You are not different

Introduction: Yet another piece from a never to be finished project. It was brought to mind by a current forum poster who suggested that somehow perhaps she was able to synthesize one pound of fat (containing 3,500 calories) from only 300 calories of food. Chapter 6: You are not different I figure I might as well get this out of the way sooner rather than later. At least then you can take this book back for a refund if (when) you don't like what I'm going to say next.

It no longer amazes me how many people will vociferously argue that "My metabolism is different" when it comes to a discussion of diet for either fat loss or muscle gain. While I used to think this only went on in overweight individuals, I've found that athletes and bodybuilders pull the same types of crap. These are frequently the same folks who refuse to even consider a different approach, even if what they're currently doing isn't working (see rule #1 in the last chapter). Weird.

Individuals who have a lot of fat to lose either think that they can magically gain weight eating only a few hundred calories per day, or that they can lose weight just by rearranging their food in some special way. Diets play on this of course, hiding the simple fact that they are causing you to eat less in a complicated pseudoscience of macronutrient ratios and such. But there is rarely any true magic: it all comes down to eating less or exercising more.

Before you think I'm just coming down on overweight individuals, let me say that bodybuilders and athletes want to magically gain muscle and lose fat with a similar rearrangement of nutrients. That by adding some magical nutrient (usually an overpriced supplement) will make them start gaining muscle (or losing fat) without changing the dynamics of the energy balance equation. In the same way diet books play on the frailties of overweight individuals, supplement companies play on the frailties of the athletes telling them to "Use this product if you aren't gaining" when the real problem lies with the diet or training program.

In short: you can't beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different. You can't gain bodymass unless your energy intake exceeds your energy output because you can't make something out of nothing (muscle or fat). And you can't lose bodymass unless your energy intake is less than your energy ouput. These are rules that every system in the universe has to follow, including the human body. Nature's rules, not mine to quote the all-knowing Mr. Miyagi. We may not like them, but we have to live by them anyway.

A quick tangent about energy balance

To get a bit ahead, this has to do with energy balance which gets a lot of chapters of discussion later on. In short, energy balance is the difference beteween your energy expendtiure (determined by your metabolic rate, activity and some other stuff) and your energy intake (your food). The difference between those two (whether expenditure exceeds intake or vice versa) determines what happens to bodymass, whether it goes up or down or stays the same. This is even ignoring the body's tremendous ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Yes, you can introduce some slight inefficiencies into the equation, and the body can adapt in a variety of incredible (and incredibly depressing) ways. But it still basically comes down to the energy balance equation.

Back to the point

People all want desparately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn't as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren't really the case. I really do. I'm mentioning that so you don't just think I'm peeing on your parade. I wish that through some nifty manipulation of macronutrient percentages you could magically get fat loss or muscle/weight gain without changing the energy balance equation.

I'd sell a lot more copies of this book if I told you it was possible. But except for some very minor effects with such manipulations (that will look like magic but are actually easily explained from basic physiological principles), it's not going to happen and I won't tell you it can. Once again, it's not that I don't want to believe that such is possible, but the reality is that it simply can't.

Once you get past all the details, all the issues of metabolic efficiency and repartitioning coefficients (don't worry, this will all make sense later on) and all that techie crap, it comes right back down to calorie/energy/nutrient balance in the big scheme of things. Controlled (and that's the key word here) studies clearly bear this out.

People who will claim with their dying breath "I can't lose weight." or "I can't gain weight." can be shown to do so when their caloric intake and caloric output is strictly controlled (meaning in a lab where every meal is meticulously weighed and measured) to accomplish one or the other. Create a large enough caloric deficit, or a large enough caloric surplus, and something simply HAS to happen. Either metabolism adapts (see below) or bodyweight changes.

It might not be fun, it might not be sustainable, but it will happen. As a buddy of mine once asked: "Why don't you ever see a fat person come out of a concentration camp?" But that's essentially what a fat person claiming they can't lose weight on 500 calories per day is suggesting can happen. Because in the face of low enough calories and sufficient activity, weight has to be lost. Or the person dies. Nothing else can happen. Yet folks seem intent on believing that somehow the basic laws of the universe apply to everyone but them.

It's not uncommon to find individuals who will claim that "I don't eat that much and I gain weight" or "I eat a ton and can't gain weight." which seems to put me in my place and prove me wrong. In research, there's typically been two attitudes towards these types of statements. The first is that there is truly some metabolic/thermodynamic miracle occurring. The second is that people are just really bad at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Turns out that number two is what's usually going on.

Invariably, when you get an honest assessment of the person's food intake (just accept that it can be done right now), their estimates are way off from reality. Studies show that people may under (or overestimate) their true caloric intake by up to 50%. Basically, unless they've done it for a while, most people are simply horrible at estimating how much food they are actually eating. Same thing for exercise, people tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they've burned.

So when you ask them to compare their food intake to their energy expenditure, they'll tend to say that they eat very little and burn very much, and be totally off of reality. So what they are expecting to happen to their weight isn't the same as what's going to happen to their weight (based on the realities of the energy balance equation).

A lot of the problem is that food intake is measured by survey and people's memories are notoriously bad, we tend to remember the good days and report those and forget that cake binge or the party last weekend. Health conscious individuals who are concerned with the appearance of health won't report that trip to McDonald's for a cheeseburger so that their fat intake will look lower than it really is as well. This makes it tremendously difficult for researchers to get an accurate measurement of how people really eat.

Even the act of writing down your food intake every day makes people eat differently, so studies where subjects are required to keep a written log (instead of relying on memory) tend to be misleading as well. The only way to really measure calorie intake and expenditure is in a lab where food intake is striclty controlled and measured, and activity is strictly measured. This gets expensive fast. But when you do it, you always find that people simply suck at estimating how much they're really eating or exercising.

A friend of mine who does research on alcohol intake tells me that the same thing goes on: college students, who don't want to look like alcholics in training, will vastly under-report how much they are really drinking on surveys. Meaning studies that rely on college students to be honest get a very misleading view of reality. If you believe the studies, there is little drinking going on on a college campus. Go visit one on a Thursday night and tell me if that's reality.

There's also the issue of people telling researchers what they think the researchers want to hear making it tough to get a really accurate report from anybody. Do you really think that such a small percentage of folks cheat on their spouses (what surveys invariably show) or are people just lying to the researchers? Probably the latter. Humans are simply screwy when it comes to this sort of thing, even when they're trying to be honeset. And animal studies can only tell us so much when it comes to the issue.

This is why, a little later on, I'm going to strongly suggest you spend some time truly measuring your food intake, with scales, measuring spoons and all of that stuff. It is a huge pain in the ass but a very necessary one for a lot of people. You might be surprised at the difference between how much you think you're eating and how much you're really eating.

Anyway to finish up, if there were truly an exception to this simple thermodynamic rule, the government would need to study it because that person would be a living breathing fusion reactor, able to make calories out of thin air ; or able to burn them off to an unlimited degree. They could use that person's body to develop free energy machines to provide unlimited energy for the world if one of these people truly existed. You know where this is going even if you don't really want to believe it. I can picture you digging for your book receipt now, trying to straighten all the bent pages so that you can get a refund. But before you do, there's a big 'however' coming up. So at least finish this chapter before you throw the book down in disgust because it's not what you want to hear.

However, not everybody has it as easy as everybody else

Before you go ballstic on me and start composing a nasty letter to my publisher (which is probably me anyhow), I'll be the first to admit that not everybody has it easy as others. Some people's bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can't lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.

Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined. It probably has to do with how these individuals brains perceive changes in caloric intake which determines how their brains react to those changes. Some people's bodies simply increase metabolic rate more quickly (or drop it more quickly) in response to increased or decreased calories. You can see similar variations in terms of what's lost during dieting; given the same diet and exercise program, some people will lose a lot more muscle than another.

And we all have that one friend who eats nothing but ice cream and soda and never gains a pound. Of course, when you look closely, you find that the person really isn't eating as much as it looks like overall, or they are only eating that one big meal per day that you happened to see, or they are burning it off because they are constantly moving (in essence, they fidget the excess calories off), or they compensate the next day after eating a lot and eat very little so that overall they maintain their weight.

These people's brains sense the caloric excess more readily and either blunt hunger harder and faster, or get the person to move more, to burn it off. The same thing happens in reverse, some people's metabolic rates slow down faster when calories are restricted, or makes them move around less during the day so they burn fewer calories, making further fat loss a lot harder. I'll talk about more specifics in the chapters on metabolic rate but it turns out the the ability to adapt to either increasing or decreasing calories is quite significant and highly variable; some people really do have it easier (or harder) than others.

So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just 'fit' their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I hate being silly.

But that doesn't change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It's a physiological impossibility because you can't make something out of nothing. There's lots of things like this, that you simply can't do. You can't make gold out of lead, you can't get a stripper to work on credit, and you can't store 500 calories if you only ate 300.

So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren't being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. I'm not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad.

Which is why you can't magically gain weight on 1000 calories per day if your maintenance intake is 2000 calories per day. Either your body will mobilize stored fuels, or it will slow down metabolic rate to 1000 to put you back into balance. Something has to happen. But weight gain on sub-maintenance calories isn't one of them.

It's also why you can't not gain weight on 3000 calories per day if your metabolic rate is only 2000 calories per day. Either you start storing fuel or your body is speeding up metabolic rate to compensate. Something has to happen.

I'll mention again that you can skew this relationship a little bit by using some nutritional tricks. This is called repartitioning where you trick the body to shuttle calories from one place to another without really changing total bodyweight. Repartitioning agents will look like a thermodynamic miracle. They kind of are but not really. The calories aren't magically appearing or disappearing, you're just affecting where they go. So it's no miracle, it's just nifty and helpful from a body recomposition point of view.

So why bother?

At this point you may be wondering why you should bother with all of the details I'm going to present if it's really just calories in vs. calories out. Note that in this chapter I've carefully referred to only changes in weight. If all you care about is losing or gaining weight, and don't care about the quality of what you're gaining or losing, just find a way to increase or decrease calories and you'll be fine. I can sum up a diet for you in 3 sentences: "Eat less. Exercise more. Repeat." If you just want to gain weight and don't care what you gain, I can also sum it up in 3 sentences: "Eat more. Exercise less. Repeat."

But, if you're concerned with what you're losing or gaining (in terms of body composition), it does matter to a degree where the calories come from. A 2000 calorie/day diet that is 100% carbohydrate will cause different amounts of fat and muscle loss than a 2000 calories/day diet that is 100% protein. It also matters what kind of activity (none vs. aerobics only vs. weight training) you do. Basically, while you can't drastically affect how quickly the weight comes off or goes on, you can change what comes off or goes on. Which is what body recomposition is all about.