Individual and national plans to end the obesity epidemic, diet myths debunked, and the latest weight loss research. No payment or registration necessary.

Calories and Weight Regulation

Calorie restriction is one of the most mainstream ideas in weight loss, yet many people who have tried low calorie diets have lost muscle mass instead of fat mass. In the third part of the book, we will see that the nutritional content of food is one of the things that affect the body’s ability to use stored fat. Before we get to that point, we will look at the evidence that calorie restriction which ignores nutritional content is ineffective. Another issue that must be considered is that focusing on calories ignores the fact that many sources of calories are less filling than others and may not satisfy our hunger, whereas other sources of calories are more filling. Eight hundred calories of fast food are not filling, whereas eight hundred calories of fruits and vegetables are too much for most people.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the government agency charged with “assuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs . . . our nation’s food supply . . . [It] is also responsible for . . . helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods to improve their health.”¹ That includes giving Americans the information they need to stay thin.

The FDA is very aware that Americans are getting fatter. As part of its efforts to combat the problem, the agency is planning to “[work] to help consumers make smart choices about their diet.” How will the FDA do this? Actions the FDA wants to take include “strengthening food labeling, . . . educating consumers about maintaining a healthy diet and weight, and encouraging restaurants to provide calorie and nutrition information.”²

Endorsed By the Experts

The FDA also wants to “increase enforcement to ensure food labels accurately portray serving size and strengthen scientific research aimed at . . . developing foods that are healthier and lower in calories.” According to an article by Linda Bren titled “Losing Weight—Start By Counting Calories” published in the FDA Consumer magazine, “the experts . . . generally agree that the key to losing weight is a simple message: Eat less and move more. Your body needs to burn more calories than you take in.”³

Also in the article on losing weight are some tips to staying thin for people who are dining out. They include:

Ask for nutrition information (for example, calories, saturated fat, and sodium) before you order when eating out. Choose foods that are steamed, broiled, baked, roasted, poached, or stir-fried, but not deep-fat fried. Share food, such as a main dish or dessert, with your dining partner. Take part of the food home with you and refrigerate immediately. You may want to ask for a take-home container when the meal arrives. Spoon half the meal into it, so you’re more likely to eat only what’s left on your plate. Request your meal to be served without gravy, sauces, butter or margarine. Ask for salad dressing on the side, and use only small amounts of full-fat dressings.⁴

The FDA‘s statements can be assumed to reflect consensus opinions of the American medical establishment; it is a very mainstream organization. As we read the above tips on weight loss, we see that the FDA implicates too much fat and too many calories as being responsible for weight gain. There are really no other possible dietary culprits mentioned.

The FDA also suggests that we need to make sure we are eating the right sizes of portions and that we need to not eat too much at restaurants. It advises, “Share food . . . with [a] partner.” In this report, the FDA clearly demonstrates the belief that we are simply choosing to overeat because we are undisciplined, and fat is partially to blame. However, we have seen previously that eating too much fat is not responsible for weight gain. If it were, then the Inuit who left their traditional high fat diet for a relatively lower fat Western diet would not have gained weight while those Inuit who stayed with their traditional diet remained thin.

Furthermore, if too much fat caused weight gain, those people who adopted the high fat Atkins diet would have gained large amounts of weight, but they did not. We have many examples of people staying thin on a high fat diet and gaining weight on a low fat diet. Thus, we can see that this FDA report is incorrect in placing the blame for weight gain on fat consumption. What about eating too many calories and not exercising enough? This FDA article was published before the government study which found that diet and exercise were no more beneficial than diet alone was published. So if lack of exercise isn’t responsible for obesity, is eating too many calories the culprit? Perhaps we are simply choosing to eat too much.

Counting Calories

Counting calories is an idea that became popular around the beginning of the 20^th century, probably because this was the beginning of the period of modern weight gain. At the time, a scientist noticed that, if food was burned in a machine, the amount of heat it produced could be measured to find out how much chemical energy was released. From this, it was possible to figure out how much energy was in the food. The calorie is the unit used to measure this food energy. The idea that the cause of becoming overweight is eating too many calories has become more and more popular. Many diet books were written early in the 20^th century, claiming that it is “all about calories,” and the idea has become more entrenched since.

It is this idea that has led to laws requiring that all packaged foods in the United States be labeled with how many calories they contain, as well as how many grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. It is this idea, in part, which has led to the idea that we should eat less fat, since fat is calorically dense; by eating less fat we could eat bulkier food that would make us feel fuller but contain fewer calories. However, this begs the question: Counting calories is an idea that has been around for almost a hundred years. During that period, Americans have become more and more overweight. That seems to imply that it isn’t really “all about the calories.”⁵

This is not to say the idea of calories has no meaning. One pound of human fat stores 3,500 calories. Expend 3,500 more calories than you take in, and your body has to get that energy either by breaking down your fat reserves or by taking it from other body tissues such as your muscles. Therefore, if being overweight is just “all about the calories,” someone who is overweight is just a person who has eaten too much for the amount of energy he has used. Take enough food away from that person, and he or she should be just the same as a person of normal weight.⁶

Body Weight Regulation

We do not have to imagine what would happen if we took calories away from an overweight person. It is an experiment that has been done in laboratories many times. Overweight people have been put on very-low-calorie liquid diets. They have lost lots of weight, but too much lean body mass and not enough fat. Still, it is not uncommon for people to lose 15 to 20 pounds of fat on a liquid diet and have a massive fall in their cholesterol levels. Unfortunately, what is also not uncommon and, in fact, seems to happen in the majority of cases, is that all of the weight lost and even more is gained back within three years.⁷

The reasons are not psychological: The people in these experiments are not simply making a decision to eat too much. People who are overweight but lose a lot of fat are not like people who were never overweight in the first place. They are like normal people who are in near-starvation mode. The metabolism of people in one study dropped from normal to burning 24% fewer calories per day. They dreamt of food and of leaving the diet. They became anxious and depressed, if not suicidal. They hid food in their rooms. When they left the program, they ate massive amounts of food. The few who did not regain the weight were always hungry and had to constantly resist the urge to eat.

This leads to the question of whether it is possible that once a person gains weight he or she can never return to being of normal weight. Another study proved this idea wrong as well. Dr. Ethan Sims of the University of Vermont wanted to know what would happen if anyone who had never had a weight problem became fat. Would the person have a lifelong problem and never be able to return to a normal weight? To find out, he got volunteers from a state prison who agreed to try and gain weight. They were successful, and over a period of four to six months, eating as much as they could every day, they increased their weight by 20 to 25 percent. Everything they ate was recorded, and some even ate 10,000 calories a day.⁸

However, unlike the overweight people who had normal metabolic levels, these people who had become fat intentionally had metabolisms that rose to 50% above normal. They had no problem returning to their normal weight. After the study, it took them a few months to return to their pre-experiment level and stay there. This was not because prison food was making them thin, as about 23% of prisoners in the United States are obese.⁹ This seems to challenge the FDA’s theory that Americans are simply overeating. After all, if we were, it would be just as easy for us to return to a normal weight as it was for the volunteers in this study. Clearly, the government’s weight loss plan is in error.

We can learn from this study what the author intended, that becoming overweight does not doom someone to staying that way his entire life. However, that is not the only thing we can learn. The study shows that the body has powerful and not fully understood mechanisms for regulating our weight. For most of human history, that mechanism has maintained our weight with slight variation. If we did not have enough food, we would become hungrier and our metabolism would fall. If we had too much food, our metabolism would rise and we would feel full.

When our bodies work as they should, we are able to maintain a relatively constant weight, even if caloric intake varies from day to day. Our body has a mechanism to deal with overeating; it raises metabolism and it increases feelings of fullness. This results in weight being lost easily. The problem for those of us who are overweight is not that we have eaten too many calories. The real problem for those of us who need to lose weight is that our body’s weight regulatory mechanism is not working properly.

We are born without knowing language or anything else about the world, yet even as babies we know when we are hungry and we get very upset when we are not fed. As babies, our bodies seem to unconsciously know how much to eat. After all, despite not consciously knowing anything, babies will not fail to cry if they have not been fed or to stop eating when they have had enough. So either we have lost this mechanism as adults or something is interfering with it. To lose weight, what we need to do is identify the substance that is keeping this mechanism from working properly.

Last Chapter

Next Chapter

Order the Paperback

Citations:

¹ "FDA's Mission Statement." FDA. 4/04/2009 http://www.fda.gov/opacom/morechoices/mission.html.

² Bren, Linda. "Losing Weight: Start By Counting Calories." FDA. 4/04/2009 http://www.fda.gov/FDAC/features/2002/102_fat.html.

³ Idem.

⁴ Idem.

⁵ Kovacs, Jenny Stamos. "The Dos and Don'ts of Counting Calories." WebMD. 4/04/2009 http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/dos-donts-counting-calories.

⁶ "Counting calories: Getting back to weight-loss basics." Mayo Clinic. 4/04/2009 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calories/WT00011.

⁷ Burros, Marian. "Diet Formulas: Losing the Weight Is the Easy Part." New York Times. 4/11/2009 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/06/garden/diet-formulas-losing-the-weight-is-the-easy-part.html.

⁸ Kolata, Gina. "Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside." New York Times. 4/04/2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/08fat.html?_r=3&oref=slogin.

⁹ Houle, Brian. "Obesity prevalence among male inmates and how their inclusion affects race-education disparities in U.S. national obesity prevalence." Princeton University. 4/04/2009 http://paa2009.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=90951.

Please help spread the word about this site.