Why counting calories doesn't work

1. SUGAR RESEARCH FOUNDATION found that cholesterol and fat were the main contributors to weight gain and the increased risk of heart diseases, so manufacturers started to lose the fat and add the sugar to combat the loss of taste.
2. Turns our SRF actually paid doctors to do this study
3. Whilst fat has more calories than carbs, including sugar - this logic has created the notion that sugar is better for you than a bag of nuts
4. Which do you reckon is better 1000 calories of broccoli or 1000 calories of soda?
5. Food interacts with your biology, a complex system that transforms every bite
6. 750 calories of fast food vs 750 calories of broccoli. Fast food contains sugar, vegetable oil and a whole gamut of preservatives. These are ‘heavy users;. The gut absorbs the finer-free sugars in the bread and starts a domino effect of high insulin and hormonal responses that kicks biology into gear and increases storage of belly fat, inflammation, raises triglycerides and lowers HDL, raises blood pressure, lowers testosterone in men and contributes to infertility in women.Your appetite is increased because of insulin’s effect on your brain chemistry. The insulin blocks your appetite-control hormone leptin. You become more leptin resistant, so the brain never gets the “I’m full” signal. Instead, it thinks you are starving. Your pleasure-based reward center is triggered, driving you to consume more sugar and fueling your addiction. The fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat. You also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation. Chronic inflammation causes more weight gain and diabesity. Anything that causes inflammation will worsen insulin resistance. Another problem with fructose is that it doesn’t send informational feedback to the brain, signaling that a load of calories just hit the body. Nor does it reduce ghrelin, the appetite hormone that is usually reduced when you eat real food. In addition, the fast food contains no fiber, vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients to help you process the calories you are consuming. These are “empty” calories devoid of any nutritional value. But they are “full” of trouble.The fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat. You also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation.

The broccoli is literally the opposite and just so you know, you wouldn’t be able to eat 750 calories of broccoli because it wouldn’t fit in your stomach.

If you still think a calorie is just a calorie, maybe this study will convince you otherwise. In a study of 154 countries that looked at the correlation of calories, sugar, and diabetes, scientists found that adding 150 calories a day to the diet barely raised the risk of diabetes in the population, but if those 150 calories came from soda, the risk of diabetes went up by 700 percent.

Some calories are addictive, others healing, some fattening, some metabolism-boosting. That’s because food doesn’t just contain calories, it contains information. Every bite of food you eat broadcasts a set of coded instructions to your body—instructions that can create either health or disease.

1. 1. Sugar, including Fruit, might be ‘low calories’ but it ain't ‘low fat’ once it goes into your body
      1. As illustrated before, whether it is sugar from fruit or sugar from high fructose corn syrup — your body reads it as the same. SUGAR.

It only takes 2.5 calories to convert 100 calories of fatty acids into body fat. It takes 23 calories (10 times as much energy) to convert 100 calories of protein or glucose into body fat. Fructose skips the fat creation control mechanism in the liver (PRK -1) and is directly converted to fatty acids (and then body fat) without passing through either of our major appetite control gateways (insulin or CCK). Fructose is also invisible to our built in calorie counter ( the hypothalamus). We can eat as much fructose as we can shove down our throats and never feel full for long. Every gram of fructose that we eat is directly converted to fat. There is seriously no questions to the obesity epidemic when you get to know these simple facts. It is impossible not to get fat on a diet infused with fructose.

Fructose bypasses all of our appetite control systems.

1. 1. Whilst fruit has fiber which helps slow down the release of the sugar to our liver, having too much fruit can result in the fructose being stored as fat in our bodies. The liver can only use 5-6 teaspoons a day and then the shop is shut.
      1. In the cave man days, they would rarely come across fruit or honey and when they did it would be a berry bush which has low fructose anyway.
      2. They would pig out on them because they actually wanted to store fat for the famine and they knew that they wouldn’t find another source of sugar in a while because it was so scarce.
      3. The scientific explanation is that the liver uses fructose to create fat. This process is called lipogenesis. Give the liver enough fructose (over 6 tsp) and tiny fat droplets begin to accumulate in liver cells. This eventually becomes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
         1. Fructose also promotes the buildup of fat around organs, increases blood pressure, makes tissues insulin resistant, increases the production of free radicals that can damage DNA and cells
         2. Fruit is just a more natural alternative to a candy bar. Vegetable contain a higher nutrient to energy ratio that fruit
         3. “at least its natural” yeah so is sugar cane and the corn from high fructose corn syrup
         4. ‘what about vitamin c from an orange” - we can get that from a green pepper

Studies comparing a high-fat diet that is identical in calorie count to a high-sugar diet had totally different effects on metabolism. The higher-fat diet caused people to burn an extra 300 calories a day. That’s the equivalent of running for an hour without doing any exercise.

First of all, the average person simply cannot exercise long and hard enough to burn up the calories they eat in a given day.

1. 1. Our bodies are not as simple as burning off more calories than we eat - or everything I just explained wouldn’t be a problem. We are designed to store calories when we exercise because as hunters and gatherers we spent a lot of time foraging and collecting food and think of how inefficient it would be for us to burn calories quickly. We’d very rapidly end up as skinny as a rake and unable to do much.

1. 1. Also, think about this - eating less and exercising more will put your body into a state of fight or flight, thinking it's in a famine and therefore it will start to store fat instead of losing it.
   2. The belief of eating less and exercising more clearly isn’t working as between 1980 and 2000 memberships to fitness clubs doubles and so did the obesity rate
   3. This energy balance, "calories in, calories out" theory, originated with a simple observation involving mice, in 1953 by Jean Mayer. Up until that point, exercise was strongly discouraged. Doctors warned it would cause heart attacks and lower sex drive.

1. Just stop NOW or you will go insane. I can promise you from my own experiences and clients experiences. Its exhausting and freaking stupid.
2. It creates a mental obsession which is much more unhealthy than any bit of food
3. Psychologically humans are not good at NOT doing something. If I say to you don't think of a blue elephant, what are you thinking of? Restrictive eating goes against our biology and creates misery and eating disorders.

1. Eat REAL FOOD - vegetables, meat and healthy fats
2. Choose a wide variety of food
3. Start learning how to cook! (8 week program)
4. Cut out ALL foods that aren’t ingredients
5. Cut out sugar and you’ll drop the weight - and limit your fruit intake.

The culprits of low calorie/low-fat foods that will pack on the pounds:

Acai bowls - 50 g of sugar (12 tsp - double the amount you should have in a day). If you go heavy on the toppings - then it can even get up to 91g of sugar!

Up and Go’s - 20g of sugar in 1 up and go. And let me ask you …. does that fuel your brain and keep you going 4-5 hours later until lunch? NO

most low fat things

Sugary Cereals - event corn flakes which you would think doesn’t have sugar has 10g of sugar per 100g. And let me tell you - i don’t think you'd be having just 100g of it. If you do, you’ll be back in the kitchen 1 hour later epically if that milk was low fat.

Shanaham, Catherine. (2008). Deep Nutrition. Flatiron Books. NY

Hyman, Mark (2016). Eat Fat, Get Thin. Hodder & Stoughton General Division. London