The problem I have with CICO is that calorie counting is so grossly innacurate. Yes if you do a large defficite overt time it’s going to cause weight loss in most people but trying to hit a specific target you are always going to be under or over. If you are 20 calories over everyday you will end up gaining 1kg of weight each year, 10 years 10kg. Obviouisly you can’t be accurate within 20 calories each day which would require 99% accuracy. You would be lucky to be within 10% by counting.
If you have proper appetite control as many people in the world do (less and less all the time), then maintaining a consistent weight and hitting “100% accuracy” is a reality. Now, do we really think peoples bodies are 99.9% accurate on CICO? Not likely, but there is a control mechnism in place to not add excess fat to their bodies. I am not disputing that calories matter, it’s just CICO is a very flawed mathematical system due to the precision required for long term consistent weight and you can’t keep counting and starving forever via will power.
If you are always eating the same foods and quantities with small deviations and BMR and burn are consistent then sure you could skip the counting and just make small adjustments.
I just watched this 6-minute discussion 
And I fully agree with everything Lane says, and he agrees all these diets can and do work and finding the one that works for you. So my suggesting that CICO for everyone was/is wrong, but my main suggestion is that thinking about CICO is wrong for most people and I still believe is correct. I know we are talking about performance cyclists here and CICO can be significantly more valuable to that group then the general population. So my message to this audience is likely flawed
When talking about the general population, remember CICO is what everyone has been trying to follow for the last 50 years, and the world is getting fatter and fatter. So it’s not that it is wrong, it’s that it drives the wrong behavior and generally does not work for most people.
So Lanes only flaw in my opinion is he ties it all back to calorie defficite which is not helpful for most people. While their is some truth in this, the core idea is disruptive for the average joe.
So ultimely finding what leads you to appetite control is what I believe the solution is, and it it sounds like you found that through CICO. For most of the alalytical western world I believe a CGM has the possibility to have a much more possitive affect on the general population because it can help find a long term way of eating that works for the individual. It gives a tremendous amount of flexibility. Controlling insulin has incredible unrealized potential in the general population at this point. The problem I see for most people trying to control insulin is these inflexible diets like low carb and especially keto.
With 50-70% of the US population having a problem with excess insulin and 80% of those people not realizing it, then glucose/fructose control is the #1 thing they can do to have a hope of achieving appetite control (well this is heavily my opinion). Now if CICO worked for them and got them to their target weight and then they had a system to sustain that weight it can also work but this transitionairy period from CICO to a new life is not simple for most.
Sorry if this keeps going on. I know you are very smart on this stuff and know as much or more than I do from a research perspective. I have over 200 books in my kindle library on health, fitness and diet and talked to a lot of people and done a lot of experimentation. I have tried CICO so many times and it only works short term so in that regard I am biased. Let’s see where we are both at in 2-years as well as where the world is at regarding CGM. With the tremendous amount of investment going into it I think we will have a much better perspective. Even in your case, if you are bored some time, I really can say very healthy people might find some very interesting learning from 50$ and 14 days of experiments.
