By Barbara Berkeley
When I tell people that I don’t believe in calories, they are often as shocked as if I’d said I didn’t believe in God. “You don’t believe in calories??? But…but that’s insane. That’s crazy! That’s….well….it’s downright unscientific!!!”
So let me clarify my position. I certainly believe in the existence of calories. I also believe that strictly limiting calories is the most important factor in achieving weight loss. But I think that the calories in foods become much less important once we are maintaining weight. In fact, I believe that focusing on calories actually prevents many POWs (Previously OverWeight people) from recognizing much more important qualities in the foods they choose.
Foods are complex, drug-like compounds. Different types of foods affect the body differently and call up different responses. Here is the prime example of how foods differ. Eating carbohydrates requires that your body make hefty amounts of insulin. Eating fats and proteins do not stimulate the body to make significant insulin. Did you know that insulin is the hormone that opens your fat cells and allows foods to be stored as fat? It is the only major hormone that has this job. Thus, making lots of insulin is not a good idea for POWs. When you have a lot of insulin around, particularly if you have had a tendency to store fat in the past, you begin to divert a lot of your food into the fat cells. Yet this difference between the insulin effect of carbohydrate and that of fat and protein is not expressed if we simply look at the calories.
In other words: if you eat 500 calories of carbohydrate and 500 calories of fat or protein, the calorie load of each is exactly the same. To a pure calorie counter, they look the same. But your body has a completely unique experience with each food. If we focus only on the calories, we miss a major (and very important) difference between them.
One of my least favorite statements is this one: “It’s simple mathematics. If you burn more calories than you eat, you’ll lose weight.” I say hold on a minute. It’s not that simple.
I don’t have all the answers, but something about the calories in/calories out equation just doesn’t add up. If it did, we’d hear less of this, “ WHY, WHY, WHY am I exercising like a maniac and not losing weight??? Why am I controlling my calories, yet nothing is moving on the scale?”
Here’s the problem. There are at least two factors that aren’t accounted for.
You have much less control over calories in and out than you think.
Why? Despite what you’re doing on purpose, your body can trickily change the rate at which it burns calories. It can become more efficient without your knowing it.
So, say you control your intake by eating less and you control your output by exercising more. You feel as if you are in complete control of calories eaten and calories burned. Why aren’t you losing weight? The reason is that your body has taken over the control of the vast majority of calories burned. For most of us, about 60 to 70 percent of the calories used up each day come not from exercise, but from something we can’t manipulate: what is called “resting metabolism”.
Resting metabolism is the amount of calories the body burns when it breathes, digests, repairs itself and runs myriad other programs. When we eat less, especially when we diet, the resting metabolism burns fewer calories to match up with the fact that we’re not feeding it as much. So you may eat less, and add more exercise. You may feel that you’re utterly in control. But the body may respond by becoming more efficient in order to stay at a stable weight just to spite you! This fine tuning by your body is the reason that, even though most people don’t count calories and their diet varies widely from day to day, their weight stays pretty much stable over long periods.
The second problem with calorie counting is that human beings are not as predictable as machines.
Let me explain. When we talk about the calories contained in a food, we are talking about how much energy is released by that food when it is burned. How do we know how many calories a food has? By putting the food into a little machine called a calorimeter, which burns the food and measures the amount of energy that is produced. If we were all exactly the same, our bodies would work like perfect little calorimeters and we’d all extract exactly the same amount of calories from each food, just as the calorimeter does. But of course, we’re not machines. Each body extracts the calories differently.
To make matters even more complicated, the body then decides whether to burn or store those calories. I think we all know that for many NOWs (Never Over Weights), the body decides to take big calorie loads and burn them up on the spot. For most POWs, the decision is fat storage, NOT burning. So calories mean different things to different bodies.
I believe that by trying to control calories, we are ignoring a much more important variable. In my opinion, it would help if we got over our calorie obsession.
If calories are as unimportant as I say, why do many weight-loss diets work?
They work because they provide drastic enough calorie cuts to overcome the body’s compensatory mechanisms. When we go on diets, we are tough and focused. We cut calories severely. This is a form of mini-starvation. The body is forced to go to its fat stores in order to continue operating. While it turns down its metabolism in response, the dieter is eating so much less that the body has no choice but to continue burning fat (and muscle).
But, in my opinion, there is another important reason that diets work and that reason is unrelated to calories. When we diet, we severely curtail our intake of the foods that ask the body to make insulin. Those foods are the starches (bread, flour, grains, cereals, corn, pasta, potatoes, rice, starchy beans) and sugars. Remember that it is insulin that causes fat storage. (And by the way, you don’t have to eat fat to store fat….the fat cells routinely convert starch and sugar foods to fat.) It is only when insulin levels are low that fat can flow the other way, out of the fat cells to be burned up. Every POW out there knows how to lose weight: start eating chicken, lean meat and vegetables. Every POW out there knows how to gain weight: start eating bread, pasta and potatoes. The culprit? Insulin.
Alright, this blog has gone on too long. But honestly, this is my favorite subject and you are a captive audience! (Unless you’ve already left me….)
Let’s get to the bottom line. POWs who are trying to maintain weight are much better off severely curtailing the insulin producing foods than they are counting calories. Try eliminating them completely for awhile and eating without limitation from Primarian choices (lean meat, fish, skinless poultry, seafood, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, seeds). Watch the scale and add or cut back based on the set weight you want to maintain. Expect a 5-pound variation around that number. Pay attention to the affect that various foods have on you. Remember that foods are more than just their calories, just as you are more than just the number that represents your weight. If we are going to be successful in learning to eat “clean”, we need to respect the complexity of the living energy we ingest.