The TRUTH behind the Calorie

I went to the grocery store yesterday with a friend of mine. She
wanted advice on what to eat to get into shape. I looked at her
grocery list: paper towels, dishwasher detergent, paper plates,
apples, rice and good food. Ha! "Good food," I tittered. "What's good
food?"
 She said, "I don't know, good... stuff."
When I shook my head, it dawned on me -- this is what just about
everyone goes through while trying to "change" their eating habits.
So, I helped her get "good" food. She was amazed at all the things she
could eat. So much so that she said, "There's no way I can eat this
much."
We finished shopping and got back to the house.
I said, "That's a lot of groceries."
She laughed and said, "At least I bought the right food!"

di·et/ˈdī-it/
Noun:
The kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats.
A legislative assembly in certain countries.

Verb:
Restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to

lose weight: "It's difficult to diet in a house full of cupcakes".

At this point, it might be helpful to define a "calorie." That's easy:
it’s a measure of the energy derived from a food source. A gram of fat
has been determined to have nine calories and a gram of protein or
carbohydrate four calories; so for any given measure, fat has more
than twice as many calories as protein or carbs. Those numbers are not
perfectly accurate, but they’re good enough. A food isn’t a food —
they’re all different — but since a calorie is just a measurement of
energy, how can it vary? It turns out that calories change as they
enter the body, the nine grams for fat and four for everything else
turn out to be not very accurate measures at all; besides, foods are
only rarely one thing or another.

Here’s what's true: The studies that have measured calorie intake,
that have put people on calorie-reduced diets and measured what
happened, show no difference in weight loss based on composition of
the diet. When people are essentially incarcerated, when all intake is
weighed and measured, they will lose weight if the calories in their
diets are reduced — regardless of the composition of the diet. That’s
why we hear a calorie is a calorie. But no one lives under
experimental conditions, and foods are complicated mixtures: fiber
makes a difference and form makes a difference. (Fiber is special
because it’s not digested or digested incompletely. Most of its
calories don’t get into the body, which is one reason why fruits and
vegetables, which are high in fiber, help with weight loss.)

The “calorie is a calorie” argument is widely used by the processed
food industry to explain that weight loss isn’t really about what you
eat, but about how many calories you eat. But if it were just about
calories, you could eat only sugar and be fine. In fact, you’d die:
sugar lacks essential nutrients. That’s an obvious case. But though a
calorie may be a calorie when people talk about weight loss and
nothing else, there are other factors involved. And once you get past
my perhaps lame “Is a calorie a calorie” question, you can begin to
see something approaching the truth. For one thing, there are dozens
of factors involved in weight regulation. It’s hard to lose weight,
because the body is set up to defend fat, so you don’t starve to
death; the body doesn’t work as well to tell people to stop eating as
when to tell them when to start.

An important question, then, is really something like, "What can I eat
to keep from putting on weight?" and here the answer turns out to be
not only easy but also expected. If you’re eating a lot of fruits and
vegetables, you’re not taking in as many calories as you would if you
were eating fast food and sodas. Yes, that’s a calorie issue; the
latter group is way higher in calories than the former. But though
there’s a difference between eat less and eating better, “eating
better makes it much easier to eat less.”

Book your consultation today! BOOK NOW!

Follow me on: Twitter      DfitgetsUfit

                       Facebook Dfit Spencer