Yeah, I seriously think OP in that thread had a larger point, even if their arguments re. Thermodynamics were asinine.

The problem is that CICO is often used to imply that the blame for continued obesity lies on the people who are obese.

I know that Reddit hates analogies, but I'm going to a give a stab at one anyway. It is like saying "Water is wet" to a cold, wet, shivering person. It is a true statement, but it might imply that the wet person was an idiot for just walking out in the rain and not doing something as simple as carrying an umbrella. However, the reality is that the wet person just lost his umbrella due to no fault of his own, just because the wind was too high that day.

Its the same issue with CICO and obesity. CICO is used to point at fat people, to say "All you have to do is eat less, or burn more." The implied statement, hanging after that sentence is: "If you fail to do this, it is 100% your fault that you are fat".

However, there are proven genetic links to obesity, and the biochemistry involved in the process of satiety is a key factor in driving the systems involved in fat gain in the human body. I.E. what you eat might be as important as how much you eat. Furthermore, environmental factors like poverty and education are huge contributors to obesity simply due to lower knowledge about food choices, longer hours of work and more unusual hours, and less access to safe and well-maintained exercise facilities.

I'm personally very ambivalent about bringing up CICO to overweight/obese people who are trying to lose weight. On one hand, they might be happy to hear that I care about them, but on the other hand, they might feel like I don't understand the fact that they may have already tried a lot of different ways of losing weight, like eating less and going on diets, or going on regular exercise routines.

As someone who's worked for a while in teaching, reality is never as simple as "this student is unable to learn math because they are lazy and incompetent". There are often a multitude of deeper reasons why people stay in non-optimal situations like these. It is best to approach these issues with empathy and open-mindedness, instead of punishing people for being unable to perform as an ideal abstraction.