Calories and how the energy system uses them
This chapter explains
how the calories you eat are utilized by the energy systems in our body.
Fats, carbohydrates
and proteins each have a calorie count, fats contain 9 cal per gram, carbohydrates
contain 4 cal per gram, and proteins contain 4 cal per gram.
When we look at the
previous chapter and the Thermic effect of food on our body, fats have a Thermic
effect of about 2%. So if you are digesting 1g of fat, which is the equivalent
of 9cal, your body uses 2% of that 9cal to digest that gram of fat. That means
you have 8 calories of fat that are still sitting there unused. So what the
body does is put that energy away in storage until a later time when your body
needs it.
If however, you take
that one-gram of protein, which has the Thermic effect of 30%, of the 4cal in
that 1gram of protein, 1.5cal are used to digest the food, and you are left
with only 2.5cal.
Here you can
definitely see that there is a lot fewer calories left over for storage.
I hope I haven’t lost
you….but in summing up, a higher Thermic effect of the food you eat, will
result in a higher amount of calories burned to digest that food.
Now let’s talk about
something scientific. I purchased a book “burn
the fat feed the muscle” and was blown away with all of the information
inside. Although a lot of pages already lent credibility to what I’ve learnt
there were some new things in there that aided me in my quest for knowledge.
In this book Tom talks
about calorie balance. In basic terms if you eat less calories than you burn
every day you will lose weight. But those of us who love to indulge in a
doughnut or a piece of cake or a night out for dinner or even out on the piss
can be safe in the knowledge that we can do this “on the occasion”. The words “on occasion” are so important in this
sentence I cannot stress enough. It is true that if you eat less quantities of
fat less than you burn during your day you will lose weight, but you will be
unhealthy, malnourished, tired and irritable.
There is a documentary
that I recommend EVERYONE watch, and that is the American doco “Supersize
me”. Morgan Spurlock is the
writer/director of this doco, and stars in this excellent portrait of the fast
food industry. In brief, this guy wants to prove that the fast food industry,
namely McDonalds provide meals for every time of day, which leads to the
overwhelming number of obese people in America today. The reason he does this
is in relation to a court case that was happening at the time, where a young
girl was suing McDonalds for her overweight problem.
I recommend watching
this just to see what eating nothing but fast food 3 times a day for a month,
physically does to your body.
So it isn’t just the
fact you have to eat fewer calories every day than you burn, otherwise we would
all be able to lose weight easily. It is
the quality of the calories that you eat that make weight loss so much
easier, and so much more important to your health and longevity in life.
You may think to
yourself “fine then I just won’t eat during the day” and in theory this would
work. But what you may not be aware of is something called the “starvation
response”. You see when your body senses calorie deprivation, it features on
this starvation response. Basically it says “that’s all the food were getting
we need to conserve our energy”. Energy that we will gain from our fat stores.
That way we will be
able to survive longer unless amounts of food. I would like to point you to a
web site that I got a really great explanation of starvation response, which I
have included here as a link as well as a body of text.
“Starvation response can be defined as a proportional reduction in
metabolism in response to reduced availability of food. While the physiological
(and even psychological!) response is obviously way more complicated than that
and differs among different people, the general response is still similar: when
faced with a sudden drastic shortage of food, the human body reacts as it has
always been trained to by evolution: it reduces its metabolism (or the rate at
which it uses calories for energy) by slowing down physiological processes.
This can be understood as just a normal reaction to conserve resources.”
The problem with this
starvation response is it cannot tell the difference between dieting and
starvation. When your body is deprived of food, such as in starvation, the body
turns to the only thing that it can for its energy, your muscles, your fat
stores, and even your internal organs so that it may produce energy to survive.
If you were to continue burning calories at your normal daily rate you would
not last very long after your food supplies were cut out. Starvation response
allows you to live longer in a desperate time of need.
I hope that this last section
gives you a really good insight into why you should not just stop eating to
lose weight. You do not only lose body fat, but you lose the hard earned muscle
that you already have, which in every way is your best friend when it comes to
fat burning, because it takes more maintenance to keep your muscles in order
than it does to keep fat stored.
