Calorie Counting: A Good Way to Keep Yourself Fat

Calorie Counting: Backasswards Diet Advice

on Sep 02 in Diet and Exercise, Resource, Science tagged calorie counting, dieting, energy expenditure, energy intake, fat loss, RMR, weight loss by GT

Last week, I did a short series on skinny fatness and scale weight obsession. Since those articles were fairly well received and spawned quite a few email questions, I’ve decided to explain another major reason diets fail: calorie blindness.

Calorie blindness is the condition where people exclusively base their weight loss efforts on a strict accounting of the number of calories they consume compared to the number of calories they burn through exercise.

You can easily spot someone who is calorie blind by their exclamations of “I only eat ___ amount of calories and whenever I exercise I burn at least ____ calories. I should be losing weight but the scale never moves! What am I doing wrong?”

What is wrong is that these individuals are listening to the countless fitness experts, doctors and dietitians who base the bulk of their diet advice around two fundamental constructs of fat loss math:

1 lbs of fat = 3500 kcal
calories in = calories out

As the theory goes, as long as you create a 3500 kcal deficit each week, you will lose 1 lbs of fat. Yet ask anyone who has tried this approach how effective it is… to put it kindly: not very.

Fat loss math: So simple… and so ineffective!

Despite the woeful track record of calorie-counting based fat loss approaches, there are still far too many equally calorie blind practitioners who accuse individuals struggling with fat loss of cheating on their diets or failing to exercise. While this occasionally may be true, it often isn’t the case. In reality, the reasons for fat loss failure are far more complex than a failure to understand the basics of fat loss math.

Allow me to elaborate.

Calorie Counting = As Productive as Following a Rainbow to a Pot of Gold

While it is true that when you burn 1 lbs of fat in a lab setting it gives off ~3500 kcal worth of energy, knowing this fact doesn’t really do a whole to help us understand how to produce fat loss in free-living humans.

Distilling fat loss into a simple “calories in = calories out” equation is akin to telling someone the secret to getting rich is knowing that 1 lbs of gold is worth $19 252 Canadian dollars.

While this may be true and each of us can acquire a bit more gold or a few more dollars over the years, just knowing the conversion doesn’t provide us with any real blueprint for producing life-long wealth now does it?

Fat loss is really no different than wealth creation: just because you know food contains calories and that exercise burns calories, doesn’t mean you understand how to produce fat loss.

Unfortunately, the elephant in the room about the “calories in = calories out” equation is that there is a critical clause missing. What is missing is the fact that this equation only holds true at the level of cellular metabolism. In other words, creating an environment for fat loss goes way beyond the food you put into your mouth or the number flashing across the screen of your treadmill.

Which leads me to today’s critical take-home point:

The greatest reason why so many people fail at losing weight isn’t because they suck at math, but rather because they have zero understanding of biochemistry.

The “calories in = calories out” equation only works in a closed system, and human physiology is anything but closed.

Before I get too far into this, I’m not suggesting that calories don’t matter, because obviously you need to create a caloric deficit in order to produce weight loss. However, the extreme variance in endocrine and metabolic responses to diet, exercise and stressful situations will always make calorie-centric weight loss guidance of limited value.

Therefore, you can dutifully count all the calories you want that are coming into your mouth, but if energy uptake is impaired in any fashion in the digestive system or at the level of the cell, then you have NO IDEA of how much useable energy is actually in your body at any given time.

Do you know your diet and exercise program this intimately?

Remember, when you have food sitting in your stomach, it still remains OUTSIDE of your body. We only consider it inside the system once it gets absorbed from the intestine and gets to the blood stream, where it has a chance to be taken up by the cells.

NB: keep in mind, just because nutrients get into the blood stream, doesn’t mean they will be taken up by the desired cells. Case in Point: diabetics and blood glucose.

A similar spate of problems exist with how we estimate energy expenditure. While it is possible to calculate energy expenditure through indirect calorimetry, this approach is fairly invasive and cost-prohibitive. As a result, most of our assessments of energy requirements in humans are based on predictive equations.

When it comes to predicting energy expenditure and resting metabolism, both approaches are based on regression equations derived from population averages. For people without much of a background in stats and to whom the term “regression” means absolutely nothing, just accept that when you perform a regression analysis, there are always a significant number of outliers on both sides of the trend line.

Which one of these dots represents you?

What too many practitioners fail to acknowledge are that predictive regression equations are only really of value when applied to large populations. When regression equations (such as resting metabolism equations) are used with single individuals, significant errors will occur. These errors are compounded when the individual does not share important characteristics with the group of people from whom the equation was developed in the first place (age, sex, ethnicity and body composition).

Most of the equations used today were developed in white, non-obese individuals, so how well they generalize to other segments of the population is likely limited. In fact, a recent review¹ suggests that even the best predictive equations have an error rate of up to 20% (i.e. if you think you need 2000 kcal a day, you might require anywhere from 1600-2400 kcal, which is a huge range).

Hopefully, you are all starting to appreciate just how pointless a practice of micro-managing your caloric expenditure truly is.

Incidentally, I will be doing a full hour long interview on IronRadio.org expanding on the shortcomings of the calorie counting approach next Thursday from 2-3 PM.

Title: Iron Radio With Graeme Thomas
Topic Flaws of calorie counting and how modern society makes us fat
Time: Thursday, September 9th at 2:00pm Eastern
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To attend, visit: http://attendthisevent.com/?eventID=14551707

You can actually visit this link and write in any questions you’d like me to answer on air. I highly recommend that you do.

Actually Useful Fat Loss Advice

I could go on all day giving reasons for why calorie counting doesn’t result in meaningful fat loss for most individuals, however, I think you have a fairly clear picture by now.

Again, I must reiterate that I don’t want you to get the idea that calories don’t matter, because they do. It’s just that calorie counting should never be the central focus of a weight loss program.

Instead of continuing to rely on inadequate coaching advice like “calories in = calories out”, weight loss coaches would have far more success if they structured their diet interventions according to the following progressive approach.

Let me assure you, unless you satisfy each of the tiers in order, then long-term success almost never happens.

Tier 1: Sustainability

Hunger management is bar none the strongest predictor of long-term diet success. Nothing drives poor food choices like hunger (real or imagined) so the initial focus for any diet coach must be on dealing with this issue.

Therefore, the primary concern of any diet approach has to be: will an individual actually follow it? I don’t care how “optimal” coaches believe their powers of meal plan design are, if a diet leaves someone miserable or hungry, it is NEVER going to work.

Tier 2: Metabolic Type

It’s only after adequately controlling hunger that there is any point to moving onto tier two. This level of intervention identifies whether an individual requires a higher carbohydrate, a balanced or a higher protein/fat diet.

Truth be told, tier 1 and tier 2 are often intertwined but occasionally you’ll need to initially transition someone out of tier 1 using foods that aren’t fully appropriate for their ideal metabolic type.

After you get an idea of what macronutrients someone deals with best (if you’d like to find out your own best approach click here: Metabolic Test), then it’s about helping them move into tier 3 and focus on food quality.

Tier 3: Food Quality

Most individuals thrive when they move from a diet high in processed foods to one containing far more natural, whole foods. For example, although bologna and pork tenderloin are both sources of protein coming from pigs, the pork tenderloin is going to have a dramatically greater impact in helping someone improve their body composition. Likewise, steel cut oats are far superior to Quaker maple brown sugar oatmeal when it comes to blood sugar management and suitability for fat loss.

Truth be told, once someone implements the first three tiers, it’s rare they’ll need to optimize their diets any further. The human body has a remarkable ability to regulate appetite and lose body fat once people revert to eating natural foods that are appropriate to their metabolic type, but on rare occasions more refinement is needed.

Tier 4: Nutrient Timing

At this level, manipulating meal frequency can result in further success. Certain individuals do better with smaller, more frequent meals (from observation: individuals who are more carbohydrate tolerant), whereas others do better with slightly larger, more infrequent meals (individuals who do better on higher protein, higher fat diets).

Optimizing nutrient timing can have a profound impact on body composition changes. However, obsessing about nutrient timing prior to establishing a solid base of the first three tiers will produce subpar results.

Tier 5: Optimization

It’s only after moving through all four of the aforementioned tiers and still not obtaining the kind of meaningful body composition change someone desires that I’d even think of incorporating a tier 5 intervention of calorie counting. In my experience, the only individuals who benefit from this level of intervention are those people trying to drop well below a normal level of body fat (under 8% for a male and sub 15% for a female).

When exceptionally low body fat is the goal, artificially fixing intake will be necessary (i.e. measuring each and every food item ingested) as will performing an exceptionally large energy output to counteract the body’s innate mechanism of downregulating fat loss.

While this approach works for brief periods (maybe several weeks in the case of a contest prep bodybuilder), it tends not to work for very long as it is exceptionally difficult to maintain.

Calorie Counting in Context

So there you have it folks, the sad reality of calorie counting. Although calories do matter on a cellular level, anyone believing that body weight will be effectively changed by telling people “calories in = calories out” is just naïve.

Before I leave, just a reminder that I’ll be going over this (and other topics) in much greater detail next week, so do tune in to my interview on Ironradio.org