![]() But everyone’s fat cells expand and contract to different amounts, so everybody has a different safe, fat-carrying capacity. But then the question is, how much is too much fat? Your fat cells are like balloons, they get bigger when you gain weight, they shrink when you lose weight. I would define an obese person as someone who is carrying too much fat, so that it begins to influence their health. Is it still appropriate for doctors to use BMI? Speaking of more nuanced approaches to managing weight, recently, body mass index has come under fire as being an inherently flawed measure of obesity. It takes a lot longer to digest food elements like protein and fibre, so you absorb less of those calories, so if you choose a chocolate bar that’s higher in nuts or dry fruits, that will make it a better chocolate bar. ![]() What really annoys me is when weight loss gurus say things like: “Oh, just replace the chocolate bar with a banana.” Now that’s a dumb thing to say, because sometimes life demands a banana, and sometimes life demands a chocolate bar.īut you can make a better practical choice in those situations by considering how the body processes food. How could people use this information practically when trying to manage their weight? You could be aiming to eat 800 calories a day, but how much energy your body actually absorbs will depend on whether you’re eating sugar, celery, or steak. So we need to consider the type of food we’re eating, rather than fixating purely on the calorie content. For every 100 calories of protein you eat, you only ever absorb 70. It’s why for example a calorie of protein makes you feel fuller than a calorie of fat, because protein is more complex to metabolise. But his calculations never took into account the energy it takes our cells to metabolise food in order to use it. ![]() There was an American chemist in the 19th century called Wilbur Olin Atwater who calculated the calorie numbers for different foods, by working out the total energy intake you get from them. In his new book, Why Calories Don’t Count, Yeo explains that what really matters is not how many calories a particular food contains, but how that food is digested and absorbed by your body.Ĭan you explain why you feel calorie-counting is a flawed approach to weight loss? But according to Giles Yeo, a Cambridge University research scientist who studies the genetics of obesity, there’s one problem: not all calories are created equal. S ince the dawn of the 20th century, almost all weight loss guidelines have used calories as a simple measure of how much energy we’re consuming from our food.
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