this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... egime.html

I didn't know CICO was the new "it" diet???

That article actually says CICO doesn't work the farther you read into it. Pretty silly. It takes about starvation mode(which is a myth) etc.

It was definitely poorly worded. I think what they were trying to get at is that it can be tough to sustain, ie you cut x amount of calories and lose the desired amount of weight whether it’s 5 or 50 pounds. Then what do you do?

You don’t need to keep right at the number of calories you ate on CICO but you can’t go right back to what you used to do either. Maintaining a new weight is where the real struggle is for a lot of people (there are plenty of studies on both weight loss and just breaking habits to back that up) and that’s what the article should’ve gotten into if it actually wanted to be helpful.

[dodint]

Then what do you do?

You don’t need to keep right at the number of calories you ate on CICO but you can’t go right back to what you used to do either. Maintaining a new weight is where the real struggle is for a lot of people (there are plenty of studies on both weight loss and just breaking habits to back that up) and that’s what the article should’ve gotten into if it actually wanted to be helpful.

You set your CI to your Basal Metabolic Rate and keep counting forever. Keep weighing yourself at a set interval so you can tell if you're slipping. It's so simple people believe it can't work.

My BMR was around 2700 calories last time I had it read. That's plenty.

[skullman80]

Agree that maintaining is the hard part, but as @dodint says.. you adjust your intake after you lose weight. It's all numbers. Finding the sweet spot can be difficult, but people make it harder than necessary. It's a numbers game/math equation. As you lose weight you are going to need to take in less total calories, but if you were cutting 500 or so a day to begin with once you hit maintenance you are still going to probably be eating more than you were when you were cutting in the first place.

[dodint]

By the way, when I found "CICO" back in 2005 it was in the form of The Hackers Diet. https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

I liked it because the guy wasn't selling it, he just self-published the concept and tackled weight loss as an engineering problem. I should download the PDF or EPUB version and reread it between semesters to keep my motivation up.

[count2infinity]

But that could be said about any diet or routine... it's a change in lifestyle that works, not fad diets. The struggling to keep weight off is just a matter of sticking to what you've been doing vs going back to the way things were.

For all the people on keto, paleo, whatever-o diets that are out there that claim CICO won't work there are 5 or more people that have followed CICO and gotten results. Take r/loseit for instance. They have a running tally of weight lost by their users. Currently 1,362,637 lbs lost for an average of 38.5 lbs/user.

Obviously just going back to what you did is going to get you where you were, but that's not really a part of the CICO plan.

[count2infinity]

btw, saw my weight in the 260's for the first time in about 5 years this morning. Fells good man.

[dodint]

Congrats. You blew right by me. Keep going.

[beerman]

Then what do you do?

You don’t need to keep right at the number of calories you ate on CICO but you can’t go right back to what you used to do either. Maintaining a new weight is where the real struggle is for a lot of people (there are plenty of studies on both weight loss and just breaking habits to back that up) and that’s what the article should’ve gotten into if it actually wanted to be helpful.

You set your CI to your Basal Metabolic Rate and keep counting forever. Keep weighing yourself at a set interval so you can tell if you're slipping. It's so simple people believe it can't work.

My BMR was around 2700 calories last time I had it read. That's plenty.

I agree it can be easy, but for a lot of people when you say "keep counting forever" they're out. What you said is, imo, the best way but not everyone likes a level of detail to that degree.

Obviously, you're going to need to monitor CI to some degree whether it's religiously tracking every bite of food you put in your mouth or just trying to reasonably do your best to continue eating a bit better. I think more people could be helped with their weight loss goals though, if there was more emphasis put on how to maintain on the back end. Of course that doesn't generate as many clicks, or sell books or whatever, but it would help people.

[dodint]

People are so routine based that I don't think strict counting is necessarily required forever. Most people buy the same groceries and go to the same restaurants most of the time. Getting an idea of what you can eat and what you can't becomes habit if you do maintenance counting for a while.

That's why continually weighing becomes important. When I do get to where I want to be my plan is to keep weighing myself daily forever and only do calorie counting when I exceed a certain threshold.

The bottom line is no matter what the method employed keeping weight off requires a commitment and that is where people break down. They're content to spend 40+ hours a week ensuring their bank account is taken care of but 5 minutes a day to count some calories is a burden. It's a misalignment of priorities if we're willing to be honest.

[count2infinity]

For me and the CI side of things: I had no freaking idea how many calories were in somethings. The religiously tracking every bite that goes into my face aspect of it pretty much taught me good from bad, high calorie and low calorie. Some people know this already, many people that get big don't because there have been ad campaign after ad campaign to make things that might be high in calories look like they're healthy or good for you. Which don't get me wrong... they might be, but calories are weight, weight is calories. If you don't know, then how could you possibly ever lose weight?

[skullman80]

Also in the grand scheme of things... no matter what diet you do. Keto, Paleo, Atkins.. or whatever.. they still come down to CICO. They are just different ways to get to that point. If you are a vegetarian.. those calories count the same as if you eat meat. People just dont want to be held accountable for stuff. It takes 5 minutes a day for me or so to get an idea of my total calorie count. I pre log alot of my day now too. I know what I have to work with. Am I a bit looser now with counting since I'm at maintenance? Absolutely, but I still do it even if I do it in my head now.

[dodint]

It's important to divorce the idea of calories and nutrition, too. You can have a 2000 calorie diet of ding dongs and ho-hos and be killing yourself. You don't need to eat 2000 calories of celery, either. There is a balance. I try to eat more fresh fruits now, for instance. It sounds obvious but a lot of CICO detractors say that CICO users do CICO so they can 'eat what they want' which pisses off the diet fad crowd who are stuck eating bean soup 7 days a week. The complete path is to do CICO and also balance your nutrients if you want to maximize health and wellness.

That said, any form of CICO is still better than free grazing yourself into diabetes and an early grave.

[skullman80]

People don't understand the balance. People are amazed I can eat pizza a few times a week and still be in great shape and not gain weight. It's all about moderation and balance.

[shafnutz05]

The complete path is to do CICO and also balance your nutrients if you want to maximize health and wellness.

That said, any form of CICO is still better than free grazing yourself into diabetes and an early grave.

Correct. On a completely side note, a pet peeve are the people that think that eating fruit is always healthy and you can eat as much of it as you want because it's fruit! My mother-in-law must have fed my daughter 100 grapes, and when I asked her to please stop, she said "It's good for her!". For starters, grapes are about the unhealthiest "fruits" out there, but that's beside the point. Some people are way off base with what is actually healthy ("lowfat", "0 carbs", etc)

Honestly, I've tried to monitor my macros on several occasions because I really wanted to build muscle, and just can't do it. Sorry...outside of having 1-2 extra protein shakes a day and eating some more chicken, there's no way I have time to track that stuff.

[shafnutz05]

People don't understand the balance. People are amazed I can eat pizza a few times a week and still be in great shape and not gain weight. It's all about moderation and balance.

I eat a bowl of ice cream every night, pretty much. And it's probably 2 servings. But because I have cut back other areas, I'm sitting at about 161 now, and my cholesterol/triglycerides were pretty decent in my most recent screening. People also have an irrational fear of saturated fat, but that's another story.

[skullman80]

People fear everything because there are so many whacko theories out there that any food will kill you blah blah blah. They watch Dr. Oz or whatever and take his word for gospel and think they can gargle some apple cider vinegar and lose 10lbs in 2 days or something. People are dumb. Enjoy food, moderate yourself, get off your ass and move.. and you will probably be just fine.

[shafnutz05]

My previous coworker (not the Juicy Juice one), drank Apple Cider Vinegar every day. Silly.

[count2infinity]

lol, my wife's aunt is notorious with that Dr. Oz bullsh*t. She would do all sorts of stuff when her mom had cancer to try and "cure" it. Eventually my wife had a chat with her about how it's all non-sense and she needs to stop. Then, of course, every time she had some crackpot FWD:FWD:RE:Lose weight in 10 days! crap, she'd forward it to my wife to see if it was legit or not.

[dodint]

Teach a woman to phish...

[MR25]

... and she'll trip balls for hours.

[iamjs]

Three days in Vegas and I ended up racking up almost 40 miles in walking/running: 10.7 mi on Saturday, 20.36 mi on Sunday (half marathon included in there), and another 8.34 yesterday.

For as big of an event that it was, the run was very organized. Police presence everywhere and every side road along the race was blocked with barriers, police cars, or in some cases even transit buses. Think I overheard the announcer say that over 38k people registered and that it wasn't a final total since they had a large number of people signing up at the expo. The first two miles were uphill and looped us past Mandalay Bay and the site of the Harvest festival. They ended up not staging any bands on that section of the race, which is probably one of the rare times where I ran without music.

Did I get my goal time? Nah. Was off by several minutes, but that's my own fault for wanting to slow down and take pics (or as I called it on Facebook, "the world's slowest tour of the vegas strip") and an early pit stop around mile 3. I'm sure also training only up to 9 miles had something to do with it. The folks from Rock and Roll marathon sent out a chart where I compared to the field, and sure enough I was faster than the field for the 5k - which was surprising since I hate running uphill, and still a minute or so faster at the 10k. Also worth mentioning is that mile 2 to mile 8ish was all downhill. Once we looped through Fremont St and headed back to the finish, it was slightly uphill but I could tell that there was some running that I wasn't used to doing . Started feeling cramping above my left knee around mile 12 and completely cramped exactly at 13.1000 miles. A day or so later and I'm not as sore as I thought I would be. That's not saying I'm not sore at all, but it's more of the chafing that is bothering me than anything.

Would I do this race again? This race wasn't a cheap one, that's for sure. $155 for the entry since I entered late, $435 for three days of hotels. Decided to stay in a lesser hotel for the first night with no resort fees so I could spent a little more on a nicer hotel for the next two days. Add about $160 on Spirit for the airfare, so that's like $750 before you even get into gambling, food/drinks, resort fees, monorail/uber and touristy stuff. But to answer the question if I would do it again, I think so. Would prefer not to fly solo next time though. Had two friends who said they would go, and kept giving me the "yeah, let me know. That sounds cool." Number of times they asked me about it after I posted things about buying my entry, buying my airfare, etc: zero. Yeah, I knew they weren't going.

[dodint]

Oh, wow. Completely forgot you were going. Sounds like you made the best of a couple of days. Nicely done.