Calorie Counting Myth & What you eat is far more important
Time to shatter the calorie counting myth
You might have tried counting calories and using different apps like myfitnesspal in the past without getting the end results you were looking for.
The basic calories in vs calories out theory is only true to the extent that if you added up the calories burnt from exercise, your resting metabolic rate, and all other calories used by your body (i.e. moving throughout your day, standing at work, doing various chores, hobbies, play with your kids, etc.) that the sum of those numbers has to exceed how many calories you eat and drink.
The part of that theory is wrong that tells you where your body is adding up your calories consumed like a calculator, and then magically a pound of fat gets added to your body when you hit 3,500 calories or when you burn 3,500 calories you magically burn 1 pound of fat.
Yes I’m telling you that fat gain and loss aren’t linear, and the number of calories that are needed to lose another pound will increase over time as you lose weight. It isn’t 3,500 calories = 1 pound of fat loss.
Your Calorie Minimum
Click here to calculate your theoretical calorie minimum.
Click here to have your resting metabolic rate tested.
This number aligns with your current resting metabolic rate which is also how many calories your body needs to stay alive and function correctly, if you lay around and do nothing all day. This number is derived from testing millions of people in labs using equipment that measures how much energy their body uses to stay alive if they just lay around all day in a chamber with a bed. Your age, gender, height, weight, and energy used to digest food are the primary metrics needed to calculate this. These will represent how many calories the average person’s brain, heart, liver, digestive organs, and muscles use to function daily.
Variables that will increase your RMR higher than the calculator shows are how much muscle mass you have, how much you expose your body to cold air/water throughout the day, eating more than 3 meals per day, and pregnancy.
Variables that will decrease your RMR than the calculator shows are eating less than 3 meals per day and time restricted eating (intermittent fasting).
Rule 1: Eat your calorie minimum to function and feel fantastic every day
Eating less calories than your resting metabolic rate will lead to weekly muscle loss. If you're wondering what does your resting metabolic rate tell you. Your resting metabolic rate is literally how many calories does your body need to stay alive and function correctly if you lay around and do nothing all day.
Why's that?
1.Placing effort into eating a calorie deficit is depriving your body of the daily calories that your brain (20%), heart (20%), liver (15-20%), other digestive organs (15-20%), and muscles (20-30%) need to function optimally and make more fat burning hormones to burn fat effortlessly.
2.For a while you may lose some weight because you are eating less of the crap you were eating before and will lose some inflammation fluid weight, and you'll lose muscle vs body fat.
3.This approach typically forces people to work through periods of hunger, delaying/skipping meals, and will lead to the following:
Low energy
Take you too long to fall asleep
Wake up often
Decreases fat burning hormones
Decreases energy producing hormones
Leads to inadequate nervous system/muscle recovery
Lose muscle and definition
Likely will increase body fat levels due to spiking cortisol (stress hormone)
Make you hangry if you’re not fat adapted
If you’ve been focused on eating a calorie deficit for a long time, I’d recommend you reweigh the pros and cons of this action step.
The inspiring news is that most people can achieve their ideal body composition without ever needing to eat a calorie deficit
Rule #2: Whatever you eat needs to keep your blood sugar levels stable
If you’ve been getting the carbs you eat now from heavily processed foods, grains, sweets (natural and artificial), and blood sugar spiking fruits/veggies you will struggle with:
Overweight/Obesity
High blood pressure
Elevated blood lipids
Energy highs and lows
Poor blood sugar control
Food cravings
Feel anxious/irritable/stressed
Muscle/joint pain
What's the problem with spiking your blood sugar?
1. This drives up your insulin hormone, who’s job is to grab all fats, proteins, and sugars from your blood and store it in either your existing fat cells or muscles.
2. If insulin is high, all fat burning hormones are turned off preventing fat loss for the next 2-4 hours.
3. If insulin goes up, cortisol (stress hormone) levels go up, which leads to elevated blood pressure, feeling stressed, anxious, and irritable. Then, if your liver and muscles don’t have room for the nutrients, fat storage time. All nutrients get converted into fat and will likely get shipped to your gut and other genetically specified areas you’re not interested in since most of the receptors for cortisol are located in your stomach area.
4. High insulin in your blood and too many fats stored in your liver cause your pancreas to keep pumping insulin out because the signal is blocked by a fatty liver, taking you down the path of prediabetes, insulin resistance, and becoming overweight.
5. Once you’re prediabetic, the additional swirling sugars, leads to glycation where the sugars stick to your arteries, leading you down the path to heart disease, and high blood pressure. Glycation also makes your muscles, and tendons stiffer and less flexible or mobile.
6. If glycation isn't controlled it will lead to advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that accelerate aging of tissues, damage tissues, and lower your antioxidant levels protecting you from a variety of cancers.
It can take 3 weeks to multiple months to start lowering your fasting insulin levels, lowering your blood sugar levels, and becoming more insulin sensitive. Eating low glycemic index and low glycemic load foods, drinks, and meals is the key. Not sure what meals will achieve this, go to the recipe section of the course.
Rule #3: What you eat provides you with unique benefits, and 1 calorie eaten is not necessarily 1 calorie kept
Let's say you eat 23 almonds (¼ cup)
165 Calories
14g fat (80% monounsaturated fat, 15% polyunsaturated, 5% saturated)
6g of carbs
3g of fiber
6g of protein
Brief overview of what the specific fat and fiber does after you eat it
The fat turns the dial up on your fat burning genes, followed by an increase in your fat burning hormones, make more fat burning enzymes, making fat loss easier, and give your body the fuel you want it to become fantastic at burning.
The majority of the fat in these almonds is monounsaturated which lowers your LDL, fuels fat burning cells
It also slows the breakdown and absorption of the carbs into your bloodstream.
The fiber in it is non-digestible and non-absorbable into your bloodstream, forms a gel slowing the digestion of all of the other absorbable nutrients (you don’t keep 30 of the calories) in the almonds and moves the food along from your small intestine, where all nutrient absorption happens, to your large intestine. Your good gut bacteria hang out in the large intestine that will consume the unabsorbed food, will multiply making more good gut bacteria, and produce short chain fatty acids that get sent to the liver for processing, then released in the blood lowering total cholesterol, LDL, blood sugar levels, inflammation, tells your brain you’re full sooner, and converts your white fat cells into brown fat cells (burn fat/sugar to maintain core body temp).
Brief overview of what the protein does after you eat it
Digesting protein and shuttling it around the body isn’t free and burns an additional 25% of calories from what you just ate. Since there’s 4 calories per gram of protein, the 6g of protein in those almonds is 24 calories. Your body is going to burn 6 calories (25%) just to digest it. You don’t want to over consume protein, which you can calculate your max absorption if you know how many pounds of muscle you have, because it will get converted into sugar and potentially body fat.
Brief overview of what the carbs do after you eat them
The body keeps all the carbs that enter your bloodstream. They need to get converted to glucose (the storage version). There was 6g of carbs in the almonds that you ate.
Your muscles can uptake these 6g without spiking your insulin if there’s room in their 350g fuel tank.
Otherwise your body needs to release insulin to deliver those 6g to your liver. If there’s room in its 80g fuel tank they will get stored there to sustain organ function for the day on an as needed basis.
If there isn’t any room for more glucose in the liver, those 6g gets converts into triglycerides (fat cell) and shipped out into your bloodstream
If your cortisol (stress hormones) are elevated it gets wrapped around your organs in the belly region
Otherwise your genes run the show and decide what locations just under your skin to store these fats for later usage.
Summary of the almond eating story
You ate 165 calories, you only kept 129 of them. (Just because you eat it doesn’t mean you keep it)
The type of fat in the food leveled up your fat burning capability and improved your blood lipids
The fiber fed your good gut bacteria, improved your blood lipids, blood sugar control, healed any inflammation in the body, made you feel full sooner, and leveled up your surface body fat cells to become fat burning cells
The carbs likely got stored in your muscles or liver and never made you fatter
Let’s look at a similar calorie consumption story where you chose to drink a 12 fl oz soda:
170 Calories
0g Fat
46g Carbs
0g Protein
0g Fiber
There is math that you need to learn as your mountain dew goes along its digestion journey:
Since there is no fat or fiber to slow down the digestion in your stomach, all 46g of glucose are getting pumped quickly into your bloodstream.
Whatever space is in your muscles at the time will take up that glucose to get used at your next structured workout.
Lots more insulin will get released to transport these to your liver. Remember it only can hold 80g so 46g of soda is more than 50% of what it can store.
Mountain dew contains mostly fructose sugar which does the following:
Reduces your leptin hormone (tells your brain you’re satisfied and to quit eating) by 18% making you overeat
Increases your ghrelin hormone (tells your brain that you’re hungry and to find something to eat) by 28% making you have a larger appetite
Increases the production of vasopressin (hormone that makes your kidneys retain water, increase your blood pressure, and tells your body to produce body fat)
Tells your fat burning cells to slow down leading to more fat storage
Turns off AMPK Kinase which shuts down your body’s ability to make more fat burning cells
If there isn’t any room for more glucose in the liver, those 46g gets converts into triglycerides (fat cell), making your liver accumulate fat, which dampers the insulin release of your pancreas, leading to chronically high blood sugar/insulin resistance, and then the rest of those fats get shipped out into your bloodstream
If your cortisol (stress hormones) are elevated it gets wrapped around your organs in the belly region
Otherwise your genes run the show and decide what locations just under your skin to store these fats for later usage.
Some additional trade offs also happen that you probably haven’t considered:
Increases triglycerides flowing around in your blood are bonded to LDL particles which can get lodged in your artery walls increasing inflammation, blood pressure, increasing your likelihood of getting a stroke or heart attack
More inflammation fluid will increase your body weight go up on the scale
High amounts of glucose in your blood blocks leptin, the hormone that tells your brain you are full, which will cause you to overeat
High amounts of glucose shut off your fat burning hormones and fat breakdown enzymes
I hope these 2 stories help you understand better that calories ARE NOT created equal, that a calorie eaten IS NOT a calorie kept, and that all calories DO NOT provide the same benefits to your body.
Putting all of this together to upgrade your health across the board, lose body fat, and have your body feel fantastic:
Calculate and eat your calorie minimum
Focus on eating meals that you already make/from the recipe library that are high in fiber, contain healthy fats, high protein, low carb, and are low on the glycemic index scale
Start tracking your net carbs (carbs-fiber) using a notepad, spreadsheet, chronometer, myfitnesspal, or lose it and aim for 50-100g per day (the closer you can get to 50g, the better)
Start acknowledging the action steps you do every day with your action step acknowledgement spreadsheet I gave you or the habit tracking app.
All Action Steps take time to give you measurable progress and require consistency
After 21 days anything that you've started, stopped, or changed will remove an old habit (good or bad) you were doing before
After 40 days that new habit will be solidified and feel effortless
After 90 days you will have reprogramed your genes and hormones to either better serve you or sabotage you.
Next Steps
Click Here to Schedule your next Lifestyle Coaching Session
When you get near the end of scheduling this click “redeem coupon, package, or gift certificate” button (located above pay now)
Type in your lifestyle coaching package code and click apply
Then click the reserve button
References
Huberman, A., & Lustig, R. (n.d.). other. Retrieved December 18, 2023, from https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-robert-lustig-how-sugar-processed-foods-impact-your-health.
Hyman, M., Boham, E. and Papanicolaou, G. (2024) ‘Is your metabolic health suffering? How to identify your weak metabolism? How to fit it?’ Available at: https://drhyman.com/blog/2024/04/08/podcast-ep880/.
Perlmutter, D. and Loberg, K. (2024) Drop acid: The surprising new science of uric acid--the key to losing weight, controlling blood sugar, and Achieving Extraordinary Health. S.l.: Simplified Chinese Press.
Xiong, R. G., Zhou, D. D., Wu, S. X., Huang, S. Y., Saimaiti, A., Yang, Z. J., Shang, A., Zhao, C. N., Gan, R. Y., & Li, H. B. (2022). Health Benefits and Side Effects of Short-Chain Fatty Acids. Foods (Basel, Switzerland), 11(18), 2863. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods11182863