Want to know how many calories you should eat to lose weight? The answer is simple: If You Want to Lose Weight, Calories Don’t Matter. You might be a bit surprised by that answer (especially when doctors, nutritionists, and government agencies all have suggestions for how many calories you should eat if you want to lose weight). The truth is simple: your body is not a calorimeter. What is a calorimeter? It is the machine that food scientists use to determine how many calories food contains (see picture on this page). The problems with using a machine to decide the value of food are many, but the biggest problem is that a calorimeter has no storage device (the way that you do).

What is a Calorie?

The first thing you need to know is what a calorie is. Here is the definition: A calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. If you are wondering what that has to do with how much you should eat to lose weight, you are not alone. Food scientists stick an apple in the calorimeter and measure how much energy it produces when they burn it and that (supposedly) tells them how much energy you get from eating that apple. Scientists will tell you that a calorimeter is a good substitution for what happens in the body (but don’t you believe it).

Most people would say that a calorie is the amount of energy that is stored in the food that we eat (and, basically, that is correct), but not the whole story.

If you take the common scientific wisdom about calories as truth, then you would say that everything that you eat has energy in it and that certain foods contain more energy than others. But that doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss. In order to lose weight, you have to focus on which foods you are eating, not how many calories the foods have.

Calories in Calorie out is Bunk

In order to lose weight (food scientists suggest) you have to burn more calories than you take in, but what they forget is what happens to calories that you cannot use right away and there are ways to change what you are storing and what you are not.

You want to store calories? That is easy just keep your blood sugar high.

When your blood sugar is high, three things happen:

• No conversion of fat into energy: Since your body has enough energy running around your blood (in the form of glucose) it will not covert fats into energy. It takes energy to change fat into glucose and almost no energy to store fat as fat.
• No conversion of fructose into energy: In a strange twist, it seems easier for the body to store fructose (a sugar) as fat than it is to change it into energy (glucose). So that soda that is high in fructose goes straight to your hips.
• Fat storage increases: High sugar means high insulin (the hormone that controls sugar) and high insulin means that you will start to store fat.

As you can see, storing calories is easy when your blood sugar is high and the opposite is also true (keeping your blood sugar low means that you are not storing calories).

How Many Calories Should you Eat?

I know you grew up with the idea of calories and are used to thinking about them when you want to lose weight, but here is where you have to change your mind. Instead of thinking how many calories should you eat to lose weight you need to start thinking about what kind of foods you need to eat to lose weight. The beauty of this approach is amazing; you no longer have to count calories and you can eat as much as you want (just pick the right foods).

Here are the basic steps of good weight loss:

• Keep sugar out of your life (this means you also have to avoid the foods that act like sugar).
• Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables: While you might have to watch that you are not eating too many starchy vegetables and sweet fruits, vegetables and fruits are the basis of a good diet.
• Exercise: Yes, you have to get out and move your buns around to lose some weight.
• Avoid dairy: Dairy foods are a common food allergens and tend to pack on the pounds. Try a week without and dairy foods (cheese, milk, yogurt…) and see what happens to your weight.
• Limit meat: Meat should be an occasional meal and not an everyday (or everymeal) food. Try eating meat on the weekends only or avoid it altogether until your weight stabilizes.

Remember, if you want to lose weight, you have to stop saying “how many calories should I eat to lose weight?” and start saying “what foods should I eat to lose weight?”

Related Posts

• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Weight Loss Success Stories (1)
• When it Comes to Weight Loss, Forget Calories (16)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (30)

What is a Calorie?

The first thing you need to know is what a calorie is supposed to represent.

When asked, most people will say that calories are the amount of energy that is stored in the food that they eat, and, basically, that is correct. But that it is not the whole story. If you take the common nutritional wisdom about calories as truth, then you would say that every food has energy in it and that certain foods contain more energy than others. For example, by common caloric measurements, both proteins and carbohydrates have about the same amount of energy stored in them (about 4 calories per gram) and fat has over twice the energy (9 calories per gram). This is where the wisdom behind keeping fats out of your diet comes from: there are more calories in fat than in protein and carbohydrates.

Okay, that is all well and good, but let’s stop for a minute and find out how this “energy” is determined.

A calorimeter is a scientific tool that is used to measure calories. To use it, scientists place a food in the calorimeter and then burn that food to ash and measure the amount of energy it took to change that food from its original state to ash. Scientists will tell you that a calorimeter is a good substitution for what happens in the body (but don’t you believe it).

Caloric Consequences

If believed that a calorie was a calorie no matter what, you might make this kind of calculation:

Let’s say that you were eyeing that piece of cake and you found out that the cake contained 300 calories. In your mind you think, “hmm… 300 calories, I think I can burn that off by a little bit of exercise.” So you sit down at your desk and you calculate the amount of exercise that you need to do to burn off that amount of calories. It turns out that if you were running around 9 minute miles (not too fast), you would burn around 775 calories in an hour. [click here to see how many calories you burn per hour] So, you figure that you only have to run for around 20 or 30 minutes to burn off that piece of cake.

If you have ever tried this, you know how crazy this can be. Most people I know who have tried this approach to weight loss stop because they are too frustrated. I’ve had people report to me that they have exercised for one to two hours a day and still can’t lose weight. Shouldn’t that much exercise burn off the calories that they are consuming?

The answer is no, but let’s see why it isn’t so.

It Not the Calories

Using calories as a way to measure what you should be eating can only take you so far. The reason this is true is that you simply are not a calorimeter, you are a living being and not some laboratory tool. Something happens when you consume carbohydrates that is different from what happens when you eat proteins or fats… regardless of calories.

Let me show you why:

Imagine that you have a certain amount of energy your body needs and then you eat something sugary. In the first scenario, you are using exactly what your body needs; you are eating the exact same energy that you are using. If we were to graph that relationship, it would look something like this:

In this first scenario, your body is acting exactly like a calorimeter, you are burning all the energy that is coming your way.

The situation is exactly the same if you are eating sugar energy from carbohydrates and the energy you consume is under your energy needs, like this:

But what happens when you are eating more energy than your body needs at the moment?  This is the situation were your body no longer acts like a calorimeter and calories don’t matter any more:

When you consume energy over your basic energy needs, your body now has a problem: what to do with that extra energy? Well, you probably know the answer to that question. Your body stores those extra calories as fat. This is what makes carbohydrates unique. This is what makes the thoughts about calories obsolete. This is what makes carbohydrates much worse than fats and proteins and this is what no one is telling you: calories don’t matter as much as blood sugar especially when you are talking about weight loss.

To lose weight, yes you need to burn more calories than you are consuming, but you also have to keep your blood sugar from spiking too high and causing your body to store that extra energy as sugar.

Related Posts

• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (30)
• How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight? (1)
• Which is Worse, Fat or Sugar? (0)
• Vegan Diet Plan (12)