Some people can do macro tracking, others don't have the discipline for it. For those people, shifting to foods with a higher satiety to calorie ratio is a better strategy, or intermittent fasting, or cutting out a food group. As you said, what matters is CICO, not how you achieve it.

I like to compare it to programming. If you tell a C++ developer that their software should have good uptime, your advice here is the equivalent of saying "don't have memory leaks, null pointer dereferces or use-after-free". Yes, all true, but everyone know that. What we need are behaviour patterns like RAII, an extensive test suite, running those tests in valgrind/ASAN, etc. that actually help in a forward looking perspective achieve this goal of not making those mistakes which lead to poor performance.

The discipline needed to resist hunger and the discipline needed to stick to a healthy and varied diet is wildly different. The second may require more thought and skill but a lot less willpower.

It does matter in the real world because practically no one is going to adhere to a diet unless care and consideration has been given to things like satiety.

Adherence is way more important than getting pedantic about thermodynamics.

People fail to adhere to diets because its SO EASY TO MAKE EXCUSES.

People can do intermittent fasting all they want, but if they're eating a stick of butter during feeding times, its worthless. Eating to satiety is useless as a marker because satiety is subjective.

Measuring your food does not give you an excuse to cheat, except the person simply choosing not to do it properly. There are no weird ways of getting around the fact that you have a maximum calorie limit, and thats it.

This is just a reductionist mindset.

Of course satiety and gut microbiome matters.

I'm thin. Do you know what I do to maintain that? Fuck all. I eat what I want, when I want. Do I exercise? No.

Why is it that I don't have to try at all, but you do? Shouldn't you be a little curious, a little jealous? How cool would it be if you could maintain what you have now, but without any of the effort?

There's a lot of stuff I don't care about. I don't care about alcohol consumption either. I drink what I want, when I want. And it works out great for me. For others, that plunges them into a life of alcoholism and they die young of cirrhosis. Why? Why does it work that way? Why is it that I can do whatever but other people can't?

These are the questions we should be asking. You're solving the symptom, not the cause here. Eating too much is a symptom. The root cause is the propensity to overeat. I don't have that propensity, so guess what - I never have to try. But why don't I have it? Will I one day get it?

I'm the same way, and I'm pretty sure there's a big part of the "CO" part that differs among people, namely absorption vs excretion. Suffice it to say I think some bodies "hoard" more than others

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376760

I'm not curious or jealous at all.

I lost 150 pounds in 2 years and all I did was eat less, and I kept it off easily. I'm not curious because I saw pictures of myself before I lost weight and I saw the plates of food in front of me and it was absolutely disgusting amounts of food.

I feel sick when I eat large amounts of food and I like to keep it that way, and all it needed was getting used to eating less.

Good for you but most people that do just that rebound a few months/years later. Maybe you already had a good enough diet and reducing sizes did it for you but most people require a change in their diet for it to stick. Keeping yourself thin on a highly caloric fast food diet is always harder and if you are already obese you most likely have a problem with food too.

> I did this famously difficult thing therefore it’s easy actually

Some people…

See, you're somewhere in the middle.

I don't have to try at all, you had to try a little, and some people have to try a lot. And that's why we're seeing a variety of experiences with obesity.

The difference is, I recognize there must be something about my genetics, or my way of life, or my upbringing, or whatever, that gives me such privilege. You, however, have zero humility, and simply believe yourself superior. I doubt it works that way.

I mean, I have plenty of other problems. I have no discipline, no self control. And I'm thin. So... it's more complicated then you give it credit.

I actually said that CICO works if you control everything and weigh your food and calculate the macros. It may work for you, it works for bodybuilders, but this approach is not necessarily the best. All diets work though reducing calories. Dietary adherence is much more important. Most people are not going to obsessively weigh all their meals. And if you feel sick or hungry all the time, you are much more likely to break the diet.

So, I maintain that, yes, CICO works and calories + macros is the most important. But unless you control intake 100%, then the types of food you consume affect how much you eat, energy levels and compliance. This is especially true long term (over 5 years).

"None of that shit matters" in purely thermodynamic sense, but it matters immensely to the actual goal of getting people to be healthier by having less body fat. In that sense, CICO is an oversimplification.

I personally don't think that anyone without enough will power and discomfort tolerance to feel hungry for long periods of time when surrounded by limitless food should be forced to live a shorter more painful life.

The key to getting people to quit smoking is for them to stop smoking. Very simple. Why on earth do we have nicotine gum and patches?