In our last post, I proposed that we might find it constructive to stop thinking about obesity as a problem of “overeating” and reframe it as one of “overstoring.”

Why? Because the “overstoring” frame changes our focus.

It forces us to ask a basic question: WHY might we store too much fat? To understand this, we need to look “under the hood” of our own bodies at the mechanisms by which we store and burn fat. Because those mechanisms are the fundamental key to determining, on a cellular level, how much fat we hold onto and how much we burn. Think about it. There has to be a way — or several ways — for fat to “get into” your fat cells. What are they? We need to know! It’s not magic. It’s biochemistry. So what biochemistry is relevant? If don’t know — if we just focus on something abstract, like “calories” — then we’re flying blind.

I call the complete catalogue of all the mechanisms that might matter the “Black Box.”

You can think about the Black Box as like the control panel for an aircraft. All the dials and switches and throttles and stuff. And you can think of “calories stored” as your altitude. In our metaphor, the higher you fly equals the fatter you get.

In order for your plane to go 20,000 feet into the air, you must “increase your elevation” by 20,000 feet.

But. Who. Freaking. Cares?

If you want to pilot your plane properly, you need to work the controls right. If your plane is crashing — or hurtling helplessly towards the stratosphere — the problem has nothing to do with your change in altitude, in and of itself. It has to do with your loss of control over the mechanisms of the aircraft.

So what ARE those mechanisms? What’s IN the Black Box?

Find out in a few days. This is gonna be good… :]

If you want to shortcut the wait, please check out my free report, Caloriegate.

Welcome subscribers and stumblers!

If you’ve ever been confused about why you can’t lose fat — or why you keep losing fat and then regaining — if you’re perpetually perplexed, then I recommend that you read the following blog post series. It’s not really a substitute for my free report, Caloriegate, which I highly urge you to download. :] But it will hopefully be helpful and interesting and eye-opening for you.

So here we go….

Most people think that obesity is caused by overeating calories — “eating more than you burn.” Indeed, out of everything you’ve heard about weight loss, this idea is championed as the single inviolable rule. It is the first principle — the thing we all assume must be true — when we talk about health and weight loss. And when I say “we,” I mean practically every educated person and nearly 100% of the professional researchers who study obesity and tell us what to do about it.

Now, before you pillory me as a quack for “denying” common sense or the laws of physics, please realize that I am familiar with the law of conservation of mass — the reason we talk about “calories” in the first place. I understand and accept that, in order to go from 120 pounds to 220 pounds, you must technically have “overeaten” 100 pounds’ worth of calories. You cannot create mass on your body from nowhere – it has to come from somewhere. Likewise, somewhere along your dieting journey from 220 pounds back to 120 pounds, you must “burn off more calories than you eat.”

But this focus on calories is not only misguided; it’s ultimately meaningless! I would go as far as to say that it is the source of our misery — the cause and perpetuating force behind the obesity epidemic that’s crippling our country.

After all, you can make the same type of true-but-empty statements about calories when you talk about any type of growth on the human body. In order for me to grow hair on my head (back when I could grow hair on my head), I have to consume more calories than I burn. The “stuff” that makes up my hair can’t come from nowhere. Same thing for a pregnant woman. In order for her to grow a baby in her tummy, she must consume more calories than she burns. If not, where would her body acquire the material she needs to make the baby? From thin air? No. She must eat more than she burns.

But ultimately, who cares that she eats more than she burns? What we care about is the WHY. WHY does a baby grow in mommy’s tummy? The answer is complicated. It involves all sorts of hormones, genes, and what have you. But unless she’s starving, we don’t care about her calorie intake. I’m not saying she doesn’t need food to make the baby. She does. But food doesn’t CAUSE the baby to grow.

We can go on and on with this line of reasoning. Because any time your body grows in any way, you must “eat more than you burn.” Mass must be conserved. But just knowing this truism gives us no information — and I mean ZERO information — about the cause or causes of the growth and what can be done about it, if the growth is out of control.

Let’s bring this all back to the topic of fat loss.

We’re so used to talking about obesity as a problem of “eating more than you burn.” But this way of thinking is needlessly ornate. It’s far simpler — scientists would say it’s more “parsimonious” — to say obesity is a condition of overstoring fat.

You’re “storing more fat than you’re burning.”

Now, this may seem like splitting hairs. But these two ways of framing the problem are actually quite different. They lead to different solutions. And if you’re struggling to lose weight and keep it off, understanding these differences can make all the difference.

More on this topic in our next post…

There is a fun little game I fantasize about playing, if/when I ever get invited onto a cable news show as a guest, and I get locked into a debate with some angry idiot blowhard.

I will wait patiently for my turn to talk. After the guy finishes fulminating, the camera will pivot to me. But instead of saying anything — a rebuttal, a defensive reply or what have you — I’ll just put my finger to my lips like I am shhhing a two year old. And I will shhh him:

“Shhhhhhh,” I’ll say, in a patronizing tone. “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

A few beats will pass as the guest and the host stare at me in stunned silence. Then, inevitably, one of them will pipe up: “What are you try—”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” will come my response. “Shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shhhh.” My face gets red with the effort.

For the rest of the segment, I’ll hover my finger over my lips and blow “shhh” as loud as I can, whenever anyone starts to try to talk again. Ideally, the noise will be so loud that it will drown out whatever nonsense they prattle on about.

Could be a fun little game — a way to make an otherwise blah CNN segment go viral.

Think about it, if/when you next have the chance to speak on a news show …

Today Caloriegate is excited to bring you an exclusive interview with a rising star in the world of online health/fitness writing, Armistead Legge, a self-declared “entrepreneur, writer, personal trainer, research analyst, and sponsored triathlete.”

Armi works with Dave Asprey of The Bulletproof Executive blogging about diet, health, biohacking, crazy power-coffee, and other fascinating stuff.

When you read his stuff and chat with him, it’s hard to believe he’s still a teenager. Holy Prodigy, Batman!

We do part ways when it comes to the whole calories issue. But in any event, I’m guessing you’ll find his story and perspective quite compelling.

Welcome Armi! And thanks for doing this interview. 

You had a long, strange journey into the realm of health and fitness journalism. Would you briefly talk about your experience — how you came to believe what you currently believe about health and fitness?

I’ve always been interested in health and fitness from an early age.  My dad has been doing triathlons for over 30 years, and I started doing them when I was eight.  I began experimenting with different foods and training methods to improve my performance.

I did my best to follow the current health recommendations, but I wasn’t pleased with the results.  I have never been over 12% body fat, but I knew I could be leaner and recover faster.

I’ve always tried to be an objective person, and there were too many contradictions coming from mainstream health authorities.  I don’t like to compromise on my health.  I was told saturated fat was bad, so I stopped eating it.  The same was true for red meat.  I was told saturated fat was okay in moderation, but “moderation” isn’t an objective value.

I am an all or nothing person.  I tend to see things in black and white.  This isn’t always a good thing.  I became obsessed with calories and developed an eating disorder.  I restricted food to the point that I almost died – twice.  Before being admitted to the hospital, I was 5’8, and 92 pounds, with a heart rate of 32 beats per minute.  I could barely walk.

I was placed in a rehab facility at John’s Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore Maryland.  What commenced was the worst experience of my life.  The doctors at John’s Hopkins were ignorant to almost all research regarding nutrition.  They used a meal program based on the American Diabetic Association’s guidelines.  You were required to eat a cretin number of servings of different foods based on their glycemic index and carbohydrate content.  Chocolate pudding was a “meat.”  Coca-Cola was a “fruit.”  Peanut butter was a “meat.”  Most of the calories came from bread – lots of bread.  Butter was replaced with margarine because it was “heart healthy.”

Movement of any kind was also forbidden.  I was required to sit in a chair 16 hours a day.

No attention was paid to food quality.  There were times when I would go over a week without a single fresh fruit or vegetable.  When I asked about getting my blood tested for nutrient deficiencies, I was punished because they said I was being obsessive.

I was only allowed to drink 24 ounces of water each day with meals (you should drink to thirst, but the minimum general recommendation is around 128 ounces from food and drink).  Needless to say, I got dehydrated.  Instead of letting me drink more, they shoved an IV in my arm for three weeks.

Just as there was no attention paid to food quality, none was paid to the quality of weight gained.  Your total weight was all that mattered, not your body composition.  Being a thirteen year old kid, this wasn’t as much of an issue.  I have never been fat, and I stayed fairly lean through the entire process.  Others weren’t so lucky.  People with over 30% body fat were considered healthy because they were a “normal” weight.

I trusted the doctors at first.  I went home and followed their guidelines, but I felt depressed, weak, lethargic, and had horrible anxiety and anger.  I was miserable, and ended up starving myself again.  I was forced back into the hospital.

This time I spent every waking second doing my own research on PubMed.  I had a lot of free time, so I would sometimes do over 8 hours of research each day.  I think it’s fair to say I knew more about nutrition than any of the doctors in that hospital.

When I came home, I started implementing what I learned.  I stopped eating grains, legumes, and processed dairy.  I started optimizing macronutrients to fit my goals.  I had never heard of the paleo diet at that time, but that’s basically what I was eating.

My current beliefs are a reflection of the research.  I looked at the data, started experimenting, and came to my own conclusions.  I was exposed to the most irrational and ridiculous kind of treatment, and responded by being as rational and objective as possible.  It’s worked well so far.

I continued to do my own research and refine my ideas.  Now I get paid to do research.

How did you meet Dave Asprey and get involved with The Bulletproof Executive? What about his work and his approach inspired you?

I started blogging about what I had learned in December of 2010.  I decided to become a writer because that was the best medium to share my information.  By this point I was already determined to become a health consultant.  I started interviewing experts on my podcast, and invited Dave on for the second episode.  We started talking, and in the next few days he asked if I would be interested in working as a researcher and writer for his blog, The Bulletproof Executive.  I said yes.

Dave came from a similar background as me.  He was 300 pounds, obese, felt sick all the time, and was in awful health.  He was doing what his doctors said and it wasn’t working.  He started hacking his body and doing his own research to find solutions.  What attracted me was his focus on brain function.  No one in the blogosphere was or is talking about ways to make your brain work better – except Dave.  In terms of diet, he focuses more on food quality and toxin exposure than other health writers, especially mycotoxins.  He’s also a coffee nerd, like me.

Dave is a great guy to work with and we have a lot of fun.

Which diet/exercise/bio-hacking insight has given you the most leverage and results?

The best supplements: Hydrolyzed collagen protein and Bulletproof Upgraded Coffee Beans.

Brain hacking software: Bulletproof i3 Mindware training.

Top overall biohack: HeartMath emWave training.

Top exercise biohack: Reverse Pyramid weight training.

Diet: Nothing has changed since meeting Dave, but I made several large changes beforehand.  The greatest thing that changed my performance and health was optimizing my micronutrient status.  I started taking the right supplements, avoiding grains and other substances which interfere with nutrient absorption, and eating grass-fed meat.  I recover faster, feel better, and never get sick.

What’s your favorite part about helping people get healthy?

There are two things.  The first reason is selfish.  I do it so I can spend my time researching and testing methods for health improvement on myself, and then being able to make money by helping others do the same.  I would be doing what I do now whether I got paid or not.  By charging others for my services, I can make it a sustainable practice.

The second reason is about improving the lives of others.  What I do makes people better at everything, and allows them to avoid problems most people have to deal with.  Being healthy allows you to not take sick days, be more focused and productive, have more confidence, think clearer, interact with others more effectively, and get dates.  Health is the foundation for all actions and thoughts.  Without health, you can’t think or act.  If you don’t agree, find someone dying of heart disease and obesity and tell me they couldn’t accomplish more if they were healthier.

For people who’ve already bought into the low carb/Paleo message… What biohacks should they explore to get even better results?

There are several:

Stress management.  This is probably the most underrated of all health topics.  Once you’ve optimized your diet, stress should be next on the list.

Sleep.  Most people don’t get enough total sleep, or high quality sleep.  Many people start eating right and get frustrated when they aren’t making progress.  They don’t lose weight or fat.  Then they start sleeping 8 hours a night and everything changes.  They get leaner, their recovery improves, and their performance goes through the roof.  Sleep matters.

Weight training.  Every human on earth should be lifting heavy weights on a regular basis, excluding people who have some illness that precludes them from doing so.  You will feel stronger, more confident, and live longer by lifting weights.

Supplementation.  It’s almost impossible to get all of your nutrition form food.  A recent analysis published in The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition found you would have to eat 33,500 calories a day to meet all of your micronutrient needs if you were following a diet very similar to the one recommended by the USDA.¹  Following the Atkins diet, you would have to eat 37,500 calories a day.  On average, you would have to eat 27,575 calories a day to meet your nutrient requirements.  This is assuming the RDI is high enough for all nutrients (it isn’t).  The best way to increase nutrient intake is to eat beef liver and avoid foods which block nutrient absorption (like whole meal products).  Even then, a little supplementation is necessary.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20537171

Play.  The purpose of life is to enjoy yourself.  If you aren’t spending at least one hour a day doing something you absolutely love – something is wrong.

Have any of your biohacks backfired; and, if so, what were the results?

Yes, several.

Massively restricting calories to improve performance almost killed me – twice.

I tried polyphasic sleep last summer in the middle of triathlon season.  My performance, recovery, and mood were destroyed.  Kids and athletes should never restrict sleep if they have the choice.

To what degree do you think we can blame carbs and sugar on obesity and chronic disease? What other factors are important and may be crucial to “count”? 

We can’t.  I don’t agree with Taubes and others that carbs and sugar are to blame.  There are numerous randomized controlled trials* showing that macronutrients have virtually no effect on total weight loss in the long term.^2–17

When researchers pooled the data, there was absolutely no difference in weight loss or energy expenditure between high carb or low carb diets.^18,19

Ensuring the person consumes adequate protein prevents almost all muscle loss, but in terms of total weight loss – it doesn’t matter.  There is no metabolic advantage of removing carbs or gorging on protein.

This isn’t to say low carb diets don’t work.  A large body of research shows restricting carbohydrates has beneficial effects on triglyceride levels, HDL-C, insulin sensitivity, and glucose control on obese or sedentary people.^20–22

Low carb diets tend to do better in the first six months, which would also provide much needed motivation.²³  No diet works if you don’t stick with the program, and fast results are likely to improve adherence.

There is also a wide variation in how certain people respond to different dietary treatments.  People with poor insulin sensitivity often experience greater weight loss on low carb diets, and people with better insulin sensitivity experience greater weight loss on low carb diets.²³

A caloric deficit is necessary for weight loss.  That said, I think telling people to simply move more and exercise less is ridiculous.  People just don’t do it, and for obese people, exercise makes a very small contribution to weight loss.  You have to provide strategies which make a caloric deficit easier.

The best research I’ve seen so far on this problem is from Stephan Guyenet.  He’s written the finest compilation of evidence behind something called the Food Reward Theory of Obesity.  Basically, that excessive reward from food (taste, feelings, texture, smell, color, etc) all contribute to overeating.  This is supported by dozens of papers, and the simple observation that hyper-palatable food is easier to overeat.  No one eats 5000 calories worth of steak.  Almost everyone can eat 5000 calories worth of cheesecake.  If this doesn’t make sense, Richard Nikoley recently published a very simple description of this idea.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-reward-hypothesis-of.html

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-reward-hypothesis-of_07.html

http://freetheanimal.com/2012/02/synthesis-low-carb-and-food-rewardpalatability-and-why-calories-count.html

I think you can still blame some of the obesity and poor health in this country on sugar and carbs, but they aren’t the sole cause.  They’re easy to overeat and readily available.  However, it comes down to self restraint if you want to avoid them.  There are almost infinite contributors to obesity, but several stand out as being more important than others.

Stress

Lack of sleep

Gut dysbiosis

Infections

Lack of proper exercise and movement

Food exposure and abundance

Food toxins

Environmental toxins like xenoestrogens (BPA, mycotoxins).

Lack of play and joy.

Another contributor to obesity is government intervention.  Subsidies support foods which make people sick and fat, then people are told to eat less and move more with poor suggestions for how to do so.  The government also subsidizes drugs which give people a false sense of security, and in some cases damage their health even more.  They also subsidize and support wheat, corn, soybeans, feed-lots, and pretty much everything else junk food is made of.  People often ask how junk food can be so cheap.  The truth is it wouldn’t be without subsidies from the government.  To top it off, they are making things like raw milk illegal, and grass-fed meat almost impossible to buy.  To quote Robb Wolf, “Whether the government comes with a firing squad or dietary advice, the result is always the same.”

What’s the biggest myth about healthy living that trips up people who have already bought into the low carb / Paleo message?

There are three mistakes I see people making more than any other.

1. The idea that studies can “prove” anything.

This is something people often say when confronted with overwhelming evidence that goes against their views.  Instead of acknowledging it might be time to change their minds, they attempt the discredit the research by saying, in essence, that you can’t prove anything.

It’s true that you can manipulate almost any study to show a certain viewpoint, but this doesn’t make it fact (see Denise Minger’s debunking of the China study, or the latest study on red meat).

When you take an objective look at the data, truths become more apparent.  There are no contradictions in science.  There are contradictions in how we perceive the evidence.  This doesn’t mean we have everything figured out.  It means there are objective truths that we are capable of discovering through research, and when enough critical thinking is performed, these truths become apparent.

If anyone is interested in more on this topic, Jeff Thibotot (doingspeed.com) wrote a post about this on January 24th.

2. Disregarding everything someone has to say because you don’t agree with them.

It’s okay to disagree.  Too often, we stop listening to smart people because we don’t agree with everything they say.  One example is Gary Taubes.  The first half of Good Calories Bad Calories is one of the best debunkings of the lipid hypothesis ever written, the last half of his book (on carbs and insulin) was less well done.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a good source of information on some topics.

Alan Aragon is another great example.  He is easily one of the best (and most underrated) researchers in the blogosphere (and elsewhere).  His research review is one of the greatest sources of information available.  That said, I don’t agree with him that grains are an acceptable food source or that most people can meet their micronutrient needs eating a balanced diet, or that saturated fat is a health risk.  It’s okay to disagree.  There’s not need to “pick sides” when it comes to writers and distributors of information.

3. That being rational means blindly following conventional wisdom.

There is this horrible idea that a rational person is someone who only believes mainstream health dogma and only takes advice from people with “MD” after their name.  You might hear people say, “some of my friends really get the whole paleo or low carb thing, but the rational ones think it’s all bogus.”  Rational thought means basing your decisions on facts which were determined by logic.  Any time you stop thinking rationally, you start making bad decisions.

This is more of a psychological/philosophical mistake rather than something small like macronutrient ratios.  Irrational thinking is what gave us the diet heart hypothesis, statin drugs, and subsidies for grains.  All myths are based on irrationality, so by eliminating irrationality and thinking clearly – you stop getting confused by myths.

Eating paleo and/or low carb is rational if you believe the benefits outweigh the negatives.  If it doesn’t make any difference for you, don’t change what you’re doing.

Imagine for a minute: your mission succeeds beyond your wildest imagination. What would the world look like? What would be different?

Personally, I would be living in a house somewhere near a river with mountains, a collection of farm animals, barbells, a shed full of bikes, tons of money, and the government would let businesses function without restrictions (laissez-faire capitalism).  In terms of health…

The people who listen to my advice would be healthier, smarter, and better at everything they do.  They would be happy with themselves and thinking rationally.   This is already happening, so now it’s a matter of expanding.

If you had to boil your message about healthy living down to one short sentence, what would it be?

Be rational.

*  Randomized controlled trials are the only study worth looking at in this regard, as self reported or free living studies are far too inaccurate to produce valid results.  Rat studies don’t count either.

Citations

1. Calton JB. Prevalence of micronutrient deficiency in popular diet plans. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2010;7:24. Available at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2905334&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract. Accessed March 8, 2012.

2. Stern L, Iqbal N, Seshadri P, et al. The effects of low-carbohydrate versus conventional weight loss diets in severely obese adults: one-year follow-up of a randomized trial. Annals of internal medicine. 2004;140(10):778-85. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15148064. Accessed March 19, 2012.

3. KEETON RW, BONE DD. DIETS LOW IN CALORIES CONTAINING VARYING AMOUNTS OF PROTEIN: THEIR EFFECT ON LOSS IN WEIGHT AND ON THE METABOLIC RATE IN OBESE PATIENTS. Archives of Internal Medicine. 1935;55(2):262-270. Available at: http://archinte.ama-assn.org. Accessed March 19, 2012.

4. Manninen AH. Is a calorie really a calorie? Metabolic advantage of low-carbohydrate diets. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2004;1(2):21-6. Available at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2129158&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract. Accessed March 19, 2012.

5. Dansinger ML, Gleason JA, Griffith JL, Selker HP, Schaefer EJ. Comparison of the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets for weight loss and heart disease risk reduction: a randomized trial. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association. 2005;293(1):43-53. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15632335. Accessed March 19, 2012.

6. Johnston CS, Tjonn SL, Swan PD, et al. Ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets have no metabolic advantage over nonketogenic low-carbohydrate diets. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 2006;83(5):1055-61. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16685046. Accessed March 19, 2012.

7. Brinkworth GD, Noakes M, Buckley JD, Keogh JB, Clifton PM. Long-term effects of a very-low-carbohydrate weight loss diet compared with an isocaloric low-fat diet after 12 mo. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 2009;90(1):23-32. Available at: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajcn.2008.27326v1. Accessed March 19, 2012.

8. Foster GD, Wyatt HR, Hill JO, et al. A randomized trial of a low-carbohydrate diet for obesity. The New England journal of medicine. 2003;348(21):2082-90. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12761365. Accessed March 19, 2012.

9. Davy KP, Horton T, Davy BM, Bessessen D, Hill JO. Regulation of macronutrient balance in healthy young and older men. International journal of obesity and related metabolic disorders : journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity. 2001;25(10):1497-502. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11673772. Accessed March 19, 2012.

10. Roy HJ, Lovejoy JC, Keenan MJ, et al. Substrate oxidation and energy expenditure in athletes and nonathletes consuming isoenergetic high- and low-fat diets. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 1998;67(3):405-11. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9497183. Accessed March 19, 2012.

11. Hill J, Peters J, Reed G, et al. Nutrient balance in humans: effects of diet composition. Am J Clin Nutr. 1991;54(1):10-17. Available at: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/1/10. Accessed March 19, 2012.

12. Thomas CD, Peters JC, Reed GW, et al. Nutrient balance and energy expenditure during ad libitum feeding of high-fat and high-carbohydrate diets in humans. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 1992;55(5):934-42. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1570800. Accessed March 19, 2012.

13. Rumpler WV, Seale JL, Miles CW, Bodwell CE. Energy-intake restriction and diet-composition effects on energy expenditure in men. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 1991;53(2):430-6. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1989409. Accessed March 19, 2012.

14. Lean ME, James WP. Metabolic effects of isoenergetic nutrient exchange over 24 hours in relation to obesity in women. International journal of obesity. 1988;12(1):15-27. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3360561. Accessed March 19, 2012.

15. Yerboeket-van de Venne WP, Westerterp KR. Effects of dietary fat and carbohydrate exchange on human energy metabolism. Appetite. 1996;26(3):287-300. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8800484. Accessed March 19, 2012.

16. Astrup A, Buemann B, Christensen NJ, Toubro S. Failure to increase lipid oxidation in response to increasing dietary fat content in formerly obese women. The American journal of physiology. 1994;266(4 Pt 1):E592-9. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8178980. Accessed March 19, 2012.

17. Whitehead JM, McNeill G, Smith JS. The effect of protein intake on 24-h energy expenditure during energy restriction. International journal of obesity and related metabolic disorders : journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity. 1996;20(8):727-32. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8856395. Accessed March 19, 2012.

18. Schoeller DA, Buchholz AC. Energetics of obesity and weight control: does diet composition matter? Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2005;105(5 Suppl 1):S24-8. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15867892. Accessed March 3, 2012.

19. Buchholz AC, Schoeller DA. Is a calorie a calorie? The American journal of clinical nutrition. 2004;79(5):899S-906S. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15113737. Accessed March 19, 2012.

20. Samaha FF, Foster GD, Makris AP. Low-carbohydrate diets, obesity, and metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Current atherosclerosis reports. 2007;9(6):441-7. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18377783. Accessed March 19, 2012.

21. Volek JS, Sharman MJ, Forsythe CE. Modification of Lipoproteins by Very Low-Carbohydrate Diets. J. Nutr. 2005;135(6):1339-1342. Available at: http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/abstract/135/6/1339. Accessed March 19, 2012.

22. Feinman RD, Volek JS. Carbohydrate restriction as the default treatment for type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Scandinavian cardiovascular journal : SCJ. 2008;42(4):256-63. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18609058. Accessed March 19, 2012.

23. Feinman RD, Fine EJ. Thermodynamics and metabolic advantage of weight loss diets. Metabolic syndrome and related disorders. 2003;1(3):209-19. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18370664. Accessed March 19, 2012.

What is obesity? Why do people “get fat”? How can people “lose excess fat”?

These are what I consider to be Level One questions. If we do not have correct answers to these questions, how can we possibly solve our obesity crisis? Quick answer: we cannot.

And so, my friends, it’s time to make a choice.

Do we want to remain enthralled to the idea that “calories count,” the not-so-veiled notion that obese people get and stay obese only because they cannot purge themselves properly of their sinful tendencies towards Sloth and Gluttony?

Or do we want to liberate ourselves from this hideous, illogical, and inhumane belief once and for all and, in so doing, free our bodies and our planet?

The answer is obvious, at least to me: unless and until the idea of calories-in-calories-out (“CICO”) is purged from our society, we are totally doomed. We must free ourselves of the Calorie Wizards’ spell, post haste!

Here’s the antidote — another neat little acronym I’m calling IONO. It stands for:

It’s Overstoring Not Overeating.

Obesity is a disorder of Overstoring Fat, not Overeating Calories.

It’s “simple smart” to fight “simple stupid”!

So who’s with me? Say it with me now:

It’s Overstoring, Not Overeating.

It’s Overstoring, Not Overeating.

It’s Overstoring, Not Overeating.

IONO! IONO! IONO!

Today Caloriegate brings you a fantastic interview with the ever insightful Adele Hite, a MPH/RD candidate at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Adele serves as Executive Director of Healthy Nation Coalition, a group that’s striving to bring positive change to our country’s health/nutrition policies. She’s a former vegetarian who switched over to the low carb life — and in so doing lost weight and saw marked health improvements. Adele has worked with Duke University’s Dr. Eric Westman to educate overweight and diabetic patients about properly formulated low carbohydrate diets.

I first met Adele in 2010 at a conference for the Nutrition and Metabolism Society. She’s a font of knowledge, compassion, and clear thinking. You’re going to gain a ton from reading her answers to some thorny questions that bedevil most of us out there.

Welcome Adele! And thanks for doing this interview.

ADAM: You lived as a vegetarian for 16 years, until health problems forced you to reevaluate your dietary choices. If you could go back in time, to the moment where you decided to be a vegetarian, what would you tell your younger self, knowing what you know now?

ADELE: I would take a laptop with me in my time machine and show my former self the “Time for Timer” public service messages that I remember seeing as a kid.  They were filled with information about the “meat and bones and fish you/need to build up muscle tissue.”  Aside from being a great rhyme, this is the information that I really lost sight of as a vegetarian.

“Appetite control?”  “More protein!”  All the answers were there, but I’d forgotten them.  Instead, I chose to listen to the media, especially the feel-good messages about how eating a vegetarian diet would help feed the hungry and save the planet.  Why I thought that meant good nutrition, I don’t know, but in pursuing nutrition reform, I’ve learned not to discount the cultural belief systems and personal proclivities that underscore even the most “objective” science.  Ideology and science end up sharing much of the same space in a lot of paradigms, and we believe what fits our own experiences and world view.  I’m no exception, but I’ve also learned to take a step back from those experiences and realize that another person’s experiences hold the same validity for them as mine do for me.

ADAM: Would you briefly tell us about the purpose of the Healthy Nation Coalition? Why does the world need this organization?

ADELE: The primary goal of the Healthy Nation Coalition is to make sure that alternative perspectives on our national food and nutrition policies are heard.  Right now, the current mantra is that Americans are fat because they eat too much and move too little.  But there is little evidence to back that up.  As you’ve pointed out, virtually all of the  increase in calories in the past 30 years has come from carbohydrate foods, foods that have uniquely fattening properties in our current food environment, yet we are continually told to lower our—that’s right—FAT consumption!  This is one of the disconnects that needs to be explored, along with the mixed and contradictory evidence regarding saturated fat and heart disease, sodium and hypertension, the health benefits of fiber, etc.  Healthy Nation Coalition seems to be one of the few organizations out there willing to raise these controversial questions without, at the same time, working to replace a failed one-size-fits-all recommendation with a different single-minded dietary prescription.

ADAM: You spent considerable time investigating the role of the USDA in creating and perpetuating the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. What shocked you, if anything, about what you discovered?
 
ADELE: Here’s the most shocking thing I discovered, and I haven’t written about it in any other forum, so you’re getting the scoop.

First, you’ll need an important piece of background information to see why I found this shocking.  Up until 2005, scientists essentially wrote the Guidelines. A group of scientists selected by the USDA and HHS put together a Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report and this report was used almost verbatim as the new set of Guidelines.  It designated which parts of the previous guidelines needed changing, and gave the wording and the rationale for the change suggested.  The two agencies who administer the Guidelines, USDA and HHS, did very little editing to the suggested changes.

Beginning with the 2005 Guidelines, however, the scientists no longer wrote the Guidelines.  Instead the USDA and HHS took over this process.  The scientists still wrote the Advisory Committee Report, but the USDA and HHS are very clear about what that means.  It means “advisory,” and the two agencies are under no obligation to follow the recommendations given in the report.  I’ve always wondered why this transition occurred.

So here’s what shocked me:  In the 2000 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report — the report done just before the process was changed—the scientists had this to say in their rationale for suggesting a diet “moderate in total fat” rather than “low in total fat” as in the previous 1995 Guidelines:
 
“There has been a long-standing belief among experts in nutrition that low-fat diets are most conducive to overall health. This belief is based on epidemiological evidence that countries in which very low fat diets are consumed have a relatively low prevalence of coronary heart disease, obesity, and some forms of cancer. For example, low rates of coronary heart disease have been observed in parts of the Far East where intakes of fat traditionally have been very low (Xie et al., 1998). However, populations in these countries tend to be rural, consume a limited variety of food, and have a high energy expenditure from manual labor. Therefore, the specific contribution of low-fat diets to low rates of chronic disease remains uncertain. Particularly germane is the question of whether a low-fat diet would benefit the American population, which is largely urban and sedentary and has a wide choice of foods. [Emphasis mine.]”

The committee went on to discuss their concerns regarding adverse metabolic changes that might occur with a low-fat diet—and with high-carbohydrate ones:  “Consumption of high-carbohydrate diets also can produce an enhanced post-prandial response in glucose and insulin concentrations (Garg et al., 1992, 1994;). In persons with insulin resistance, this response could predispose to type 2 diabetes mellitus.”

The committee also voiced concerns regarding public misconceptions about the healthiness of a low-fat diet:  “The committee further held the concern that the previous priority given to a “low-fat intake” may lead people to believe that, as long as fat intake is low, the diet will be entirely healthful. This belief could engender an overconsumption of total calories in the form of carbohydrate, resulting in the adverse metabolic consequences of high carbohydrate diets.”

Finally—and what nearly knocked me off my chair when I read it—the committee noted this correlation:  “Further, the possibility that overconsumption of carbohydrate may contribute to obesity cannot be ignored. The committee noted reports that an increasing prevalence of obesity in the United States has corresponded roughly with an absolute increase in carbohydrate consumption (Anand and Basiotis, 1998).”

Did the fact that these scientists were questioning the value of a high-carbohydrate low-fat diet lead to the Advisory Committee having much less control over the final content of the Guidelines?  I don’t know, but it sure looks questionable.  I currently have a FOIA filed with HHS (the agency in charge of the 2005 Guidelines) to try to find out why that change took place.  I’ll let you know when—or if—I find out anything.

ADAM: One of the stated goals of the HNC is to “Develop consensus, where such consensus exists, regarding the optimal macronutrient distribution for 21st century Americans and what the best sources for those nutrients are.” Easier said than done! Even in the very small “Ancestral Health” world, it seems like no one can agree on anything. Do carbs count? Calories? Both or neither? Is saturated fat okay or not? Is there an “ideal” mix of macronutrients in the diet, or is the “perfect diet” idea preposterous? Is sugar a toxin (per Robert Lustig), or can refined sugar help you regain health (per Matt Stone)? And it goes on and on and on like this!   How are we supposed to develop a consensus, given the depth and breadth of the disagreements, even within this small community? What, if anything, can we cling to and say “we all agree – THIS is right”?

ADELE: Ah, perhaps we were a little naïve then, when we created that goal.  At this point in my studies, I’m not sure that we would find consensus or that we should even try.  I’m not sure we need to.  After all, what is “optimal” for one person may not be “optimal” for another.  Let’s look at the carb issue from a different angle, using the analogy of alcohol.  I think it is an illustrative example because there are so many similarities between them:
–there are no human dietary requirements for carbohydrates or for alcohol
–carbohydrates and alcohol may have health benefits
–carbohydrates and alcohol may also have toxic properties
–carbohydrates and alcohol may also have addictive properties (this is well-established in alcohol; the scientific proof for the addictive properties of carbohydrates—specifically glucose—is building, but has not been firmly established)
– carbohydrates and alcohol may be consumed via dietary vehicles that also have very different effects on metabolism, which may also have short and/or long term consequences on health
–carbohydrates and alcohol are significant parts of our food culture and traditions

So, I don’t need to drink 5 oz of red wine at dinner.  But I might anyway.  After all, I may be convinced that the resveratrol is beneficial for prevention of cardiovascular disease, and besides, it’s yummy!  So, do I give a glass of wine to my 13-year-old?  (resveratrol!  heart disease prevention!!)  I might, depending on my culture, or how much I like my kid.  What if he passes out before he’s finished dinner?  What if it wires him up like a triple espresso (alcohol does have differential effects on humans)?  What if he started requesting his daily dose of resveratrol at breakfast? What if nothing adverse happens at all (except that I have to buy a bigger bottle of wine for dinner)?  Should I switch to Boone’s Farm?  Am I doing him a favor by preventing heart disease or just starting him on an early road to cirrhosis?  The truth?  I don’t know.

When we isolate a single component of food and try to generalize its effects to people in different stages of life, health, and activity, with a variety of overall dietary patterns, and we try to predict health effects—especially of diseases with extended, various, and complex etiologies, like heart disease—we really end up in the land of pretend.  That’s bad enough, but a far more dangerous and insidious effect is that we learn to ignore the signs and signals that our own bodies are sending us in favor of information from experts who may have their own biases and limitations.  You’ve heard the saying “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  Well, if you are an expert who studies the negative health effects of saturated fat, well, saturated fat is “bad.”  It would be goofy to expect that expert to believe otherwise.  But that doesn’t mean that if you found dietary saturated fat to beneficial to your health, that the scientist is right and you’re wrong, or—for that matter—vice versa.

Some people do fine on sugars and starches, even grains.  Who am I to tell them differently?  But many, many people do not.  Those people deserve equal consideration, and they deserve to know the truth:  that they do not need to eat grains at all to be healthy, and they may prefer not to eat many starches and sugars in general if that’s what works for them.

What can we all agree upon?  I wish I knew, but I’d start here:

Human have general essential dietary requirements for amino acids from protein, fatty acids from fat, vitamins, and minerals, in the context of a sufficient energy supply.  The best sources for those required dietary components are non-industrialized foods, because, to put it quite simply, that what we are designed to consume.  Past that, we need to begin teaching people how to choose food wisely by listening to their own bodies and deciphering its messages, to help them know how to distinguish what they want from what they need.  This is an especially tricky proposition right now, where there is a good chance that the national nutrition policies that usurped the authority of our grandmothers and our own bodies back in 1980 (and led us to believe that what we want is what we need) may have also limited the necessary biochemical substrates that allow us to think and feel clearly in the first place.  But at the very least, we should be aware that health effects—hunger, fatigue, weight gain, heartburn—that occur daily, weekly, over the course of months or a year are more important than unproven possibilities for prevention of chronic disease, especially when those notions of prevention are based on population studies which may simply not apply to you.  Those studies are frequently deeply flawed and, besides, you are your own population study.

ADAM: In your work with Dr. Eric Westman, you’ve helped many people overcome their struggles with obesity. How does it feel to help someone on that level, with something that important?
 
ADELE: I know this sounds like I’m running for Miss America, but those patients taught me more than I could ever have taught them.  I’ve yet to encounter anything in my “formal” education that is as eye-opening an experience as that was.  I loved celebrating their successes with them—especially the amazing phenomena of being able to reduce medication and control blood sugars before any significant weight loss would occur!  It almost looked too easy sometimes.  But I also remember the frustrations of patients trying to move through life adhering to their chosen food plan and being told that what they were doing was unhealthy, dealing with the social pressure of having a “weird” diet, being unable to find foods that were convenient, readily available, and affordable that fit their plan, and wrestling with the very real “addiction” cycle that some people have in relationship to sugars and starches.  Those barriers have really shaped my vision for reform.

ADAM: If someone wants to get involved in the HNC, where can he or she go? What help is needed?

ADELE: We welcome any and all help that we can get.  The most important aspect of our mission right now is education. It is very important that the public have access to alternative sources of information about nutrition besides the USDA, HHS, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association), and other entrenched authorities that position themselves as experts in nutrition, while simply parroting 30 years of nutritional recommendations that have not proven to be beneficial.

Anyone who wants to blog, write, or speak on the topic can contact us at forahealthynation@gmail.com and we’ll help that person get the information they need.

Right now we are working on a project tentatively called “Fix Our Food” which we hope will bring together the many different facets of the food and nutrition reform movement:  science & research, agriculture, social justice, healthcare, and of course, policy and advocacy.  We will need people with website skills, social media skills, graphic design talents, fundraising expertise, event planners, etc.  But anyone who wants to start thinking differently about food and nutrition reform is welcome.  We want to avoid nutritional ideology as best we can, while creating a united voice that will represent the people actually affect by our current food and nutrition policies—us, the folks on the ground, in communities, in families, struggling to figure out what to eat for dinner.

ADAM:What’s the biggest myth about healthy eating that trips up people who have already bought into the low carb / Paleo message?

ADELE: I think the biggest myth about “healthy eating” that trips up everybody is that there are “food rules” you can follow that will guarantee good health.  If you eat a diet with plenty of protein and fat from healthy animals and reduce your consumption of industrialized foods, but abuse your body in other ways, you’ve not made a lot of progress.  Maybe you’re better off than you would be otherwise, but you still have to listen to your body and learn to respond accordingly.  Sometimes the way we abuse our bodies can seem so justified in the name of another goal.  But too much exercise, not enough “down time,” too little joy, too much stressing out about whether the food at any place or event is “good” for you—those things can really interfere with quality of life.  If we pursue exercise and dietary goals to the extent that we forget to travel and learn, give up social connections and neglect relationships, we’ve lost sight of the whole point, which is to have a body healthy and functional enough so that it doesn’t get in our way or limit us as we enjoy the wonders of life.
 
ADAM: How much of a food zealot are you, in real life? Do you ever “go on vacation” from healthy eating and gorge on, like, a huge banana split?
 
ADELE: I actually hate “food rules.”  My food philosophy is simple and sounds just like something a mom would say:  Eat what you need before you eat what you want.  But being able to tell the difference between need and want isn’t any easier with food than is with anything else in life, and that’s where problems arise.  I have no problems with a chocolate chip cookie (or two) baked from scratch & fresh out of the oven, but I don’t pretend that is healthy for me—or “bad” for me either.  Honestly, I don’t care whether it is or not.  If I’ve eaten my meat and veggies for dinner, I’ll be okay.  It’s not every day I bake cookies!

There is more (much much more) to life than diet.  Sex isn’t always about procreating; food isn’t always about its health value.  Food has social and cultural value; it has value as a joy and a pleasure.  Why have sex if you’re not planning on having a baby?  Because it is a lovely part of life.  Ditto chocolate chip cookie.

The bigger issue for me is that our current nutritional recommendations really muddy the waters between want and need for many people, making it impossible for them to read their bodies own signals.  Sugary/starchy foods that induce cravings are the same foods that enhance fat storage are the same foods that people have been taught to think are healthy.  This means when people are truly trying to manage their weight or get their blood sugars under control by eating food that they’ve been told is “healthy,” like fat-free yogurt and shredded wheat, they can end up in a really frustrating cycle of hunger, cravings, and weight gain.  Nobody is surprised when they gain weight on a diet of ice cream and French fries, which are also full of sugars and starches.  Try gaining weight on a diet of shredded wheat and fat-free yogurt—it’s very upsetting.

People should eat in a way that they enjoy, but they should know the truth behind our current nutritional recommendations.

ADAM: When will the low carb / Paleo revolution occur? What will victory look like? 
 
ADELE: It’s occurring now.  We are, I believe, on the crest of it.  In another 20 years, we will look back on the years that we spent under the thumb of the USDA Dietary Guidelines as the “dark ages” of nutrition.  That said, we still have a long way to go.  As a public health policy person, I will feel that I can declare victory in the nutrition revolution, retire and go home, when the food coupons in the WIC (Women Infants and Children) program—a federally-funded nutrition program that is especially focused on prenatal and childhood nutrition—are for farm-fresh eggs and grass-fed beef instead of Cheerios and juice.  That will signal not only a change in our nutrition prescription for this population, but a system that makes those high-quality, nutrient-rich foods affordable and widely-available.  Unfortunately, I think the science will ultimately demonstrate that our current battle with childhood obesity and adult diabetes and chronic disease has much to do with the epigenetic effects of high-sugar/starch/calorie diets during prenatal development, diets such as the one we feed mothers in the WIC program.  Until we have public health nutrition policies that are responsive to the real nutritional needs of this population, instead of making nutrition programs for the poor a dumping ground for US commodities, our public health battles with chronic disease will always be uphill.

ADAM: If you had to boil your message about healthy living down to one short sentence, what would it be?

ADELE: In order to listen to your body—which is the key to good health—you might have to make your brain shut up for a minute.

Thanks Adam for giving me this opportunity!  It’s been lots of fun.

It all comes down to this:

1. Does “overeating” make us fat?
2. Or does “overstoring” make us fat?

The choice is a binary one.

I choose choice #2. Because choice #1, while obvious sounding enough, is preposterous. It’s like saying the Earth is flat. Sure, the Earth can LOOK flat, just as it can LOOK like overeating makes us fat. But in reality, at the end of the day, the Earth is round.

• It doesn’t matter how many flat desert plains you can find. (e.g. instances where it sure looks like overeating is the cause of obesity).
• It doesn’t matter how much the Earth LOOKS flat to you. (e.g. examples you can think of in your life where battling “overeating” has cured cases of obesity)
• It doesn’t matter if the entire population of the world BELIEVES the Earth is flat. (e.g. everyone on Earth, basically, believes it all comes down to overeating. So what?)
• It doesn’t matter if, for purposes of certain experiments or engineering feats, you can assume that the Earth is flat and basically get away with it. (e.g. certain experiments seem to show that “it really all comes down to overeating after all.” Again, who the f cares?)

None of this stuff matters. Because the Earth is freaking round, folks. As much as we think obesity is about overeating, it’s fundamentally NOT. It’s about OVERSTORING.

Until we get the diagnosis of the problem right, we’re all screwed.

Dear Readers,

I’m going through something of an existential crisis with respect to my business, and I could sure use your input. Could you help me help you?

I’ve been banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out how I can bring value to people who are struggling to lose weight and/or struggling with the low carb thing, and I’d love your insight. I’m not a doctor or researcher, and I get bored reading about the nuances of the biochemistry. I want to avoid being seen as “Gary Taubes lite,” although maybe my mission is to be the guy who explains his theory in a way that even Aunt Martha can understand.

One thing I’m good at is coming up with a million and one ways to look at problems. It’s this skill that’s allowed me to write over 30,000 articles and web pages since 2003. I like debating for sport and making “idea messes.” I have no ego about this stuff — I like listening to and learning from critics as well as fans — and I have a weird spidey sense for counterintuitive ideas (like Taubes’ fat loss theory) that other people don’t seem to realize are as important as they actually are.

What do YOU need that I could help you with?

If you’re a regular visitor or subscriber, why do you come back? What problems in your life or weight loss quest could I help you solve? What kind of information or product could I produce for you that would dramatically add value to your life and make things a lot easier for you?

Any feedback at all — including feedback to the effect of “Adam, you suck at doing XYZ” — would be appreciated. Thanks!

Do Calories Matter?

Just asking…

What “counts” is NOT how many food calories you eat… it’s how many calories your FAT CELLS eat.

There’s a difference!

And that difference makes all the difference.

A cool Paleo diet video from Dr. Doug Willen of The Health Fixer. Check it!

I’ve been reading a lot of diet blogs and books recently. And there’s something that almost all of them do that’s really starting to bug me. (I do it, too.)

They (we) extrapolate way, way too much based on not enough evidence.

Science is only really useful for proving things wrong. It’s far less useful for proving things right. You can use science, for instance, to disprove notions like “eating saturated fat causes heart disease.” (Although the methods for doing so are complicated and harder than you might think.)

But when it comes to positive messages — telling us what we SHOULD be eating and doing with ourselves — science often proves to be a clunky and cumbersome instrument.

“Cancer Fighting” This-and-That

How many times a day do we get bombarded with positive messages that are marketed to us as “grounded in science”?

• Eat these 45 fruits, because science proves they all contain XYZ antioxidants and other health-promoting compounds.

• Do this ABC exercise regimen, because science proves that it’s the best ever in the history of the universe at obliterating thigh fat.

• Take these 15 pills, ointments, powders and supplements, because science proves that they’re the best 15 pills, ointments, powders and supplements ever made because they’re derived from willow seeds, Amazonian frogs, and the nose hair of a real genuine witch! Therefore, they HAVE to be good for you!

Nonsense! Science proves nothing. It only FAILS to DISPROVE.

That’s a subtle, sly distinction. But it’s an important one.

The moral is: the next time you encounter diet advice that appears overly extravagant in its conclusions, be skeptical. Taken as a whole, the diet might work. It might work wonderfully, in fact. But even still, ask yourself: what components of this diet are ACTUALLY driving the results? What components are doing nothing? What components may actually be counterproductive or even harmful?

Science is a blunt instrument. It generally does not permit or celebrate extravagances!

I’m a man who loves to be told he’s a complete idiot.

It’s not that I’m a masochist. But all my favorite ideas — the ones that have revolutionized my life in wonderful ways — have come to me completely out of left field. I rejected them ALL at first as hogwash. It always takes me months, sometimes years, to really “grok” them.

Consider my introduction to low carb dieting, for instance. In no way did it foreshadow that I would one day become a zealous disciple of the good Dr. Robert Atkins. Here’s how it went down:

“The Atkins Diet Works!” Goes in One Ear, Out the Other

In 2000, I was out on a date with a girl I had just started seeing. I noticed she had a peculiar habit of picking the tomatoes out of her bacon-loaded Cobb salad.

“Why on Earth are you taking out the tomatoes?” I asked.

“Because I’m on a diet!” she grinned back at me.

“What kind of diet has you eating bacon but no tomatoes? That sounds insane.”

“It’s Atkins, silly! It’s a low carbohydrate diet.”

“A whaaa?”

“It’s awesome. I’ve lost 20 pounds already!”

“Really? Is that so…?” (Adam slowly backs away from the table)

Needless to say, we broke up shortly after this conversation.

Seven Years Later…

After that weirdness, I never even casually thought about “low carbohydrate” diets, until 2007, when I read Gary Taubes’ Good Calories Bad Calories, the book that transformed me into a rabid, raving low carb evangelist.

Now, if you’ve already been converted to the low carb tip, you might be wondering: what took you so damn long, Adam? Are you just a dunderhead who needs to hear the truth 50 times before it sinks in?

The answer is: yes!

It takes a long, long, long time for me to fully embrace insights like “count carbs, not calories to lose fat.” Because those kinds of insights are SO counterintuitive. They fly in the face of so much of what we’ve been trained to believe.

And, listen. Like I said, I’m someone who LOVES to be proven wrong. I love finding out ideas that “blow my mind” and force me to rethink everything I know. I actively seek out these insights. And even given my openness, EVERY TIME I come across a new cool insight that “changes everything” in the same way that “count carbs, not calories” changes everything, I hesitate. My skepticism overwhelms me. It overwhelms me, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary and oodles of testimonials from the converted-and-cured.

Prove Me Wrong Again and Again… and I STILL Won’t “Get It”!

I’m beginning to reach the conclusion that our ability to transform ourselves hinges on our ability to find, retain, and ingrain the right insights about our problems. And that never happens in one moment! The popular idea of insight as like a lightbulb going off over the head is absurd. Insights, epiphanies… these things develop over time. They sneak up on us. Bit by bit, we open our minds and change our points of view. Until one day, we look back and realize that “everything’s changed.”

And then our minds do a very sneaky thing! They convince us that we went through the change rapidly, maybe even instantaneously. In hindsight, we think a lightbulb went off over our heads. But the lightbulb was a phantom. It was never there.

And it never is.

All weight loss diets — low fat, low calorie, low carb, low blarb, etc — are, at essence, ways to treat obesity and/or prevent it.

Think about your weight loss goal as a mountain you want to climb.

Reaching your goal of, say, 50 pounds of excess fat gone, might be the equivalent of reaching the peak of a 5,000 foot mountain.

Different diets are analogous to different paths up that mountain:

• Some paths lead only half way up. (i.e. you lose 25 pounds and then stall out)
• Other paths zigzag up and down and finally dump you back at base camp. (i.e. you yo-yo diet for months or years before winding up back at your starting weight.)
• Other paths are thorny and eventually lead off the side of a cliff. (i.e. the diet is ferociously difficult/hunger-inducing and/or hurts you.)
• Still other paths may lead quickly and easily to the peak. (i.e. you lose the fat easily and effortlessly and keep it off.)

The Diet Wars constitute an ongoing argument over who’s got the Best Path Up the Mountain. Whose path is fastest? Whose path is most certain? Whose path is safest? Whose path is most popular? Whose path is cheapest? Whose path does your favorite celebrity du jour follow? Etc.

All well and good. You’ve got a mountain to climb (i.e. pounds to lose). You need a path that’s going to get you there, according to principles acceptable to you.

The problem is that no one is looking at the mountain as a whole.

We need to survey the whole mountain, otherwise we’re never going to know what path is really “best,” nor will we ever bring the Diet Wars to a satisfying conclusion.

So what is the “mountain as a whole”?

The mountain as a whole is the Black Box — the concept I introduce in my free report. The Black Box is not a Path Up The Mountain. It is not a diet solution, per se. Rather, it’s a model of the landscape that we’re all trying to get a grip on.

As any Zen meditator worth his snuff will tell you: to begin to make progress in any endeavor, you MUST SEE REALITY CLEARLY.

We need a vision of the whole mountain.

It’s been 40 years since the late, great Robert Atkins pulished his famous treatise on the near magical efficacy of low carbohydrate diets. Dr. Atkins foresaw a glorious revolution based on his low carb approach. If only enough people understood and believed his message, the human race could liberate itself from the plagues of obesity and chronic disease.

Atkins was, essentially, right. The low carb approach works. Good science supported it and still does. Likewise, the stories of millions of successful Atkins dieters should not be ignored. Atkins and diets like Atkins have helped countless folks who failed miserably on more culturally normal diets, like low fat and low calorie.

But it’s been 40 years! If low carb is so damn effective, why aren’t we ALL low carbers?

Look around. We’re losing the war.

• Atkins is grounded in evolutionary theory. But the Paleo diet — the concept that we should eat what we evolved to eat for 99.9% of our evolutionary history — gets dismissed as a “fad diet” by the medical and journalistic communities. (What??)
• We’ve tried exposing the bad science that critics use to bash low carb.
• We’ve tried surfacing and promoting good science that supports low carb.
• We’ve tried blogging, writing editorials, debating, dreaming up colorful metaphors, signing petitions, and more. We’ve done everything but march on Washington. And I doubt even THAT would make much of a dent.

Why? Why are we losing the war?

What we need are not new strategies or tactics. As the inimitable Will Rogers once said: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Well, guess what? We’re in a hole. So let’s put down the shovel for a second and just think.

I assert that we’re losing because of the way the obesity debate has been framed. The rules of the Diet Wars are stacked against low carb/paleo, permanently.

Our problem isn’t our science. It’s our marketing!

To succeed in the grand debate, we need to shift how the basic problem of obesity is framed. Any marketing guru will tell you that. (See here, here, here, and here, e.g.)

That’s what I’m trying to do with this Black Box concept — the raison d’etre of my blog. Once people accept that the Black Box, not calories, “counts,” they will need to fall back on SOMETHING. And that “something” must include:

• Good science (which leads to low carb diet);
• Our evolutionary predispositions (which leads to the paleo diet concept).

We need the Black Box, or something like it, to change the frame.

It’s time for the low carb/paleo world to close ranks behind the Black Box (or something like it). We can still debate the merits (or lack thereof) of the carbs/insulin hypothesis, “safe” starches, food reward, omega 6s, the special poisonousness of wheat, etc etc. All good. But if we want to WIN, then we MUST remove the Calories Count mentality. It is the final redoubt of our enemies, who use it as a cudgel to dismiss our science and our stories.

We will never be free while the Calorie Wizards have us under their spell. So I implore you: join the Black Box revolution, and let’s finish the job Dr. Atkins started for us.

The obesity epidemic ravages our society to the tune of trillions of dollars of every year, if you count up all its indirect costs and the indirect costs of those indirect costs.

The trillion dollar question is: can we turn this around? Can we stop the madness?

I assert that, if we don’t move beyond Caloriegate, the answer is NO.

Here’s the thinking:

1. Our broken diet (a.k.a. the Standard American Diet or “SAD” for short) is the primary cause of obesity. We can discuss what specifically about the SAD is so damn toxic — too much sugar, too much processed food, too many vegetable oils, too many gross industrial meats, etc. But our diet is the problem.
2. This diet makes us fat and sick, literally. It messes up our tissues and organs, including our fat tissue.
3. But practially everyone assumes this diet makes us sick because of magic. Somehow the SAD makes us “eat more than we burn off” and prevents us from “eating less and moving more.” (I agree, of course, but this point is irrelevant.)
4. Unless we lift the spell cast by the Calorie Wizards, we will continue to apply the wrong solutions. For instance, we will tell obese people to switch from high fat high calorie greek yogurt to low fat high sugar low calorie yogurt; they’ll eat less food but secrete more insulin and thus store more fat.
5. No data, evidence, anecdotes, arguments, or double-blind controlled studies can defeat the Calorie Wizards. The Eat Less, Move More crowd will never be won over incrementally. Just like you cannot turn a Creationist into a Darwinist by sending him an article about the glory of finches.
6. Ergo, unless we change the frame of the debate, the Calorie Wizards will triumph, and our society will be doomed. We need the Black Box, or something like it, to fundamentally change the conversation and compel people to pay attention to all the data, evidence, anecotes, arguments, and good science that support the low carb/paleo approach to fixing obesity.

What do you think? Is this argument logically sound?

The lure of the “dieting made easy” promise is so, so seductive.

We all want to believe in magic belly fat cures. For some of us, the possibility of magic is the only thing keeping us going. Ask yourself: how many tinctures, ointments, supplements, powders, diet plans, hypnosis sessions, gym memberships, etc have you paid for, hoping against hope that this solution will finally be The One?

How many times have you been utterly disappointed by the results?

Failing doesn’t stop us, though. The possibility that a pivotal Amazon fat-burning secret (perhaps secretions from a brightly colored weight-loss toad?) might be out there lingers in our thoughts and toys with our emotions.

Are there, in actuality, hidden cures or shortcuts? Or is it all a load of bull? Are you doomed to carry around those extra 20 lbs (possibly more) for the rest of your life?

Dieting Made Easy… The Needlessly Brutal Version

Our public health authorities are often quick to call “bogus” when they hear claims of easy fat loss. Losing weight is supposed to be hard, they tell us. “Your situation is complicated. Don’t be so gullible and delusional.”

And, of course, they’re right.

If you’re storing “too much” fat, you have a metabolic problem with your fat tissue. Chance are, it’s a complicated biochemical puzzle, perhaps extremely so.

Imagine if you had a problem with any other organ in your body – your spleen, your heart, your small intestine, your brain, your pancreas, etc. Would you ever expect to find a magical herb or pill or three-point plan guaranteed to heal that sick organ? Of course, not!

At the same time, the very health authorities who loudly condemn bogus pseudo-cures try to sell you the snake-iest snake oil of all: namely, that to fix your sick fat tissue, you simply need to eat less food and move your body more.

I don’t want to ramble on, yet again, about why this approach is so inherently insipid. (Download my free report, if you’re interested.)

My point is, just because a proposed cure is Puritanical does not mean it’s scientific or smart. Sure, you can win masochist points by semi-starving yourself and working out to the point that your body temperature drops and you have no energy to do anything else.

But ask yourself: do you want to be a martyr, or do you want to be healthy?

Because martyrdom does not generally lead to good health.

So Is Counting Carbs the Ultimate “Diet Made Easy” Solution?

Not necessarily “easy” easy. Going low carb is no picnic (no sandwiches allowed, after all). And low carb diets may or may not fix your fat tissue.

But counting carbs makes waaaaaaaaay more sense, at least from the view of the biochemistry, than does counting calories, starving yourself, and exercising yourself into the ground.

When you control the quality and quantity of carbohydrate you consume, you are likely to start on the road to normalizing your blood sugar, normalizing your insulin levels, and doing all sorts of other wonderful stuff for your fat tissue and your body as a whole.

Bear in mind that even carbs only “count” indirectly. Diverse forces can cause you to put on fat – and these forces may have zero to do with your diet and exercise plan.

Some people may find success on various eating plans – low carb, low fat, vegan, whatever. All these diets are low sugar diets, so they all can conceivably work, provided you’re relatively metabolically healthy. For other people, the only possible solution will be a low carb solution, and even that might not be enough.

My friend and fellow blogger, Jimmy Moore, recently posted about his ongoing struggles with weight gain on low carb. Jimmy is one of the most respected thought leaders in the low-carb world. He lost 180 lbs on the Atkins Diet back in 2004. Over the past few years, however, Jimmy has had problems keeping the weight off, and his recent blood results showed that he may have a hidden hormonal/metabolic issue that’s driving him to regain fat. It’s a medical mystery, one that I hope he and his doctors are able to solve. But his odyssey goes to show that, for some people – particularly people who’ve been seriously metabolically damaged – there literally there is no such thing as “dieting made easy.”

Again, this isn’t to say that certain tactics and strategies are not better than others. I’m a big advocate of the low-carb/paleo way of life. But if we are ever to make substantial progress fighting obesity and overweight – and all the diseases that being overweight predisposes us to – we need to engage with the full tapestry of reality. Otherwise, the simple solutions we desperately crave (and may in fact exist!) will remain forever elusive.

All diets boil down to calorie control, or so you’ve been told. You need to EAT LESS food, BURN OFF energy through exercise, or, ideally, BOTH. The prize for success? All that nasty excess flab will finally “melt off.”

But perhaps you’ve already played this game. Perhaps you’ve tried and failed to create that holy grail of fat loss — the Calorie Deficit. If so, chances are, you blamed yourself. You lacked the willpower. You lacked the energy. You lacked the discpline. You lacked the self-control. It all came back to you. YOU have been the problem, all along.

Or so they would have you believe.

But does creating a Calorie Deficit always work (if you work it hard enough)? Get ready for a story that will (should) blow your mind and rock your world…

The story comes from my favorite book on diet and nutrition, Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories (p 366):

“[Certain genetically obese mice] will fatten excessively regardless of how much they eat. The obesity is not dependent on the number of calories they consume… “These mice will make fat out of their food under the most unlikely circumstances, even when half starved,” [researcher Jean] Mayer had reported. And if starved sufficiently, these animals can be reduced to the same weight as lean mice, but they’ll still be fatter. They will consume the protein in their muscles and organs rather than surrender the fat in their [fat] tissue. Indeed, when these fat mice are starved, they do not become lean mice… they become emaciated versions of fat mice.

Francis Benedict reported this in 1936, when he fasted a strain of obese mice. They lost 60 percent of their body fat before they died of starvation, but still had five times as much body fat as lean mice (!!!!!!)* that were allowed to eat as much as they desired.”

*[bolded font and exclamation points are mine!!!!!]

“In 1981, M.R.C. Greenwood reported that if she restricted the diet of an obese strain of rats known as Zucker rats… and did it from birth onward, these rats would actually grow fatter by adulthood than their littermates who were allowed to eat to their hearts’ content. Clearly, the number of calories these rats consumed over the course of their life was not the critical factor in their obesity (unless we are prepared to argue that eating fewer calories induces greater obesity)… these semi-starved Zucker rats had 50% less muscle mass than genetically lean rats, and 30% less muscle mass than the Zucker rats that ate as much as they wanted. They, too, were sacrificing their muscles and organs to make fat.”

The moral here, folks? It’s twofold:

1. Don’t be born a Zucker rat in one of these psycho’s labs.

2. Don’t try to “melt off” your Sick, Sad Fat Tissue (SSFT) by starving yourself, unless
you’re also prepared to “melt off” your organs and muscle tissue.

Calorie Deficit, Schmalorie Deficit, I say.

What if, on a perverse whim, you decided that you wanted to become the fattest human being ever to grace God’s green Earth.

Could you do it? If not, why not?

If the Calorie Wizards are right, if you have the willpower and gusto, nothing can stop you from being crowned the fattest slob on record and enshrining your name in the Guinness Book of World Records. And once you have “overeaten” thusly, then nothing, at least theoretically speaking, could stop you from get fatter and fatter still, until your fat reached the moon.

Here’s the recipe…

Just “overeat” a little bit each day, and you’ll get there. The record for fattest person ever is
something like 1,500 pounds. So say you’re already 250 pounds. That means you just need to gain 1,250 more pounds, and you’ll win and be immortalized in Guinness. Awesome!!! Now, 1,250 pounds is a lot. But not if you stretch the gain out over a decade. You’d only need to gain 125 pounds a year — basically 1 pound every three days. Since there are 3,500 calories in a pound, you’d just need to “overeat” by like 1,200 calories a day. Don’t get me wrong: that’s still a boatload. It’s like an extra tray of brownies a day. But it’s doable.

The reality, though — assuming your crazy little experiment doesn’t kill you — is that, at some point, you’d hit a limit. You cannot accumulate fat infinitely, no matter how much you stuff your face. You might pee out the excess; or your metabolism would spike to compensate. The reality is: the body is rigged with all sorts of mechanisms designed to keep itself (somewhat) stable.

Take body temperature, for example. Our bodies like to be at about 98.6 degree Fahrenheit. Stuff can temporarily make us hotter or colder — e.g. a swim in a hot tub or a bare-bellied roll in the snow (or both at once: invigorating!). But, eventually, the body finds its way back to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Because that’s where it likes to be.

This concept is known as homeostasis, and it applies to lots of stuff going on in your body. You are not a gelatinous blob of goo at equilibrium with your environment. (I mean, I assume you’re not. You never know…) Your body and its tissues/organs can be changed — made sicker, healthier, bigger, stronger, weaker, etc. — but it takes more than an extra bite of corn bread.

Homeostasis helps your body regulate all sorts of weird systems, such as:

• Sleep
• Iron metabolism
• The osmotic pressure of your bodily fluids (cool!)
• The level of calcium in your blood
• Etc etc.

Okay, so we can admit that the body and everything in it (including your fat tissue!) resists
change. HOWEVER, there is a degree of “give.” A swim in a hot tub might elevate your body temperature. But you won’t boil. And when you get out, your temperature will recede to 98.6 degrees, as if by magic, without your having to do anything or “count” anything.
On the other hand, say something screws up the “Black Box” that regulates your temperature: for instance, you contract a scary virus while on an ill-advised safari to Zimbabwe. You get a 103 degree fever, and your temp stays elevated for a while, in spite of your best efforts to get it back down. Why? Because the virus perturbed the mechanisms regulating your body temperature!

This point is crucial!

Perturbations, even small, not so obvious ones, can totally change what happens in complex systems — systems like your Black Box — and throw off homeostasis.

Let there be no mistake: I believe the late, great Dr. Atkins and his many predecessors, contemporaries and successors got it RIGHT. Carbs are basically the problem.

But the Black Box model is not just yet another attempt to push low carb diets. (Even though I believe they should be pushed!)

Here’s a diagram to illustrate the distinctions:

Conclusions:

1. The Black Box is 100% accurate. But without shortcuts through the Box, the construct is not particularly actionable or useful.
2. Based on what I’ve read/learned, it seems like Atkins/Paleo/Low Carb type diets are far better at “fixing” people’s Boxes (and/or preventing them from breaking) than are typical calorie counting diets. Why? Because these diets restrict more of the “stuff” that is likely to break Boxes (carbs/omega 6 fatty acids/wheat/etc).

A Vastly Simplified Model of What’s Inside the Black Box
(The Pretty Lines are Feedback Loops and Stuff Like That.)

Instead of “Calories,” We Really Should be Counting All This Crap.

YIKES!!

I know what you’re thinking: “Don’t be a dumbbell, Adam. Of course, both the quantity and quality of calories matter. Everyone knows that.”

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Follow the perverse reasoning of the Calorie Wizards at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and logic will compel you to conclude that, at least in terms of obesity, the only relevant factor is calorie quantity.

I invite you to download my free report, Caloriegate, which pulls back the curtain on the Calorie Wizards’ dastardly wizardry. But the basic point of my argument – and the argument of other “calorie haters” out there, like Gary Taubes – is that things are more complicated than meets the eye.

When you are talking about losing excess fat, you are talking about fixing/maintaining an organ. That’s right: the fat tissue is an organ! Just like the spleen, the skin, your lungs, and your gallbladder. The Calorie Wizards tell us that the key to health of this organ is to “balance” our calories. If calorie “quality” matters, it does only insofar as certain foods satiate us more or less or cause us to “burn more or less energy.” By this reckoning, on some level, 500 calories of olive oil equal 500 calories of cream equal 500 calories of lettuce, at least in terms of what they do to our fat tissue (an organ!!).

I don't buy it.

Really?? Come. On.

“But wait, Adam!” I hear you protest, “Different diets can work, as long as they are calorie restricted. Therefore, at the end of the day, quantity IS what really matters!”

Ah-ha, my friend. You raise an intriguing point.

A well-known Paleolithic-diet blogger, Stephan Guyenet, recently made a similar argument in a series of blog posts on “Food Reward” that ignited much spirited discussion on the blogosphere.

Guyenet pointed to studies that suggest that diets of all stripes — low fat, vegan, low carb, paleo, etc — might ALL work, as long as they’re calorie restricted. Here’s what he said:

“So here we have four diets that are diametrically opposed to one another. On one hand, we have low fat versus low carbohydrate diets, on the other, we have vegan versus high meat diets. All four causes spontaneous decrease in calorie intake in overweight people, all four cause fat loss, and all four improve metabolic markers in overweight people with diabetes risk factors.”

Very interesting, isn’t it?

It seems to all boil down to calories, after all!

So does this line of thinking “refute” the Black Box model and confirm the unspoken, conventional assumption that “calorie quality” is essentially meaningless?

No. Because we must look deeper into the problem.

Gary Taubes wrote about this same issue in a December 2010 blog post. Here’s what he had to say on the subject:

Virtually any diet that significantly restricts the number of calories consumed, even a diet that is described as low-fat (because the subjects are instructed to reduce the proportion of fat calories they consume), will cut the total amount of carbohydrate calories consumed as well. This is just simple arithmetic. If we cut all the calories we consume by half, for instance, then we’re cutting the carbohydrates by half, too. And because these typically constitute the largest proportion of calories in our diet to begin with, these will see the greatest absolute reduction. If we preferentially try to cut fat calories, we’ll find it exceedingly difficult to cut more than 400 or 500 calories a day by reducing fat — depending on how much fat we were eating to begin with — and so we’ll have to eat fewer carbohydrates as well.

Put simply, low-fat diets that also cut significant calories will cut carbohydrates significantly as well, and often by more than they cut fat.

In other words, per Taubes, when people lose fat/improve health on a diet, it’s not because they’re limiting calories or fat but rather because they’re improving the quality and/or reducing the quantity of their carbohydrates.

So is Guyenet right? Is Taubes? Are they both right? Neither right?

Here’s My Take

First of all, don’t let your brain explode. Don’t mindlessly go down this logical rabbit hole:

1. The ABC diet (which happens to restrict calories) works!

2. Therefore, it must work because it’s a low calorie diet (not because of the quality of the “ABC” food).

3. Therefore, only calorie quantity “counts” and quality only matters in terms of satiation or energy burning. The Calorie Wizards were right, after all. Ha-ha! Take that, Adam!

Please tell me you can see the insipidness of the “logic” I just walked you through.

Again (how many times must this be said?) the fat tissue is an organ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The forces that can destroy, fix, and maintain our organs are enormously complex. A tremendous amount of “stuff” is involved. Stuff that involves conscious choice, the brain and behavior. Stuff that involves unconscious mechanisms, like hormones and enzymes. And beyond.

It’s a big hairy mess.

I want to bring this all home for you with a powerful thought experiment. Look at all the different diets we’ve discussed: low fat, vegan, low carb, paleo, etc. Notice any patterns?

All these “low calorie” diets are also “low sugar” diets! Specifically, low liquid sugar diets. (Some people, including Taubes, think the liquid sugars are the worst for you.)

Even Mark Haub, on his famous junk food diet, did not guzzle gallons of Mountain Dew a day.

So if you really want to make the argument that calorie quantity is the ONLY relevant factor — to falsify the Taubesian claim — there’s an easy experiment you can do.

Put people on a low calorie, high liquid sugar diet. Don’t compare low carb to vegan, because both are relatively low sugar diets. Instead, compare low carb or low fat or any “standard” diet with an iso-caloric equivalent high liquid sugar diet.  Call it The Mountain Dew Diet.

The Mountain Dew Diet: Would It Work??

If people on a low calorie Mountain Dew diet demonstrate sustained fat loss and improved metabolic markers, then I will concede the point that calorie quality is irrelevant.

I leave this experiment to the Calorie Wizards and their supporters!

The philosophical implications of Caloriegate should chill any thinking person to the bone.

If, indeed, Caloriegate is “true,” then logic suggests it is possibly one of the biggest f**kups in the history of institutional science, if not the biggest f**kup of all time.

Awakening to this scary reality, we must recalibrate. If the concept “calories count” is suddenly rendered meaningless, then what can we hold on to? What can serve as an anchor, as we explore issues of diet, health, weight loss, etc?

Most importantly: whom can we trust?

We need reliable guides to answer questions like:

• What foods are healthy?
• What foods will kill me?
• What’s the minimum I must do to get/stay healthy?
• When can I get back to doing more fun things, like watching TV or playing my Wii?

Let’s consider some candidate guides…

“The Trusted Experts”: Our Public Health Authorities and Doctors

We grew up trusting these people. But was our trust misplaced?

After learning about Caloriegate, I’m certainly more distrustful of the conventional wisdom than I once was. I’m guessing you, too, probably feel disconcerted by aspects of conventional dietary wisdom, as mostly famously enshrined in the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid (Or is it a Plate, now? Whatever they call their shape-shifting monstrosity, I’m still going to hate on it.)

BUT! Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Just because conventional medical wisdom is likely wrong about certain things – even certain extremely big things – doesn’t mean we should burn every copy of the New England Journal of Medicine. That’s crazytown. But sorting the bullsh*t from legitimate science is impossible for any single person to do. I’m certainly not qualified to do it.

The one thing I do feel confident saying is that the authorities who insist that “calories count” are practicing magic, rather than science. They believe that a single, two-word prescription — “count calories” — is all it takes to fix and maintain the health of a complicated organ (the fat tissue).

Really??

I’m going to start calling these magical-thinking people “Calorie Wizards,” and I invite you to join me in mocking them this way. I like the name Calorie Wizards, since the abbreviation, CW, also stands for Conventional Wisdom. So there is some word play at work, too. Zing!

But if our public health authorities/experts are “out” – if they are thoroughly corrupted with and hypnotized by Calorie Wizards – whom can we trust, instead?

People Like Me? MUYOBs?

I fit into a class of iconoclastic bloggers/thinkers/journalists that we could call the “Make Up Your Own Belief System-ers” (MUYOB is a far clunkier acronym that I don’t expect to stick around.) Basically a MUYOB is someone who has identified flaws with conventional thinking, and who wants to reconstruct our understanding of diet and health based on their revelations.

Out of all the MUYOBs who populate the “low carb/paleolithic diet” arena, I am probably one of the LEAST qualified to give advice, since I am not a doctor, clinician, or even a legitimate journalist. All I know is that the Black Box matters.

What about MUYOBs who are way smarter than you are, Adam?

You mean people like Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, Dr. Michael Eades, Gary Taubes, Dr. Kurt Harris, Colette Heimowitz, the list goes on?

Sure. While these “low carb/paleo diet” MUYOBs may disagree on nuances (how much is too much rice in the diet? Is high fat dairy good or bad for you? etc, etc), they are generally on the same page, and I find their perspective on the science and anthropology persuasive.

HOWEVER! In some sense, all these people are making up their own belief systems. Chances are, they are getting significant things right and also missing significant things. We are ALL guilty of cherry-picking. So choose your cult.

What About Trusting the Community?

Ah, the Sarah Palin approach: when “the experts” fail us, trust the unwashed masses, instead.

Look, I’m a fan of “collective wisdom” as much as the next guy. And I do believe networking can help solve tricky diet and health problems. But let’s not go overboard here with the populism.

Remember: the vast majority of people are still under the sway of Caloriegate. And something like 80% of Americans believe angels literally walk the earth. If you are one of those 80% – and there is a 4 out of 5 chance that you are! – I apologize for making fun of you. (My mom is among your ranks, by the way.) But I find the “angels are real” belief scarily ridiculous. It indicates to me that “the people” are fundamentally gullible and prone to flights of preposterous fancy.

What About Trusting Yourself?

You mean, trust “your gut”?

Sure, your gut can be useful. But if you are a Failed Calorie Counter, by definition, your gut failed you, metaphorically and literally. And even if you self-experiment, and strengthen and deepen your sense of “what’s going on” inside your body, I hope you’d agree that your intuition for what “feels right” is not an effective replacement for sound medical science.

So where does this leave us?

It Leaves Us Hanging!

On some fundamental level, there is no one, no institution, we can fully trust.

We can’t trust our public health authorities or experts. I certainly don’t want you trusting me farther than you can throw me. We can’t fully trust the MUYOBs. We can’t trust the masses, and we can’t trust ourselves.

We’re out of options, folks!

To navigate beyond this trust-deficit dilemma; first, we must accept our reality. I would suggest that we all inject a little “I-don’t-know-ism” into our lives.

I don’t know. You don’t know. Let’s start from there, shall we?

Remember, Caloriegate was born out of human hubris. Our public health authorities became infatuated with a seemingly reasonable (but, in retrospect, idiotic) way of thinking about the human body. This rigid thinking led to billions sick and trillions of dollars in damage. Let’s not repeat that mistake. Let’s instead strive for openness, compassion, and, above all, humility.

More: “Hmm, I don’t know.”

Less: “Ah-ha! I found the answer!!”

More compassion. Less blame.

More listening. Less yammering.

More good science. Less magic.

Anyone with a brain who reads my free report, Caloriegate, will hopefully quickly come to this conclusion: to achieve permanent fat loss (or, more specifically, fat tissue health), you need to do more than consciously “balance” your calories.

But then what? If we shouldn’t count calories, what SHOULD we count, instead?

According to Gary Taubes and other advocates of an idea called the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis, we should count CARBS, not calories, since carbohydrates essentially regulate our insulin levels, and our insulin levels essentially regulate how much fat we store and burn. By eating fewer/better carbs, we will improve our fat tissue health.

Is it really that simple??

Excellent question, my friend. I believe something like the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis is certainly a better starting point than the nonsensical “calories count” idea. But is it the whole kit and kaboodle? Probably not. Is “real life” more complicated? Sure. In biochemistry, after all, nothing is all that simple.

The critics of the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis make some very interesting points, and they should not be glibly dismissed.

But please please please please! Don’t allow the critics of “carbs insulin” to lead you down this rabbit hole of illogic and disaster:

1) “Hmm. It seems like this whole ‘fat tissue health’ thing might be about more than just regulating my carb consumption and insulin levels.”

2) “I guess calories DO count, after all!”

3) “Therefore, the reason I’m fat has nothing to do with carbs/insulin; it has to do with my being a big fat slob who can’t stop shoving pies down my face. And the reason I can’t lose fat is because I can’t control my behavior — i.e. I can’t ‘eat in moderation’ or ‘exercise enough’”

Don’t think like this! This is stupid thinking! It makes zero logical sense.

There is a middle ground. We can collectively admit that “calories count” makes no sense without necessarily agreeing with the carbs/insulin explanation.

The actual reality is: The Black Box counts.

In other words, all the vectors of force on the fat tissue matter. Hormonal forces, enzymatic forces, behavioral forces, etc. It’s an awesomely complicated project to describe what’s “in” the box. “Count carbs/insulin” is, at best, a shortcut through the chaos. And I would maintain that it is a damn better shortcut that “count calories.”

The days of “calories count” are numbered.

Long Live the Black Box!