CICO, Exercise and Dieting

There is a lot of marketed to weight loss. According to CNBC, weight loss advertising spending topped 1 billion. I’ve seen advertisements for diet pills, enriched with caffeine to jump your heart rate. There’s also diuretics in the shape of water pills. Companies revolving around “eat what you want” where they sell portion control. Blenders for mixing “healthy things” into a juice and drinking them.

It’s a lot. You would think based on this alone that obesity rates would go down. Unfortunately, it is anything but. We’re looking at 40% obesity rates in some US states.

So, why? Why is this such a profound problem? I recommend reading the book Salt Sugar Fat, a look into how much these ingredients have been integrated into nearly every food you touch.

Things are not as you seem. From the book Salt Sugar Fat, consider the following

Juice concentrate is made through an industrial process that is highly variable, including any or all of the following steps: peeling the fruit, thereby removing much of the beneficial fiber and vitamins; extracting the juice from the pulp, which loses even more of the fiber; removing the bitter compounds; adjusting the sweetness through varietal blending; and evaporating the water out of the juice. At its extreme, the process results in what is known within the industry as “stripped juice,” which is basically pure sugar, almost entirely devoid of the fiber, flavors, aromas, and or any of the other attributes we associate with real fruit. In other words, the concentrate is reduced to just another form of sugar, with no nutritional benefit over table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. l.240

For me, sugar is sugar is sugar. Throughout this book there is a reoccurring theme. Food is hard to package and store for a long period of time. To get around this problem, these three elements are used liberally.

Additionally, serving size is a joke. a 105 calorie soda bottle looks fine, until it’s “2 servings per bottle”.

What I’m getting at is there is an astonishingly large amount of information out there. The information that we do get is sometimes deceptive, misleading or are unclear.

Which is a shame, because it can be reduced to some very simple ideas.

CICO (Calories In, Calories Out) is the understanding that you lose weight when your calories out exceeds your calories in. If your weight is rising or is stuck and you want to lose weight you have two tools. You may

• Reduce the amount of incoming calories.
• Increase the amount of outgoing calories.

For me personally, I have struggled with reducing the amount of incoming calories. I like food 🍲
But it also happens to be the most important one. There is a quote that has stuck in my head

You can’t outrun your diet.

If I work out at a moderate level, with a heart rate about 150bpm, I can burn about 500 calories in about an hour. Then I’m tired, wiped out and I need to rest. If I go home and eat a pizza worth 2000 calories, I’m at a net positive of 1500.

The real answer to weight loss is to take a more holistic view. Limit your calories, increase your exercise level, spread the weight loss over a greater period of time (look for 1lb a week as a moderately aggressive strategy).

But how do you figure this out? Well, you’re in luck 😊

Calculators

Over the years, I’ve built little calculators and tools related to exercise, calorie burning, BMI and weight loss.

I know there’s probably hundreds of thousands of guides about this already.

Looking around, there’s an astonishing number of “calculator” type sites. Where you put in a number or two, and it outputs a number. These are sort of great because if you’re looking for a very specific answer it will give it to you.

For example, what’s my BMI?

Wow! Except, what do I do with this information? Your BMI is just one small piece of the puzzle to answer a bigger question.

I decided to look into all the calculations I would need to make something more useful for me. Something like an automated plan I could update over time that would just tell me what I needed to do to reach my goal. Luckily, I had a little bit of Python knowledge that I could use.

I dropped into a jupyter notebook and set out to collect all the equations I needed to answer that question:

How much can I eat and how much do I need to work out to lose weight. In a healthy way.

Unfortunately, I had an uphill battle. Just figuring out how many calories you burn sitting there is a complex exercise, with different formulas, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, your TDEE (base calorie burn rate sitting there watching movies). As you can see with (f), I used the “Mifflin-St Jeor” formula, which supposedly is about 90% accurate.

Rinse and repeat for things like calories burned per minute of exercise, BMI levels, and other critical and yet imperfect parts for calculating the human body.

    def _calc_tdee(self, formula="mifflin_st_jeor"):
        """
        Variables: W=weight in pounds, H=height in inches, A=age in years
        """
        weight = self.current_weight / 2.2046
        height = self.height * 2.5399999
        age = self.age
        gender = self.gender.lower()[0]
        if formula == "mifflin_st_jeor":
            # Formula variables: W=weight in pounds, H=height in centimeters, A=age in years
            if gender == 'm':
                res = (10 * weight) + (6.25 * height ) - (5 * age) + 5
            elif gender == 'f':
                res = (10 * weight) + (6.25 * height ) - (5 * age) - 161

        res *= self.activity_level
        return int(round(res, 0))

Still, I went with it. Hard numbers help me reach goals, compared to vague guidelines. Eventually, I built up a text report that said a lot of things. As long as I followed them, I would lose weight. Hopefully.

I followed it closely, and in those three months I lost weight faster than I ever had before.

The only problem was it sat in a notebook. So, now that I know JavaScript, I’ve converted it over a more approachable form that you may enter in your own values and get the same report that helped me ⚽

So please, enjoy. The calculations are done locally and the numbers you put in are stored on your device. I don’t see any of it.

Exercise Plan Form

To start, we’ll need to collect all the necessary information:

Exercise Plan

If you’re not sure how to read this, the idea is this. You want to lose weight, but you’re probably eating more than you burn per day. This report helps you by telling you how much to exercise to meet your goal on a fixed timeline. Be realistic, losing 1lb a week is a moderately aggressive schedule. If you goof and mess up your plan, that’s fine! Start again. Life is about progress, not always just the end goal.

Finally, a note to body positivity. Whatever weight you are, whether you smoke, do drugs or other destructive habits, you deserve to see yourself in a positive manner. Targeting weight loss towards a healthy level doesn’t take that away.