Let’s say you’re carrying around 40 pounds of excess fat and you put on that 40 pounds over the course of 20 years, as many of us do. When you’re in your late 20s, say, you’re still lean, and then, lo and behold, you celebrate your fiftieth birthday and you’re obese and your doctor is lecturing you on eating less and getting to the gym regularly (and probably writing you a prescription for Lipitor, as well). Now, if you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned – roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number.
http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/
So, if we miss our calorie estimate by an average of 20kcal/day, 1 to 2 percent, we're going to be forty pounds overweight? But that didn't happen to our paleolithic ancestors, why does it happen to us? Why is Taubes so certain that "eating less and exercising more" won't equalize that 20kcal we're over-eating?
The biggest problem with this "calories in calories out" idea is it assumes the body is non-reactive - it assumes there's no interaction between the calories in and the calories out. In geekier speak, it assumes the calories in is an independent variable from the calories out. This is not so - our bodies have feedback systems which change our behavior and our physiology based on what we eat and what we do. The model I use to understand this process goes like this - if you eat the wrong foods, it throws off your metabolic regulation feedback loops to make you default towards fat storage. If you increase the amount of exercise or other work that you do, it doesn't shift the default away from storing fat, it shifts your appetite up to sustain the fat storage. If you eat the right foods - meat vegetables nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar or wheat - the metabolic feedback loops work more like they were designed to. Your hunger is regulated to match your metabolic demands. You eat the right amount, just as our ancestors have for as far back as they were hominids.
So you could spend your life in a metabolic math problem, doing some system that requires 99% precision, day in and day out. But I have a better idea - eat the right food, let your body do the math that it evolved to do.
http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/
So, if we miss our calorie estimate by an average of 20kcal/day, 1 to 2 percent, we're going to be forty pounds overweight? But that didn't happen to our paleolithic ancestors, why does it happen to us? Why is Taubes so certain that "eating less and exercising more" won't equalize that 20kcal we're over-eating?
The biggest problem with this "calories in calories out" idea is it assumes the body is non-reactive - it assumes there's no interaction between the calories in and the calories out. In geekier speak, it assumes the calories in is an independent variable from the calories out. This is not so - our bodies have feedback systems which change our behavior and our physiology based on what we eat and what we do. The model I use to understand this process goes like this - if you eat the wrong foods, it throws off your metabolic regulation feedback loops to make you default towards fat storage. If you increase the amount of exercise or other work that you do, it doesn't shift the default away from storing fat, it shifts your appetite up to sustain the fat storage. If you eat the right foods - meat vegetables nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar or wheat - the metabolic feedback loops work more like they were designed to. Your hunger is regulated to match your metabolic demands. You eat the right amount, just as our ancestors have for as far back as they were hominids.
So you could spend your life in a metabolic math problem, doing some system that requires 99% precision, day in and day out. But I have a better idea - eat the right food, let your body do the math that it evolved to do.
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