Toss out your calorie counter. Pay no attention to the calorie count on food labels. Counting calories is a useless and simple-minded way to decide what you eat. How come? Firstly, a calorie is a unit of heat. Heat does not directly guide metabolism. When caloric heat is released, nothing will put it back.
Scientists define a calorie simply as the amount of heat necessary to raise a milliliter (cubic centimeter) of water one degree Celsius, at sea level and at room temperature. Consuming calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Health professionals, trainers, nutritionists, and many other experts who ought to know better, wrongly equate food calories to metabolism. This is based on simple-minded reasoning that says calories from food provide you with energy. This is incorrect!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
It is helpful to know how food calories are really measured. It is done by completely incinerating the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. In so doing, when only the charred remains are left, it has lost whatever calories it originally contained. The bomb calorimeter measures the amount of heat lost and expresses them as calories released.
The total heat that can be released from food in a bomb calorimeter is well-known for the three main food groups: 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein and 9 calories per gram of fat. However, these numbers reflect only the maximum caloric yield in a bomb calorimeter. This number has nothing to do with what your body gets from food. This is why the maximum caloric potential of foods is, indeed, a nearly useless criterion when it comes to weight loss.
The concept of calories works for bomb calorimeters, not for your body. The calorie count of foods is a maximum potential, not a metabolic potential. Your metabolism has nothing to do with food calories that are measured in a bomb calorimeter.
You can never, ever get all the energy out of food. At the most you might get 10 to 20 percent of the potential energy through your fuel-harvesting metabolism. You will certainly never get more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you nothing about how your body will metabolize different types of food.
Consider this: in a calorimeter a gram of starch will yield the exact same number of calories as a gram of cellulose, which is indigestible fiber. As you already know, starch is a source of food calories for people. In contrast, cellulose is not.
Similarly, your body gets plenty of caloric value from potatoes and almost nothing from celery. However, in a bomb calorimeter, they would yield comparable calories per gram.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
A possibly surprising comparison for you is the difference between two nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. They yield the same number of calories per gram. However, glucose passes through the liver intact and serves a metabolic energy for many kinds of tissues, most notably muscle and liver. In contrast, fructose never escapes intact from the liver. This is why counting calories for even nearly identical foods is so useless.
Note that, as a consequence of consuming glucose vs. fructose, glucose serves your entire body whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before it can move out of your liver. That something else is largely fat, which has to be stored in fat cells. Simply put, glucose gives your body energy and fructose makes you fat. The identical caloric yield of these two sugars means nothing.
By the way, once you understand how misleading the calorie count is for different foods, you will be clearer about why calories have almost nothing to do with being overweight. Now chew on that concept for a while (pardon my pun), because it is the kind of clear thinking that will help you be truly successful in whatever weight management or fitness program that will work for you for a lifetime.
Scientists define a calorie simply as the amount of heat necessary to raise a milliliter (cubic centimeter) of water one degree Celsius, at sea level and at room temperature. Consuming calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Health professionals, trainers, nutritionists, and many other experts who ought to know better, wrongly equate food calories to metabolism. This is based on simple-minded reasoning that says calories from food provide you with energy. This is incorrect!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
It is helpful to know how food calories are really measured. It is done by completely incinerating the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. In so doing, when only the charred remains are left, it has lost whatever calories it originally contained. The bomb calorimeter measures the amount of heat lost and expresses them as calories released.
The total heat that can be released from food in a bomb calorimeter is well-known for the three main food groups: 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein and 9 calories per gram of fat. However, these numbers reflect only the maximum caloric yield in a bomb calorimeter. This number has nothing to do with what your body gets from food. This is why the maximum caloric potential of foods is, indeed, a nearly useless criterion when it comes to weight loss.
The concept of calories works for bomb calorimeters, not for your body. The calorie count of foods is a maximum potential, not a metabolic potential. Your metabolism has nothing to do with food calories that are measured in a bomb calorimeter.
You can never, ever get all the energy out of food. At the most you might get 10 to 20 percent of the potential energy through your fuel-harvesting metabolism. You will certainly never get more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you nothing about how your body will metabolize different types of food.
Consider this: in a calorimeter a gram of starch will yield the exact same number of calories as a gram of cellulose, which is indigestible fiber. As you already know, starch is a source of food calories for people. In contrast, cellulose is not.
Similarly, your body gets plenty of caloric value from potatoes and almost nothing from celery. However, in a bomb calorimeter, they would yield comparable calories per gram.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
A possibly surprising comparison for you is the difference between two nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. They yield the same number of calories per gram. However, glucose passes through the liver intact and serves a metabolic energy for many kinds of tissues, most notably muscle and liver. In contrast, fructose never escapes intact from the liver. This is why counting calories for even nearly identical foods is so useless.
Note that, as a consequence of consuming glucose vs. fructose, glucose serves your entire body whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before it can move out of your liver. That something else is largely fat, which has to be stored in fat cells. Simply put, glucose gives your body energy and fructose makes you fat. The identical caloric yield of these two sugars means nothing.
By the way, once you understand how misleading the calorie count is for different foods, you will be clearer about why calories have almost nothing to do with being overweight. Now chew on that concept for a while (pardon my pun), because it is the kind of clear thinking that will help you be truly successful in whatever weight management or fitness program that will work for you for a lifetime.
About the Author:
People who want to know how to lose belly fat can find excellent solutions online. The the best place to start is Dr. Dennis Clark's free belly fat book.
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