Toss out your calorie counter. Pay no attention to the calorie count on food labels. Counting calories is a useless and simple-minded way to decide what you eat. How come? Firstly, a calorie is a unit of heat. Heat does not directly guide metabolism. When caloric heat is released, nothing will put it back.
Scientists have a very specific definition of a calorie. The simplest one is that a calorie is the amount of heat that is required to raise a cubic centimeter (milliliter) of water one degree Celsius, at room temperature and at sea level. Saying that you can consume 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.
It is helpful to know how food calories are really measured. It is done by completely incinerating the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. In so doing, when only the charred remains are left, it has lost whatever calories it originally contained. The bomb calorimeter measures the amount of heat lost and expresses them as calories released.
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 behaved like a bomb calorimeter, then the calorie count of foods, such as those on food nutrition labels, would have more meaning. Your metabolism, however, has nothing to do with what happens in a bomb calorimeter.
In the first place, you can only harvest 10 or 20 percent of the calories from food, maybe up to 30 percent on the high end. Some foods will yield no calories at all, regardless of what they yield in a bomb calorimeter. A calorie counter does you no good whatsoever in evaluating different foods for their metabolic value.
Consider this comparison: starch vs. cellulose. Cellulose is indigestible fiber, whereas starch is a source of food energy for humans. However, gram for gram, they both yield the same exact number of calories in a bomb calorimeter.
Similarly, your body gets plenty of caloric value from potatoes and almost nothing from celery. However, in a bomb calorimeter, they would yield comparable calories per gram.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
For a surprising example of what this means, compare the two nearly identical sugars, glucose and fructose. Following their metabolic fate is much more meaningful regarding their roles in diet and health than just keeping track of counting calories that they yield in a bomb calorimeter. In fact, these two sugars have identical caloric potential, 4 calories per gram. However, glucose goes into many different tissues, most notably muscle and brain, and intact fructose never escapes your liver.
Note that, as a consequence of consuming glucose vs. fructose, glucose serves your entire body whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before it can move out of your liver. That something else is largely fat, which has to be stored in fat cells. Simply put, glucose gives your body energy and fructose makes you fat. The identical caloric yield of these two sugars means nothing.
By the way, once you understand what is truly important about foods of all kinds, which is clearly not their calorie content, you will be very clear on why calories have nothing to do with being overweight. Chew on that comment for a while (pardon the pun), because this is the kind of clear thinking that will guide you to success in any weight loss or fitness program that works for a lifetime.
Scientists have a very specific definition of a calorie. The simplest one is that a calorie is the amount of heat that is required to raise a cubic centimeter (milliliter) of water one degree Celsius, at room temperature and at sea level. Saying that you can consume 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.
It is helpful to know how food calories are really measured. It is done by completely incinerating the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. In so doing, when only the charred remains are left, it has lost whatever calories it originally contained. The bomb calorimeter measures the amount of heat lost and expresses them as calories released.
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 behaved like a bomb calorimeter, then the calorie count of foods, such as those on food nutrition labels, would have more meaning. Your metabolism, however, has nothing to do with what happens in a bomb calorimeter.
In the first place, you can only harvest 10 or 20 percent of the calories from food, maybe up to 30 percent on the high end. Some foods will yield no calories at all, regardless of what they yield in a bomb calorimeter. A calorie counter does you no good whatsoever in evaluating different foods for their metabolic value.
Consider this comparison: starch vs. cellulose. Cellulose is indigestible fiber, whereas starch is a source of food energy for humans. However, gram for gram, they both yield the same exact number of calories in a bomb calorimeter.
Similarly, your body gets plenty of caloric value from potatoes and almost nothing from celery. However, in a bomb calorimeter, they would yield comparable calories per gram.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
For a surprising example of what this means, compare the two nearly identical sugars, glucose and fructose. Following their metabolic fate is much more meaningful regarding their roles in diet and health than just keeping track of counting calories that they yield in a bomb calorimeter. In fact, these two sugars have identical caloric potential, 4 calories per gram. However, glucose goes into many different tissues, most notably muscle and brain, and intact fructose never escapes your liver.
Note that, as a consequence of consuming glucose vs. fructose, glucose serves your entire body whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before it can move out of your liver. That something else is largely fat, which has to be stored in fat cells. Simply put, glucose gives your body energy and fructose makes you fat. The identical caloric yield of these two sugars means nothing.
By the way, once you understand what is truly important about foods of all kinds, which is clearly not their calorie content, you will be very clear on why calories have nothing to do with being overweight. Chew on that comment for a while (pardon the pun), because this is the kind of clear thinking that will guide you to success in any weight loss or fitness program that works for a lifetime.
About the Author:
People who want to know how to lose belly fat can find excellent solutions online. The the best place to start is Dr. Dennis Clark's free belly fat book.
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