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> things like “diet and exercise” are non-explanations

what?

CICO, period. You can’t beat thermodynamics. You can certainly separately explain why CI has gone up and/or CO has gone down, but the energy has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.

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Unfortunately you're not arguing for what you think you're arguing for. Food is not metabolized via combustion. However there is a way to measure the energy the human body gets from food and that's to measure the amount of ATP generated by the metabolism of a single molecule of the constituent parts of that food. And it turns out this doesn't track calories very closely at all. I'm fact, fat produces nearly 2x the ATP we would expect, except in the absence of oxaloacetic acid, in which case it produces a mere 16% of the expected value, implying that utilizing OOA for things like glycogen production can force your body to burn loads of fat for the same metabolic output, completely invalidating CICO.

And that doesn't even begin to account for how much mass we eat which is utilized structurally or excreted without being exhausted. CICO works for thermodynamics, not dieting.

Or there's the layman's refutation of CICO: Poop burns.

Yep. Coming from someone who has lost a lot of weight and got into the best shape of my life using CICO, there is no other explanation. Of course food quality matters a lot because you won’t feel as hungry. I’d argue even exercise makes you less hungry as a whole. Of course there are probably chemicals in our environment that are making us fatter, but it's definitely not a silver bullet, maybe responsible for 10-20lbs of excess fat if even that.

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