The Calorie Myth

Our second Calorie Myth is one that is touted in diet books and on television shows, and used in the formulas of many popular weight-loss programs.

Richard Feinman, PhD, of SUNY’s Health Science Center, said it best: “Attacking the obesity epidemic will involve giving up many old ideas that have not been productive. ‘A calorie is a calorie’ might be a good place to start.”⁶³ In order to streamline calorie counting, we’ve been told that all calories are created equal. Think about using this kind of equivocation—which doesn’t take quality into account—with something else that’s essential to our health: water. If you were thirsty, would you stop to drink from a polluted creek or a muddy puddle in the middle of the road? Of course you wouldn’t—because the issue isn’t just about quenching your thirst. You know that water quality matters a lot. The solution to the puddle problem isn’t to “drink less water,” but rather to “drink higher-quality water”; similarly, the solution to today’s obesity epidemic isn’t to “eat less food,” but rather to “eat higher-quality food.”

Beyond battling our basic biology, calorie counting is bound to fail us because not all calories are equal in our bodies.

Calorie counting is rooted in the assumption that our bodies work like balance scales. Balance scales do not measure quality. On a balance scale, a pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of lead. Quality is irrelevant. So on a balance scale, 300 calories of vegetables is the same as 300 calories of pasta.

Let’s look at the issue another way. Breathing in polluted air for thirty years has a different effect on our respiratory system from breathing in the same quantity of fresh air. In the same fashion, putting 2,000 calories of low-quality food into our metabolic system has a different effect on our weight from putting in the same quantity of high-quality food.

Marshall University conducted a childhood obesity study in which researchers divided obese kids into two groups:

After two months, the Change Quality kids lost eleven pounds, but the Cut Quantity kids gained five pounds. We do not have to go on a low-carbohydrate diet, but this study is a great example of how critical calorie quality is. People ate as much as they wanted whenever they wanted and still burned body fat because they changed the quality of their calories.

So how do we know what a “quality” calories is? The quality of our calories can be determined by assessing our food based on four criteria:

3. Nutrition: how many nutrients—vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids—the calories provide

The more Satisfying, unAggressive, Nutritious, and inEfficient a calorie is, the higher its quality. The more SANE it is. The more it heals our hormones, prevents overeating, and lowers our set-point. Conversely, the more unSatisfying, Aggressive, not Nutritious, and Efficient a calorie is, the lower its quality. The more inSANE it is. The more it harms our hormones, encourages overeating, and raises our set-point. The more we understand the four calorie-quality factors, the more clearly we will see how eating more high-quality SANE food is the only practical way to burn fat and boost health long term.

Illustrating the importance of calorie quality, in each of the studies that follow, all the study participants ate the exact same quantity of calories (these are called isocaloric studies), but one group’s calories were of much higher quality (were much more SANE) than those of the other groups:

A review completed at the University of Florida analyzed eighty-seven studies and found that those people who ate SANE calories lost an average of twelve more pounds of body fat compared with those who ate an equal quantity of inSANE calories.⁶⁴

Researchers at Cornell University split people into three groups, each eating 1,800 calories per day, but at different levels of SANEity. The most SANE group lost 86.5 percent more body fat than the least SANE group.⁶⁵

In the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers at the Clinical Investigation Center, US Naval Hospital, compared a reduced-calorie inSANE diet with a reduced-calorie SANE diet. After ten days the SANE diet burned twice as much body fat.⁶⁶

A review published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism covered nine additional trials demonstrating that people who eat SANE calories lose more weight than those who eat the exact same quantity of inSANE calories.⁶⁷

Let’s look at each of the four factors of SANE eating. We’ll start with Satiety (which comes from the same root as satisfying).

The Philosophy of Long-Term Fat Loss and Health

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a helpful theory for thinking about moral issues: We can tell whether an action is good or bad if it makes sense for everyone to do it all the time. For example, is it okay to lie? No, because if everyone always lied, society would fall apart.

His logic is even more useful in the fat-loss and health field. We are trying to become slim and healthy for the rest of our lives. We do not want to lose body fat now only to gain it back later. So if a program isn’t flexible enough for us to follow it forever, forget it.

Whatever we do to lose body fat, we have to keep on doing it or we will gain all the body fat back. It is like pushing the accelerator pedal to make your car go sixty miles per hour. As soon as you stop pushing it, you will slow down. Similarly, if you change the way you eat and exercise to burn body fat and then stop eating and exercising that way, you will quickly regain body fat. For instance, the American Journal of Physiology reported that as soon as rats stopped eating less, they gained weight twenty times faster than normal until they returned to at least their original weight.

Nobody wants to gain body fat twenty times faster than normal, so before trying any diet or exercise program, be a philosopher and ask yourself, “Can I do this forever?” If the answer is yes, do it. If the answer is no, skip it.