This is frequently solved by getting people to buy a food scale and weigh everything they eat for a few weeks and calculating the actual caloric content of their food. Food scales are frequently all people need to make real and persistent changes to their weight.
The biology isn't complex enough that ignoring CICO or telling people that it's wrong is useful or helpful and not harmful.
I agree, and believe this is part of it. People aren't paying attention to what they eat. This is specifically why understanding human behavior is important and that only repeating CICO is not useful.
If people are interested in understanding how metabolism regulation works and finds that it's useful in modifying their diet to help them be healthier, that should be encouraged, shouldn't it? If understanding how different foods affect hunger, insulin levels, diabetes, muscle gain, fat loss, I think that should be a good thing. If someone focuses purely on calories, they can easily deprive themselves of nutrients and hungry, making it hard to keep themselves on the diet and failing to get or keep themselves healthy.
Because it’s been tried and hasn’t helped.
CICO-based treatment has been popular for decades yet the problem has continued to get worse (much worse).
I know it works for some but it has not worked for many more. We can stick our heads in the sand about this or admit that we need to be looking for a better answer.
The useful thing to do at that point is to diagnose what they were doing wrong and how to correct for that instead of claiming they were defying the laws of physics.
Anyway, none of this is meant as criticism or argument. Perhaps not much more than a personal insight into phrasing.
