All you need to do, to maintain a healthy body weight, is to balance Calories In vs Calories Out with an accuracy of 99.2%. Well, no human being can do it. So if this is the calorie hypothesis then, why aren't we all fat?
How accurately do you have to measure Calories In to Calories Out to make sure you don't gain more than 8 kgs in a decade? You have to keep your error margin within 20 kcal/ day. If you end up storing just 20 kcal per day as fat for a decade you gain 8.1 kgs in 10 years, and 16.2 kgs in 20 years and hence we see a lot of people in their 40s being overweight or obese, that were pretty lean in their 20s.
It's simple math - 20 kcal/ day X 365 days/ year X 10 years/ decade, which is 73,000 kcal/ decade which gets stored as fat. One gram of fat is 9 kcal, 1 kg is 9000 kcal. 73,000/ 9,000 = 8.1 kgs in 10 years.
If you couldn't keep up with the above math then anyways counting calories is not for you to begin with, and I should have convinced you already about the flaws in the calorie balancing hypothesis.
Simply put, if you ate 100 bites of food a day, and you only burn off 99 of them, you are going to get obese.
Anyone who tells you that you have put on weight because you ate more than you exercised, hasn't told you anything meaningful.
No human being can measure calories in to calories out with such accuracy. So the question shouldn't be, why are some of us fat? The question should be, why aren't we all fat? Because nobody can do this. The calories hypothesis tells us nothing about it. I am a science student and an engineer first, so I love the Law of Conservation of Energy, as it makes perfect scientific sense. If a person gains fat, they have to have consumed more energy than they expended during the period they were getting fatter. But with this, I haven't told you anything meaningful, despite it making the most logical sense. Anyone who tells you that you have put on #weight because you ate more than you exercised, hasn't told you anything meaningful. It's true, but it tells you nothing that you can do about, effectively.
The Alternate Hypothesis
Looking at an Alternate Hypothesis, we first look at some research conclusions by the Germans; they said - Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. Overeating and Inactivity are compensatory effects, not causes. We don't get fat because we overeat, we overeat because our fat tissue is accumulating excess #fat.
So what you should really be wondering is that What causes fat accumulation? while all this time you were wondering about your willpower and reducing appetite and depriving yourself.
Additionally, deprivation creates problems of its own, mostly lashing as #EatingDisorders
Fat is stored in the body in form of triglycerides; (doctors are taught this in med school). When fatty acids enters the fat cells they are stored as triglycerides which become long chains and then can't get out of the fat-cell membrane. Studies in the 1960s reveal that it is #Insulin which is the regulator of fat metabolism. If you wanted to get the fat out of the fat tissues the basic thing one had to do was lower the insulin levels.
The bottom line is that fat is accumulated in fat tissue when insulin levels chronically elevate in our blood and when insulin levels drop, fat escapes from the fat tissues. We secrete insulin in response to #carbohydrates in our diet.
George Cahill, in the 1970s, the then professor at Harvard said - "Carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat." In other words, carbohydrates are fattening.
Now you are thinking you gave this 3 minutes of your life to come to the end and be told about Atkins and Keto diets! No, not at all and not all carbohydrates are bad. This is where the concept of Glycemic Index comes in. Simple (small chain) carbohydrates raise the level of insulin our blood with a sharp spike as compared to complex (long chain) carbohydrates. And so does sugar; it is the basic thing that causes insulin resistance, and we all know the problems that come along with insulin resistance, if not, leave me a message and I'll write one on just that.
Inspired by the words and works of Gary Taubes.
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