paper-machine comments on Minimum viable workout routine - Less Wrong

12 Post author: RomeoStevens 21 June 2012 04:19AM

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Comment author: denisbider 21 September 2012 01:47:32AM -2 points [-]

I haven't checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.

You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can't track stuff to save their lives.

For me, it's been easy. When I'm dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.

Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that's after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.

Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.

I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.

I don't know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don't, and so they're fat.

I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn't work.

Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 September 2012 02:20:17AM *  -2 points [-]

My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.

There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.

In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA's Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That's before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.

So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they're recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It's unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.

All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,

I don't know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don't, and so they're fat.

is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can't imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?

I was right in the grandparent. I'm tapping out.