The Restaurant Analogy.

Often I’m asked why I disagree that fat loss is “merely a game of calories in vs. calories out” and maintain that it’s a function of hormonal tone. Gary Taubes makes an interesting analogy:

If you owned a restaurant and hired me as a consultant to help you figure out why business is down, and I came back and told you, “Oh, it’s because you have fewer people going into your restaurant than going out of your restaurant”, you’d probably slug me. Of course you’ve got fewer people going in than coming out; that’s not the point. The question you need to look at is: Why?

Why indeed. What’s implied by the statement “you’re fat because you eat too many calories” is that it’s all your fault, you dreadful pig. There are starving children in rural China; how dare you. I would argue that they are compelled to eat by virtue of what they eat.

Now this isn’t to absolve the overweight of personal responsibility. ‘Tis true, no one held a gun to your head and forced you to eat all the wrong things. But what it does do is to help you identify what those wrong things are, so you can stop eating them.

When you raise insulin levels (particularly easy to do if you overconsume refined carbohydrates), you do two things:

1. You shift your cells from energy utilization to energy storage. In other words, you turn on the ‘fat storage’ switch.

2. You increase hunger. There’s a reason “Betcha can’t eat just one” is the slogan for Lay’s Potato Chips and not Land O’ Lakes Butter.

Here’s an intellectual exercise:

Get together 8000 Calories’ worth of sweet potatoes, avocados, chicken, eggs, and leafy greens. Put it in a big pile in front of you, set a timer to 24 hours, and make that pile disappear before the timer goes off. Good luck.

Now, put 8000 Calories’ worth of soda, pasta, pizza, and chips in front of you. Set timer to 24 hours. Go to town. Again, best of luck.

I don’t think you’ll disagree with me that completing the task in scenario two (carbs) is far, far, far, far more feasible than completing scenario one. But you don’t need to take it from me. Just ask Michael Phelps how he managed to keep his dietary intake at 8000-10000 Calories/day while training for the Beijing Olympics: