Throw out your calorie counter. Ignore the calorie count on food labels. Counting calories is a simple-minded and useless way to judge what you eat. Why? First off, a calorie is a unit of heat. Heat is not directly useful metabolically. Once a calorie is released, there is no putting it back.
Scientists define a calorie simply as the amount of heat necessary to raise a milliliter (cubic centimeter) of water one degree Celsius, at sea level and at room temperature. Consuming calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Nutritionists, medical doctors, fitness trainers, and many other experts who should know better, incorrectly equate food calories to metabolism. This simple-minded reasoning goes something like this: The calories contained in the food you eat provide energy, in the form of calories, for you to live. Not so!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
Do you realize how food calories are measured? We completely incinerate the food in a lab instrument called a bomb calorimeter. When a substance is completely burned up, until nothing except its charred remains are left, it has lost all the calories that it contained. When this is done in a bomb calorimeter, the amount of heat that is released is expressed as calories.
The maximum amount of heat released from different food groups is 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate, 4 calories per gram of protein, and 9 calories per gram of fat. It is ridiculous to think that these food groups provide you with that much heat. The maximum number of calories from foods, as measured in a bomb calorimeter, is simply useless and misleading when it comes to weight loss.
If your body was really like a furnace, then the calorie count of foods, such as on nutrition labels and in food lists, would have more meaning. Your body, however, has nothing to do with how a furnace works.
For one thing, you could never harvest all the energy out of food. You might get 10 or 20 percent of it, certainly no more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you absolutely nothing about what your metabolism will do with different foods.
Consider this: in a calorimeter a gram of starch will yield the exact same number of calories as a gram of cellulose, which is indigestible fiber. As you already know, starch is a source of food calories for people. In contrast, cellulose is not.
Likewise, a calorimeter will derive the same number of calories from equivalent amounts of celery and potato, after correcting for water content. Obviously, your body could not possibly do that.
Instead of comparing food metabolism to a furnace (calorimeter), it is vastly more meaningful to understand the fate of different foods upon digestion. This entails how they impact different kinds of cells and tissues, such as fat vs. muscle, and what happens to these tissues because of different foods.
It may surprise you, for example, to compare two well-known and nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. Their caloric yield is exactly the same in a bomb calorimeter. However, glucose goes through the liver into many different tissues, most notably brain and muscle, and fructose never escapes intact from the liver. Counting calories tells you nothing about these two different metabolic fates.
The consequences of these differences are that glucose serves the metabolism of your entire body, whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before you can do anything with it. That something else is largely fat. In simpler terms, fructose will make you fat much faster than glucose will. Their caloric potential is irrelevant.
By the way, once you understand how misleading the calorie count is for different foods, you will be clearer about why calories have almost nothing to do with being overweight. Now chew on that concept for a while (pardon my pun), because it is the kind of clear thinking that will help you be truly successful in whatever weight management or fitness program that will work for you for a lifetime.
Scientists define a calorie simply as the amount of heat necessary to raise a milliliter (cubic centimeter) of water one degree Celsius, at sea level and at room temperature. Consuming calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Nutritionists, medical doctors, fitness trainers, and many other experts who should know better, incorrectly equate food calories to metabolism. This simple-minded reasoning goes something like this: The calories contained in the food you eat provide energy, in the form of calories, for you to live. Not so!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
Do you realize how food calories are measured? We completely incinerate the food in a lab instrument called a bomb calorimeter. When a substance is completely burned up, until nothing except its charred remains are left, it has lost all the calories that it contained. When this is done in a bomb calorimeter, the amount of heat that is released is expressed as calories.
The maximum amount of heat released from different food groups is 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate, 4 calories per gram of protein, and 9 calories per gram of fat. It is ridiculous to think that these food groups provide you with that much heat. The maximum number of calories from foods, as measured in a bomb calorimeter, is simply useless and misleading when it comes to weight loss.
If your body was really like a furnace, then the calorie count of foods, such as on nutrition labels and in food lists, would have more meaning. Your body, however, has nothing to do with how a furnace works.
For one thing, you could never harvest all the energy out of food. You might get 10 or 20 percent of it, certainly no more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you absolutely nothing about what your metabolism will do with different foods.
Consider this: in a calorimeter a gram of starch will yield the exact same number of calories as a gram of cellulose, which is indigestible fiber. As you already know, starch is a source of food calories for people. In contrast, cellulose is not.
Likewise, a calorimeter will derive the same number of calories from equivalent amounts of celery and potato, after correcting for water content. Obviously, your body could not possibly do that.
Instead of comparing food metabolism to a furnace (calorimeter), it is vastly more meaningful to understand the fate of different foods upon digestion. This entails how they impact different kinds of cells and tissues, such as fat vs. muscle, and what happens to these tissues because of different foods.
It may surprise you, for example, to compare two well-known and nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. Their caloric yield is exactly the same in a bomb calorimeter. However, glucose goes through the liver into many different tissues, most notably brain and muscle, and fructose never escapes intact from the liver. Counting calories tells you nothing about these two different metabolic fates.
The consequences of these differences are that glucose serves the metabolism of your entire body, whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before you can do anything with it. That something else is largely fat. In simpler terms, fructose will make you fat much faster than glucose will. Their caloric potential is irrelevant.
By the way, once you understand how misleading the calorie count is for different foods, you will be clearer about why calories have almost nothing to do with being overweight. Now chew on that concept for a while (pardon my pun), because it is the kind of clear thinking that will help you be truly successful in whatever weight management or fitness program that will work for you for a lifetime.
About the Author:
Dieters who want to know how to lose belly fat can find excellent solutions online. The best overviews is Dr. Dennis Clark's free belly fat book.
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