I completely agree with you about poverty and obesity. Those are systemic problems and are going to take something else to escape. Choices are removed for people who get stuck in those black holes, and its true that saying “use a budget” isn’t helpful after those happen. It might be helpful long before, but the forces are too strong for people who are spiraling down or stuck there. So, I hear you and I think you’re right about that. I’m not suggesting CICO is a tool to fix obesity.
Moreover, poverty and obesity are related. Poverty is affecting people’s food choices, and the cheap food and fast food we have is a lot of high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and huge portions.
CICO is more useful for people who are stable and fine, not under the poverty line and not obese, but just a little unhappy with their weight. CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning. (Just like how financial budgets are mostly helpful for rich people, and people optimizing their savings, but not particularly helpful for a single parent on minimum wage who’s unable to meet basic necessities.)
For someone who’s not suffering from either poverty or obesity, the difference between money/debt and calories/weight is you can only get money from other people, where you only get calories from yourself.
It doesn’t actually matter that calorie metrics are approximate and not perfect. The reason is because CICO enables a personal science experiment, and a process that can adjust and adapt to imperfect information. What it enables you to do is to calibrate your measurement first. Then, second, either reduce caloric inputs or increase caloric outputs to lose weight while making sure the other one doesn’t change, or do both. For average non-poor and non-obese people, CICO isn’t a prescription, nor is it a dangerous red herring, it’s basic consumer information that is, some say, dangerous to not know, which is why part of the important response to the obesity crisis is to demand accurate caloric labeling on food, to enable consumers to make healthier choices long before obesity. This is only the tip of the iceberg, we need better sugar and portion control and all kinds of things, but it’s a start.
CICO is like a PID controller but even simpler than that, it’s only the wires of a P controller where you are the controller. The only thing CICO says is which input to connect to, and that’s all. A PID controller doesn’t know a thing about the system it controls, it doesn’t have to. All that matters is that the inputs affect the outputs and the outputs can be measured. As long as the system output changes over time with it’s inputs, this P controller setup works. It still works when the underlying system has defects and bugs or differences in manufacturing from other systems, as long as the underlying system is responding to changes in input.