The other day, I was reading some articles in Medium about fat loss.
To my surprise, I found a well-known doctor making some posts.
But what really caught my attention was one of his articles that he posted 4 years ago, titled “The Useless concept of calories”.
It was quite a good article with some good points, yet…
everything he shared didn’t make sense.
In fact, a lot of what he was sharing was pseudoscience and biased studies.
For instance, here’s one idea I found in his article:
“Our body understands the language of ‘hormones’ and we are speaking ‘calories’.”
Interesting way of putting it.
Well, as I replied in his article… in reality, we’re speaking neither hormones nor calories – we’re speaking glucose.
That doesn’t mean it’s good or bad…
it’s just the preferred fuel of the body, regardless of what we want to believe in.
Plus, he unsurprisingly started to point out that since hormones are important, they are the ones we should care about – not calories.
You know, ignore the basic law of thermodynamics and pretend that hormones are the main driver in the game of weight loss (or weight gain)… sounds like an interesting concept, for sure.
In fact, he even referred to a specific hormone as the responsible for controlling our weight.
“The only currency the body really cares about is insulin. If you want to lose weight, reduce insulin.”
I don’t know about you, but as far as I know, insulin is a hormone that transports the nutrients via the bloodstream to reduce the glucose in the blood.
That’s his main function.
Plus, there’s no direct way of reducing or increasing insulin.
Why?
Because it will be determined by (you guessed it) the total amount of calories you end up eating in your day.
Sure, you’ll gain weight if you were to eat twice as many carbohydrates as normal… but not because you’re increasing insulin (that’s a natural process that comes from it), but because you increased your caloric intake.
Plain and simple.
And as I said in another post…
I’m not saying hormones are useless or that they shouldn’t be taken into account.
Quite the opposite.
When you follow and use energy balance, you’re by default taking into consideration how hormones affect our bodies.
But even with all of this… what surprised me about this is how a doctor would actually give you a lot of science and fancy Kreb’s cycle images to prove his point.
Well… I think he’s trying so hard to get people to turn into Low Carbs, High Fats (LCHF) diets and Intermittent Fasting (IF) as “the solution” to maintain and control their weight.
But the only problem I see with that is how he portrays one way as the “end all be all” diet to lose weight and keep it off.
By this point, you should know that the path you choose is less important than the overall principles.
Here’s what I mean by that.
Sure, you can lose weight with LCHF diets and IF…
but you can end up being the 9 out of 10 people who can’t maintain their weight and end up adding all their weight back (some even more from where they started)… all because you don’t know how to keep it off or what to do when things like a plateau occur (because they always happen).
Something to think about.
Anway…
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It’s not magic, just real science.
Ivan @ Fitnessthetic
