We don’t have a thread to share interesting studies or articles, so here we go.
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Good articles.
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@TrainForPain not gonna lie, I was getting pretty excited in the second article, till they got to the point where they said it can’t be achieved in humans. Womp womp.
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Really fascinating read! Brad Marshall from “Fire in a Bottle” has written some interesting stuff regarding the interplay of linoleic acid and obesity, and his employment of steric acid as an intervention. I like how this speaks to the notion of “don’t lose weight to get healthy: get healthy to lose weight”. We see a similar notion in the idea that “sugar isn’t poisonous”, wherein statements like that are true for individuals that ARE metabolically healthy, but for those currently afflicted with some manner of metabolic derangement? Mayhaps there IS something more to it than simply CICO or IIFYM.
Appreciate you sharing it! Love the idea of this topic.
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Way to make me actually read, @BethB (Beeeeeeeeth!). Ugh.
My default (believe it or not, I was an engineer by education - never practice, God forbid) is a bit of “empirical or GTFO,” but I’m also not blind… so these concepts tend to have me of two minds.
First, typically we see all of these interventions and weight loss outcomes really can be explained by simple caloric deficit. These articles don’t seem to indicate anything differently, so the obvious answer is “eat less than you’re taking in.”
On the other hand, the absolute caloric threshold of what constitutes a deficit changes relatively significantly between individuals and (in some studies, predictably) between groups. So CICO gets to stay true, but something is happening on that “calories out” end.
Further, we definitively see a difference in individual caloric intake (“food drive”) if you will. The two above seemed to mostly look at the metabolic damage concept, but we’ve seen plenty of literature around different substances encouraging overeating to different degrees - we’ve even coined the term “hyperpalatable food.” The incredible rise and success of the GLP agonists seems to almost completely target caloric intake (although there has to be a metabolic processing mechanism as well, regardless of what my favorite Instagram stars say).
My long, rambling point here: I’m able to reconcile the mathematical CICO with individual behavior variance because I think both can be true: physics stays true, but we alter both ends of the equation depending what we put into our bodies.
So… @T3hPwnisher beat me to it:
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You are welcome. 
First, typically we see all of these interventions and weight loss outcomes really can be explained by simple caloric deficit. These articles don’t seem to indicate anything differently, so the obvious answer is “eat less than you’re taking in.”
This is why I always try to be extremely nuanced and discuss FAT loss vs WEIGHT loss. It’s an unfortunate casualty of our language that we use the latter to mean the former, because we observe that CICO itself is agnostic. Absolutely true: you consume less energy than you expend and your body will weigh less: but what route it picks to accomplish that goal is influenced by these other factors.
Which is what I hope to strike at by saying “Beyond CICO/IIFYM”. The Animal Farm notion that “all calories are equal: some are more equal than others”. That, when we embark on a journey to lose FAT (as opposed to simply weight) and operate under the premise that it’s PURELY a math equation, we can fall victim to the reality that 50g of soybean oil and 50g of grassfed butter may yield the same 450 calories yet have strikingly different metabolic impacts.
I still think of Alan Aragon’s experiment where he had a cohort consume a diet of ice cream and protein powder in an IIFYM approach, and midway through the process they had to course correct to include whiskey, since the diet was so depressing to the subject, haha.
I had a friend who used to say, you can eat 5 Snickers a day and stay under your calories, but you’re still eating 5 Snickers a day.
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Is this a real thing? It’s hilarious!
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It’s not.
Yeah, he talked about it on Mark Bell’s podcast. I am sure it sounded awesome to try at the time, haha.
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I, sir, will make it real. The ice cream and whiskey diet. For science!
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That’s a vomit that hurts
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Found it! Starts at 1:46
Brings up the whiskey at about 2:36
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It might just be the fond glow of reminiscence, but I remember chocolate milk and Windsor Canadian being really good.
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It’s essentially a White Russian, I guess, but that always seemed a disgusting concoction to me as well. I want everything to wait until it’s deep in my guts to start curdling.
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Very true words. Ever had a cement mixer?
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Where does he mention it was because of the depressing diet?
“He consumed only ice cream for 100 consecutive days, drank a small protein shake, alcohol, and managed to lose 32-pounds. “The whole point of these demonstrations is to show you – basically prove, in the best way I can – that you can eat anything you want and still lose weight,” said Anthony.”
“You’re probably wondering why he included alcohol in his diet. According to a dieting myth, a person can’t lose weight if they drink alcohol, which the Colorado stunt dieter says is completely untrue. So, in order to prove that it is only a myth, he decided to include the occasional glass of liquor to his already strange diet,”
"Anthony said: “I’m not going to stop drinking for this.”
“A lot of people think you can’t drink while you’re losing weight. Also not true.”
Where does he mention it was because of the depressing diet?
He mentioned how terrible the dude felt from the diet in that span between 1:46 and 2:36.