A calorie is a unit of energy – specifically heat. Food is burnt and the amount of heat given off is measure and recorded and that’s how many calories your food contains. This is a flawed science as the food you consume acts differently in the digestive process to just being set on fire and essentially means that food labels aren’t necessarily accurate when they list the amount of calories per serving of the foods you eat.
You body converts unused calories into fat. It tries its best to use the excess fuel for metabolic processes such as restocking your liver and muscles with energy-releasing glycogen but, if the onslaught of excess energy lasts more than a couple of meals, excess calories are converted to adipose tissue, better known as body fat.
Body fat is a concentrated form of energy and provides many thousands of calories for you to use during times of reduced food intake. Even a very lean person, say 170 lbs at 8% body fat, has around 13.5 lbs of fat which contains over 47250 calories of usable energy – that’s enough to run about 472 miles! However, not all calories are created equal and while fat contains 9 calories per gram, alcohol contains 7 and protein and carbs contain 4 a piece, what you eat is not necessarily what you get in terms of energy.
Eating, digesting, absorbing and eliminating nutrients from food uses energy. The very process of taking food into your body uses some of the energy within the food you eat! The amount of energy depends on the food being eaten. This is called the thermal effect of food. The thermal effect of food is seldom taken into account in discussions about diet. Most mainstream dietary advice will suggest you eat a specific number of calories but, like the measuring of calories in the first place, this is a flawed approach to weight management.
Fat has a very low thermal effect (TEF for short) and only around 3-5% of fat energy consumed is lost in the process of ingestion, digestion and elimination. Carbohydrate has a thermal effect of around 10%. The TEA of protein is around 30%. What does all this mean? For every portion of protein you eat, almost one third of the ingested food is used in the digestive process. This is one of the reasons that high protein diets work so well – you end up with a whole lot less calories than you are consuming.
With the flawed way we measure the calorie content in food combined with the TEA of the foods we eat; it’s very hard to get an accurate picture of exactly how much energy you are ingesting. The food labels that state calorie values and the dietary recommendations for food intake don’t provide the whole picture. So what’s the alternative? Simply eat a diet rich in fresh vegetables, protein, healthy fats, low sugar, moderate fruit and low to moderate grains and your weight will balance itself. Counting calories is time consuming and, as we’ve seen now, kind of pointless if you can’t rely on the numbers. Eating a well-balanced diet, keeping your insulin levels stable and keeping active will ensure your weight remains within healthy parameters without having to waste time crunching numbers. You body is very bad at converting “good” foods to fat – you’ve got to eat a whole lot of vegetables and lean protein for them to achieve any resulting weight gain! By choosing natural and healthy foods, your body will function better, burn “hotter” by keeping your metabolism elevated, keep your muscles and brain supplied with a steady level of glucose and create an internal environment that is custom made for fat burning and not fat storage.
Do you need to create a calorie deficit to lose weight? Of course! But this is best achieved by eating well rather than cutting a seemingly random amount of calories from your daily diet. How can we decide how many calories we should be eating when TEA is not even considered and food values are unreliable?
Bottom line; do not worry about the mathematics of weight loss – the numbers seldom add up! Instead, eat well, eat a little less and move a little more. Diet is just another dirty four-letter word and implies there is a short term fix to the long term problem of being overweight. Weight management is a lifelong pursuit and should be treated as a lifestyle change and not an attempt at a quick fix!
Posted on 04 January 2012 by ultra-FIT
