I’m WILFing* around again in the LC and paleo blogospheres and ran across this guy, who overall is interesting, but I’m kind of freaking out at his recipes… too high on the protein and too low on the fat. Anyway, he’s got a piece up about how to get fat and how to lose weight. I was about to argue with him there, then I remembered I have a blog. I like you dude, and you have a nice blog, so this is not a vendetta. And I don’t expect people to take me seriously, since I’m still fat. Nevertheless.
I tell people that calories don’t count as one of my rhetorical shortcuts. It is not that I’m lying, it’s that if I stood around trying to explain to them how the whole thing works, most of them’s eyes would glaze over and they’d tune me out about three paragraphs in. Because I know how they think of calorie theory, how they believe the theory works, I shortcut “the way you believe about calorie theory is incorrect” to say “calories don’t count,” because in the way THESE PEOPLE think calories count, they don’t, as far as the evidence indicates.
I see you’re confused. I’ll try to clear it up.
I was reading Good Calories, Bad Calories a while back and Taubes mentions this scientist back in the first half of the 20th century who did some experiments with a substance called deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. It is a special form of hydrogen that shows up very well on certain types of spectroscopes. He used it to tag foods eaten by his test subjects, then scanned to see where the food went. He found that most of the food people ate wound up broken down and sequestered into adipose (fat) tissue, almost immediately. This was not the leftovers after the person’s energy needs had been met, this was the stuff they’d just eaten.
I can’t remember whether he tracked what happened in between meals but Taubes mentioned an idea that those food particles were fatty acids and were sequestered in adipose tissue to be let out in between meals, in order to meet the energy needs of lean tissue–stuff like muscles, bones, skin, etc.
The way most of us think about calorie theory, this is what we think happens to food calories:
1. We eat a food.
2. We then burn however much of the food we need for energy.
3. We then store the leftovers in our fat cells to save til later. This is how fat is stored.
When what actually appears to be happening is this:
1. We eat a food.
2. We store all the energy-creating components of that food in our fat cells immediately after it is eaten.
3. We then release the energy from our fat cells as our lean tissues “request” it, when they need energy in between meals.
In someone who is of a normal weight without excess fat accumulation, eventually they will release about as much energy as they had previously stored. In someone with excess fat accumulation, that doesn’t happen. The energy got stored, and it’s staying in storage. Something is locking it up.
Taubes argued pretty convincingly that that something is insulin. In fat people, insulin is elevated beyond normal levels more often than not. It is, after all, the fat-storage hormone. (It also stores sugar and amino acids–this is how you add amino acids to your muscles after eating protein.)
So then you wind up with a fat person with excess fatty acid accumulation. Now, getting back to this calorie theory thing, here’s what conventional wisdom says is occurring with weight loss.
To lose weight, you must burn more calories than you take in.
That is sort of true and sort of not true. There’s a big glaring error in this statement, an elephant in the living room if you will. Allow me to point it out to you.
As a culture, by and large, we assume that “food intake” means food we are eating, right this minute. But we forget about something. We forget that whatever is in our fat tissues is technically food we have NOT eaten yet. It’s as if I were a squirrel and I took all that pasta and bread and full-sugar soda I ate over the years and stuffed it all into my cheeks. It’s not still intact like that, it’s been broken down into its component fatty acids or turned INTO fatty acids–but it’s still food that my body has not “eaten” yet.
In other words, dear dieter, just because you have cut the food going into your mouth down to 1800 calories a day, does not mean you’re eating just 1800 calories.
Now here’s the real pisser.
We have, as a culture, this almost pornographic fascination with the habits of fat people. The fatter the fattie, the more dread fascination they hold for everyone else. “Can you believe that guy? He eats ten Big Mac supersized value meals IN A DAY! No wonder he’s so fucking fat!” I’m going to go out on a limb, though, and presume that most of us fatties don’t get more than 2500 calories a day, since most of us don’t weigh 500-1000 pounds. Possibly we’re getting 3000 calories a day if we drink a lot of liquid calories. Not entirely unheard of.
So it’s established that a fattie can get fat, or stay fat, on 2500-3000 calories, at least for the purpose of my little model here.
So, say the fattie started out eating 2500 calories a day, got fat and had been staying fat on that amount, and then goes on a 1800-calorie diet. The diet works: to wit, the fattie begins turning into a thinnie, to the tune of a pound a week. Cool. The fattie’s in proper caloric deficit, right? That’s what most of you would say.
Wrong.
If the fattie is losing weight, that means fatty acids are being released from his or her adipose tissue. Now remember, those are calories the fattie has not used yet. They were “excess,” otherwise they wouldn’t have been stored–so goes conventional calorie theory. So now they are no longer stored–they’re being let out and presumably burned, otherwise they’d probably go right back in.
Now remember, the fattie is losing one pound a week–the supposed “safe rate of loss” (see previous post). According to this article at About.com, that would mean a caloric deficit of 500 calories a day.
But where are those calories going? They aren’t just disappearing. That violates whatever law of thermodynamics all these calorie buffs love to prattle on about.
Where are they going? The fattie’s lean tissues are using them for energy, that’s where. Getting back to our one-pound-a-week weight loss rate, that means the fattie is burning 500 calories a day from his or her own fat stores.
Now do the math.
1800 calories eaten per day through the mouth + 500 calories eaten from the fat stores = 2300 calories eaten per day.
Remember that the fattie was originally eating, and remained fat upon, 2500 calories a day. Now the fattie is getting 2300 calories a day. That’s only a 200-calorie deficit. Where did the other 300 calories go?
Do you see the problem here? I sure do.
It gets even more fun if you consider the effects of a low-carb diet, especially one that induces ketosis in the dieter. Those are great. Atkins is my favorite. Dr. Atkins loved to talk about benign dietary ketosis–he referred to it as a way to “sneak calories out of the body.”
He was right, too. So let’s say you’re me, and you’re on Atkins and going out of your way to eat at least 2000 calories a day, sometimes up to 2900 calories a day. But you’re still losing weight–AT LEAST a pound a week, sometimes three to five. And pissing ketones all the while.
Ketones are a byproduct of fatty acid metabolism or the breakdown of fat stores. They are also energy-generating substances–your body can use them for fuel. Well, if you’re peeing them out, those are ketones you never got to use for fuel. They have caloric value too. Those calories are going into your sewage system every time you go potty and flush.
Is fat loss still about fat-burning when not all the fat’s being burned? Is it about caloric deficit?
What about people who gain weight or stay fat on 1800 calories a day, then eat 2000 calories a day on Atkins and lose a pound a week? How does that work?
I don’t have all the answers. The point is, neither do you. I don’t care if the person spouting off about this stuff is an MD, even–if he or she doesn’t consider these fairly basic questions, the spouting becomes so much nonsense.
It’s possible the whole thing is still about calories in and calories out. But maybe we as a community need to expand our definitions of what it means to put calories “in” or “out” in the first place.
This is what it means to solve the obesity epidemic. Hard fact. Looking at the situation AS IT IS, not as we would like it to be. Until we do that, people are going to continue to suffer.
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*WILF = What was I Looking For? A geekly, values-neutral way of saying I’m mindlessly clicking around on the internets reading everything I see.
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