Welcome to ‘Dear Laura’ - a monthly column where I fashion myself as an agony aunt and answer the questions that readers submit. If you’d like to send in a question for me to answer next month, you can submit it here.
I’m happy to answer Qs about anti-diet nutrition, developing a more peaceful relationship to food and weight-inclusive health, annoying diet trends and news stories, body image challenges, and, of course, challenges with feeding your kiddos. Please give as much detail as you’re comfortable with and let me know if you’d like me to include your name or keep it anon.
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Dear Laura,
While not an avalanche, I had just clocked two weight loss related mini articles on The Guardian in the past few months that were oriented around explaining that a calorie deficit was how you lost weight (one on 23/03/26, and one on 13/10/25). Both are written by the same journalist Kate Lloyd (not a nutritionist/dietician/dr according to their bio).
I know in post ozempic times there's been a dizzying backslide into diet discourse but I thought that the calorie deficit had been consigned to the dustbin. Is it having an Olympic era resurgence or did it never go away? I know at this point I shouldn't be surprised to see this kind of thing get published with no critical engagement by The Guardian but I think just seeing it presented in such a 'that's just a fact' way feels very jarring! Would love to hear your thoughts on it anyway!
So you’ve hit on two things that really piss me off: click-bait explainer articles on The Guardian and the CICO myth.
CICO, for the uninitiated, stands for ‘calories in, calories out’. The logic is this: in order to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you consume. Ergo, weight loss is easy peasy, right? You just maintain a calorie deficit. Eat less, move more.
And this might be true, if our bodies were perfect machines. Which they are not. We are messy, complicated humans, not static machines that follow the laws of thermodynamics.
In The Guardian articles you mentioned in your question, the journalist Kate Lloyd quotes a sports nutritionist, Bethan Crouse. Crouse suggests that you need to cut calories through eating less energy dense foods and exercising more (eat less, move more). It’s entirely possible that Crouse went on to explain to Lloyd all the myriad ways in which our bodies try to prevent weight loss. But I doubt it. Either way, the article presented CICO in a very straightforward and linear way that betrays the reality of what’s actually happening in our bodies.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Obviously it is true that when energy requirements are much higher than energy intake, especially for prolonged periods, it usually results in weight loss. We have seen this starkly in Gaza, where there was (and still is) acute famine and starvation. This is the kind of malnutrition where there is irreversible damage done to the body.
But what about in less severe circumstances? The casual diet? It’s not that ‘calories in, calories out’ doesn’t hold true exactly, it’s that our bodies change. You see, they don’t like having less energy than they need, and so they protest.
