The mathematics of weight loss. What's the real deal with calories? I'm gonna
explain it so you get it once and for all.
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you like to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. So I saw
a very interesting video it was a very geeky and illustrating video I love that
sort of stuff it was by Reuben mere man is called the mathematics of weight loss
and he was asking a question and he said when you lose weight where does it
actually go and none of the people that he asked knew that of course because
they hadn't read physiology if you have read physiology you know that fat is
stored in long chains of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and when you breathe
in and you convert you metabolize under the use of oxygen with the use of oxygen
you turn that carbon and those components into carbon dioxide and water
so basically all that fat that you're burning you breathe it out as carbon
dioxide and water and you can't see it so you don't know that it's happening
but that's how it works so then he admitted to being a physicist which he
was a great one it was very entertaining but he admitted to not being an expert
on weight loss and not knowing much about health but he went on to say that
what worked for him was to eat less and exercise more so his conclusion was that
all you have to do to lose weight is eat less move more and keep breathing so
while that is good advice biology doesn't work quite like that because
physics and chemistry have a set of rules they're very very rigid that very
precise and they work in a physics lab and in a chemistry test tube but biology
is different biology is governed by on the rule so while biology is
combination of biochemistry and physiology the biochemistry asked
answers what happens how did the molecules combine but physiology asks
and answers why why does this happen and the big reason is that we live in an
environment biology human living beings we interact with our environment for the
purpose of survival and under the influence of hormones so let's talk
about that and let's talk about how calories really work so let's say that
the average person just for simplicity burns a hundred calories an hour and you
learn a little more here and a little less there but just average it out and
keep it simple what we have to know is that your body can store a certain
amount of carbohydrate as glycogen but it's very limited for most people is
somewhere around 1,500 calories and that's represented by this skinny little
rectangle here on the other hand your body can store unlimited amounts of fat
so an obese person might have 500 thousand calories stored as fat and a
relatively thin person like myself is still gonna have about a hundred
thousand calories stored as fat so we have a lot of potential for fat storage
but we don't have a whole lot of room for carbohydrate storage so what we all
want to understand here is that fat is made up of carbon hydrogen and oxygen
which ironically is the exact same thing that makes up carbohydrate so these
things are interchangeable they can go from one to the other so when the body
starts storing carbohydrate and it runs out of room it turns the rest of the
carbohydrate into fat of which you have an unlimited amount of storage so let's
look at the life in the day of a carbohydrate eater
what does it look like so let's say you've filled up your carbohydrate
stores before you went to bed and through the night
you burned 800 calories and half of that was fat and half of that was
carbohydrate just for simplicity that means in the morning your carbohydrate
stores have burned up 400 calories that means they have room for 400 calories of
carbohydrate so you wake up at 8:00 in the morning and you have a cup of coffee
and you have a slice of toast with some jam on it and you have some milk with
cereal and it doesn't really matter which cereal because they're all grain
they're all carbohydrate whether you call it corn or rice or sugar or granola
it's all carbohydrate so with that breakfast let's say it's 600 calories
your blood sugar is gonna rise very very quickly and your body doesn't like that
it likes blood sugar in a very narrow range it likes to have between eighty to
a hundred and twenty milligrams of blood sugar floating around that means you
have about 1 teaspoon of blood sugar floating around at any given time so
that's all one teaspoon you burn a little bit you replenish a little bit
you burn a little bit to replenish a little bit with emphasis on a little bit
and this is not a little bit this is an enormous amount it's a threat it's an
emergency it's toxic to the brain diabetics go
unconscious they get into a coma when the blood sugar gets too high so with
that kind of breakfast and use some insulin resistance your blood sugar
might get up into the two three four hundred range and now because your body
your brain wants to live it tells the body to make a lot of insulin what is
insulin do insulin takes the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cell and
because you only had room for so much carbohydrate you quickly fill up the
stores the excess get turns into fat and by that mechanism insulin is a fat storing
hormone so it's not about how many calories you eat or how many you burn
it's how do the hormones regulate it and how do the hormones regulate your
behavior because if the food you eat triggers insulin that makes it fat
storing that's why a hundred calories of fat is not the same as a hundred
calories of carbohydrate because when you eat it it influences hormones
differently now insulin gets really really high because blood sugar is
really hot you gotta get it out of there fast so blood sugar starts dropping and
it drops fast because there's a lot of insulin and because it drops so quickly
it tends to overshoot and now we have what's called reactive hypoglycemia and
when you're hypoglycemic what happens is your brain doesn't have enough blood
sugar and now it says I gotta have some you get shaky you get hungry you get
tired you get irritable you lose focus you just don't function well you just
don't feel good until you can get some more blood sugar so there's two ways
your body can do that it can release cortisol which will start pulling from
these glycogen stores again so you have some carbohydrate stored and cortisol is
released to raise blood sugar by pulling from those stores but you can also raise
blood sugar by eating sugar that's the fastest way so when you have a craving
and there's a vending machine around the corner your body is gonna take you like
a robot over to that vending machine and you buy yourself a granola bar or a
Snickers bar or a honey bun or something like that so now your blood sugar shoots
up again you make a bunch of insulin your blood sugar
drops you get another hypoglycemia and then now we've reached noon and you're
ready for lunch so let's look at what actually happens here as far as storage
so you wake up you have used 400 calories of carbs during the night you
can store 400 if you ate six hundred for breakfasts in between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
you have used 200 calories of fuel the extra 400 got into the bloodstream and
then they were pushed out of the bloodstream that means that they are
stored the extra 400 stores so now your glycogen stores are full and anything
that you eat from this point is going to be stored as fat so you eat another 400
which takes you through noon and now you have burned 200 more but 200 has been
turned into fat and they have been stored now you go to lunch and you eat
another 800 calories then by 3:00 p.m. you have burned 300 calories in 3 hours
but you ate 800 they're no longer in the bloodstream that means they got
converted into fat so now you have 500 calories in fat stores plus the 200 in
fat stores and because it was a big lunch you make it all the way to 3 p.m.
and then you have another snack maybe a coffee and a doughnut maybe another
Snickers bar and you make it all the way to dinner and then you eat another 800
and so it goes so at the end of the day you might have eaten 3000 calories which
for most people might be a little too much but why did you eat too much
because you triggered insulin insulin is fat storing in the presence of insulin
which is fat storing you do not have complete access to that fat you
have trained your body away from using fat into depending on carbohydrates so
your body doesn't know how to get to this and therefore every time you need
more blood sugar you get cravings and you go like a hummingbird to top off
your blood sugar every couple of hours this is the problem with eating many
small meals it's better to eat many small meals of low carb foods but that's
not what most people do and the best way is not to eat carbs much at all and then
what you find is you don't really need to eat many meals you don't need to top
off your blood sugar so let's look at how that works let's say that you eat a
very low carb diet that you're fully fat adapted your body knows how to burn fat
for fuel now you wake up with a blood sugar of about 85 that's very very
stable it's a sweet spot that's an ideal blood sugar you wake up you have a cup
of coffee with with some butter you have some bulletproof coffee and even though
fat doesn't technically trigger insulin it's probably a trigger just a little
bit anything that you eat triggers just a little bit but you might go from 85 to
90 milligrams of blood sugar so no huge reaction no roller coaster you your
blood sugar is level and you're just coasting along and you don't really get
hungry to lunch ask people who have been on a low-carb diet for a while they say
I can't make myself eat three meals a day it's just too much they eat when
they get hungry and it's not very often so you get out to lunch and you eat a
huge omelet with lots of cheese and butter and good vegetables and some
beans on the side and some broccoli eat a thousand calories but it's all
low-carb so your blood sugar doesn't change much it
might go from 90 to 110 but it never gets to the point where you need a ton
of insulin so now your blood Sugar's stay stable you burn a little you
replenish a little you burn a little you replenish a little the body doesn't have
to go through any convoluted mechanisms of compensation to make things work
so you coast along and you get out to about six seven o'clock and you have
dinner and the same thing happens you eat low carb you eat a thousand calories
and your blood sugar is stable so the difference here is that you're not gonna
store the fat that you eat does not get stored as fat it gets used it gets
burned as energy because your body likes to burn fat for energy and if you don't
trigger that insulin which is a storage hormone you won't store it over here he
will just kind of float around in your system and be available for energy what
upsets the system is the blood sugar roller coaster and that's why you go to
storing fat and not burning fat so in our example of carbohydrates you ate
3000 calories but throughout the day you stored 1200 calories each day as fat and
as long as you keep this roller coaster going and you develop insulin resistance
you don't have full access to this fat so it doesn't matter how many hundred
thousand calories you have you you're rich in terms of fuel but you can't get
to it it's it's in the vault and the lock for the vault is called insulin
it's like a vicious guard dog it just keeps it in there so this is what we
have to understand it's not the calories it is what happens to the calories
depending on hormones so while this is brilliant and
geeky and I love it it's works in a physics lab it doesn't work in biology
because biology has additional rules on top of physics and they're called
hormones hormones are triggered by different foods fat does not trigger
insulin carbohydrates trigger insulin that's the difference and hormones will
change behavior they'll change the behavior of the cells the cells will
store fat in the presence of insulin they won't store fat in the absence of
insulin and hormones will change human behavior they'll change your focus
they'll change your hunger they'll change your cravings they'll change your
mood they'll change your motivation they'll change your ability to stay on
track so it is a whole lot more to it then eat less and exercise more and keep
breathing so now what you want to do is you want to go watch that video because
it's hugely entertaining it has some good information but keep this in mind
and if you need a refresher then you come back and you watch this again and
you need to know this stuff well enough that you can explain it to someone else
because there's a lot of people out there that need to know this if you know
a hundred people eighty of them are insulin resistant and they're heading
toward a future of degenerative disease because of it so share this with as many
people as you can because this is life-saving stuff and if you're new to
this channel make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell
so we can keep this content coming your way thanks for watching