Nutritional heresy No. 3: You can’t burn calories, because they don’t exist

How it works, in the real world

Calories don’t exist, other than in our heads and on paper. That probably explains why calorie restriction as a weight loss method fails spectacularly.

Calories provide a form of measurement, like inches or miles. The concept of a calorie was created to measure the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1º Celsius. It applies perfectly to, say, an internal combustion engine. Not so much the human body.

The food you eat is broken down until it ultimately becomes a unit, or ‘currency’ of energy that the body can burn. That unit is called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is produced within the mitochondria of each cell via a process called the electron transport chain, and various nutrients are key to that process.

Without those nutrients, which include B complex, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, zinc, and Coenzyme Q10, there may be mitochondrial dysfunction. You can’t burn ATP if there is mitochondrial dysfunction.

Burning ATP is not, however, just a matter of providing the right nutrients. It’s also about the efficient functioning of glands, hormones and biological systems. Not to mention your circadian rhythm.

Calorie counting is a theory that takes none of this into consideration. It assumes that weight loss is a simple matter of calories-in versus calories-out. You eat less and move more. That remains the official guideline, despite it having little or no effect. At least not in the long-term; at first, it’s great. You reduce your calorie intake substantially, and quickly lose weight. Marvellous! You’re hungry, pretty much all the time, but the system’s working and you’ve got the willpower.

But soon enough your weight reaches that inevitable plateau. What’s more, your hunger is now raging, gnawing at both your stomach and your resolve.

Your weight loss has flatlined and even eating ‘normally’ results in weight gain and that creeping sense of despair; you can see what’s coming. One emotional trigger, one unkind word, and your willpower crumbles like the cake that’s flashing before your eyes.

Worse still: numerous studies have concluded that dieting is associated with long-term weight gain. This phenomenon has even been given a scientific name: fat overshooting. Charming. You will regain the weight that you lost, and then some.

Game of hormones

That weight regain is thanks to something called “adaptive thermogenesis”, as the body (the thyroid gland) adjusts its metabolic rate to match the reduction in food intake. As your metabolic rate falls, in kick your hunger hormones. The hunger game is essentially a game of hormones.

These hormones were forged during the evolution of our species, to ensure survival. That’s why, when you reduce your food intake, you automatically trigger a cascade of hormones whose mission it is to break your will and force you to eat, in order to prevent starvation. It’s not you; it’s your biology.

Of all the hormones involved in stimulating hunger, none is more potent than ghrelin.

Ghrelin is secreted principally in the stomach. It stimulates appetite by acting as a hunger signal to the brain.  

The good news is that excessive ghrelin secretion is not a given. It is very much influenced by factors that are within your control: what and when you eat, and how long you sleep.

The opposite of ghrelin is the hormone leptin. Leptin works by suppressing hunger. In order to burn fat stored in your adipose tissue, you need to produce plenty of this hormone. Secreted predominantly by fat cells, and in the small intestine, leptin informs the brain that you are full, and further eating is not required.

The best way to keep your leptin high and your ghrelin low is through eating protein. If your diet is low in protein, ghrelin secretion increases.

A diet consisting of 30% protein has been shown to markedly increase fullness, and to lead to reduced desire to eat.

Higher protein weight-loss diets have led to beneficial reductions in body weight, fat mass, and food intake, while preserving lean body mass, and improving satiety in overweight and/or obese individuals. Because of these benefits, higher protein diets are potentially a preferable dietary strategy in combating obesity than traditional reduced energy diets.

The effect is long lasting, too: protein suppresses concentrations of ghrelin once you have finished eating, and for prolonged periods thereafter.

A high protein diet not only promotes appetite control, it speeds up fat burning. It does this by increasing your resting metabolic rate. What’s more, this effect is immediate, which is terrific because you want to lose weight in the here and now, not on another time and space continuum.

What protein?

A quality protein includes meat, fish, dairy and eggs. Base your meals on these foods and cut out carbohydrates. A low carbohydrate diet works because it reduces insulin secretion and stimulates the release of fat from storage.

It is said that you can have too much of a good thing, and that’s certainly true of insulin. Without this hormone, you’re either dead or diabetic, but too much can make you fat and sick.

Eat carbohydrates and your digestive system will get to work, breaking them down into smaller molecules of glucose and then transporting those molecules through the gut lining into the bloodstream. The more carbohydrate you eat, the more glucose enters the blood.

This is where insulin comes in. It takes surplus glucose and sends it off for storage in your muscles and liver, where it becomes glycogen. When these depositories are full — and they have limited storage capacity — off goes that surplus glucose to your adipose tissue, aka body fat.

And that, folks, is how sugar is transformed into fat. It’s not magic; it’s the horrid inevitability of eating lots of carbs.

Insulin also block the flow of fat out of adipose tissue. If you continue to eat lots of carbohydrates, your fat stores will remain locked away.

Eating carbs is not the only way to increase insulin. Another way is lack of sleep.

Lack of sufficient sleep is a risk factor for weight gain: adults who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to become obese than adults who sleep 7–8 hours.

One way that sleep deprivation causes weight gain is by disrupting insulin production. After just five days of sleep restriction, your insulin sensitivity can be 40% lower than normal.

Insulin is naturally low at night, when growth hormone is dominant. Growth hormone becomes active at the beginning of the first deep sleep cycle and stimulates the release of fat from adipose tissue.

Sleep too little and the whole metabolic balancing act is thrown into reverse. Your insulin sensitivity decreases, growth hormone is suppressed, and insulin remains high, meaning you can’t burn fat. Leptin levels fall and ghrelin increases. Consequently, poor sleep leads to increased hunger.

In population studies, a dose-response relationship between short sleep duration and high body mass index (BMI) has been reported across all age groups.

Fast before bed

To burn fat, you must be in fasting mode by the time you go to bed. To be in fasting mode, you have to stop eating at least three hours before retiring.

The reason for this is that under normal conditions your body switches to burning fat overnight as opposed to glucose, thanks to growth hormone. This won’t happen if you have a stomach full of food waiting to be digested.

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If you are ever tempted to start counting non-existent calories again, just remember that the calorie theory only works if you are an internal combustion engine. A human body is quite a different matter. Give up the struggle, and eat in accordance with your ancient biology, rather than against it.

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