Your understanding of CICO (or at least the point I am making about it) is wrong in your “B” paragraph.
My argument boils down to the following:
For every individual, at any given time, there is a metabolic rate M for which, if their calorie intake was larger than that, they’d gain weight, and if their calorie intake was smaller, they’d lose weight. Crucially, M changes over time.
But going CICO properly means using the scale to measure M, every day, by diffing your expected value of your weight loss given how much you’re eaten, with the actual value on the scale. You now have an updated value for M to use in calorie counting.
Since M is determined by empirical observations of your weight loss/gain in response to the calories you have consumed, you will by definition lose weight if you consume less than M calories. This is the argument that CICO must work by definition. It’s a logical contradiction for it not to work.
> Your understanding of CICO (or at least the point I am making about it) is wrong in your “B” paragraph.
Just to clarify B is not cico, it's the inference that you seems to make from CICO.
> For every individual, at any given time, there is a metabolic rate M for which, if their calorie intake was larger than that, they’d gain weight, and if their calorie intake was smaller, they’d lose weight. Crucially, M changes over time
This is "not" the definition of CICO, and again does not follow from CICO. CICO is fundamentally a thermodynamic statement about the observed state of a system. You are making predictive statement about a possible future state of the system.
Again, if you want to believe that statement that's fine. The point i am making is just it's does not follow from cico, no have i seen anything empirically that validate that statement.
> Since M is determined by empirical observations of your weight loss/gain in response to the calories you have consumed, you will by definition lose weight if you consume less than M calories.
sure this derived from your "definition" of CICO... but your definition is not thermodynamically derived...
> This is the argument that CICO must work by definition
the premise (the definition of the argument) is flawed.
> It’s a logical contradiction for it not to work.
Not really, CICO not working (as in this case) can be just the result of sound logic based on bad premises.
My argument boils down to the following:
For every individual, at any given time, there is a metabolic rate M for which, if their calorie intake was larger than that, they’d gain weight, and if their calorie intake was smaller, they’d lose weight. Crucially, M changes over time.
But going CICO properly means using the scale to measure M, every day, by diffing your expected value of your weight loss given how much you’re eaten, with the actual value on the scale. You now have an updated value for M to use in calorie counting.
Since M is determined by empirical observations of your weight loss/gain in response to the calories you have consumed, you will by definition lose weight if you consume less than M calories. This is the argument that CICO must work by definition. It’s a logical contradiction for it not to work.