Is it Going to Take Engineers to Put This Calorie Nonsense to Bed?

It Takes Just Two Engineers to Correct a Whole Field of Study’s Stupid Mistakes!

The next time you hear a dietitian or a TV show bigmouth say “calories in=calories out” (CICO) and 3,500 calories equals 1 lb of body fat, you can completely debunk these with a single statement. Don’t worry about digging into the finer details of insulin, leptin, exercise, or any of that. Just say:

“Since the calorie is a unit of energy and weight storage is a process, CICO is meaningless and 1lb=3,500 calories is incorrect because an input to a process does not equal the process itself, or its output.”

Done. Calories in=calories out and 1lb=3,500 calories are hereby declared dead due to incorrect mixing of process inputs, actions, and outputs. These people have literally been peddling nonsense.

What’s this about?

There is a boom of people who are trading notes online on all kinds of diet information that gets down to internal body processes, and all of them involve some actions inside the body that happen for numerous reasons. People who are doing low carb to lose weight or Paleo to lose weight and live better, or doing intermittent fasting, all that seeks to change the process going on inside. People are getting better at it all the time. Let’s say they are working on a process model.

The process model folks are always under attack, or disregarded by CICO folks that don’t get it, get in arguments, and in general just make nuisances out of themselves.

What’s wrong with CICO then, and 1 lb=3,500 calories? It only allows one input, calories, and it has one action-steady burn. It’s not much of a process model at all. It’s really just skipping actions and jumping to a guessed answer. No animal on this planet works that way. Why are so-called professionals getting away with even saying it?

What’s a process?:

A process is something that needs 3 three things-
1. Inputs
2. Actions
3. Outputs

One input to the process that determines your weight is food in. Calories is a legitimate and very important input. Dietitians tell us just take energy out (another input, not an output), and use this to find the net difference, then work in 1lb=3,500 calories. Every lb up or down has to be due to 3,500 calories in, or avoided, except for energy out. Done. But it’s dead wrong. In fact, this is impossible for this to be correct. It just skipped every action inside your body besides “steady burn,” whatever that is anyway, and jumped to an answer.

We haven’t even gotten to actions yet, but let’s look at the inputs left out of the above-
-Stress
-Sleep
-Hormonal health.

You can’t correctly analyze a process if you ignore the inputs that matter.

Moving on to actions:

The actions we are interested in are part of all the complicated processes in the body that determine how you turn food to into energy and set your weight point. We don’t even know them all but we know that they do exist.

Hormones move around in the body and carry inputs and outputs where they need to go, tissues, glands, the brain. Hormones are not necessarily inputs themselves, but if they are messed up, the process gets messed up and you might get an output (weight) you don’t want. It should be said that there is room to debate the details, but we do have some basic facts to work from like insulin’s role in storing fat, leptin’s role in signaling the brain about how much fat is there, and the thyroid’s role in managing too many important processes to mention. There are more. There are all kinds of things going on.

It’s a complex system with complex processes. It’s not like food as an input just goes “poof,” and you gain energy by heating up inside, and when you get cold, hit it again. That would simply be a steady burn process. No animal on Earth works that way, except humans, if you listen to a dietitian. True Story!

When people chose to eat low carb/Paleo for example, they are manipulating the food input to hopefully get the hormone action they want. It’s not just calories, it’s the balance of macros because they know that changing macro percentages can change actions once the process starts. In other words, the thinking is less carbs lowers insulin, and since this is an input to the real fat storage equation, it matters.

At least you have things in some kind of process model that reflects how lifeforms work on Earth. No one has a perfect process model and we are all experimenting.

What the Stupid People are Thinking:

Low fat dieters are manipulating inputs too, but they don’t know what they are doing and skipping to the answer, an amateur mistake. They are simply ignoring every input except calories to simplify the math. But, the problem comes next-

CICO declares that there is no such thing as a fat storage process that does anything other than add and subtract. Why is it then, that nature put in such a complex analog computer to sort it out? Why the built-in complex process? Just because we don’t know everything there is to know about it, it certainly can’t be said that it does not exist. If you don’t understand the model, you don’t just skip it and declare a direct relationship between input and output. This really is what they are doing. Where do they get numbers then?

Meet the bomb calorimeter. This is a gadget you put a bit of food in, hit a button, vaporize it in an instant, and watch the temperature change. Temp change=energy stored. Write that down. It’s not steady burn, it’s instant burn. =poof= This is where calorie numbers really come from.

On to the 1lb=3,500 calories thing, this isn’t even in correct units. A lb is a unit of weight (mass). A calorie is a unit of energy. This is saying that the output of a process (weight) is equivalent to the input of the process (calories). Algebra 001, use consistent units. It’s really just putting numbers to the incorrect CICO thing anyway, the one that skips process and goes right to the (guessed) answer.

Summary:

Sure, this is geeky, but if you suffered through it, hopefully the diet wars make more sense.

On one hand, there are a variety of people experimenting with process models for their diet and health, and it’s working pretty good.

Then we have dietitians and all those agencies telling you, with impossible math, that there is only one model and it’s a tin can with wires on it, and it works exactly the way your body does. It’s not even good enough to call a process model, because they are just skipping around and leaving things out. But, it works better than anything else anyone is doing, including the mob that is comparing notes online that knows better.

Let’s let the first idiot that keeps saying CICO and 1lb=3,500 calories have their thyroid, adrenals, and about half the pancreas blocked, because after all, they don’t do a thing. It’s not in their math.

It’s not.

True story.

This was a lunch hour project, don’t expect references!

-Two Engineers in Memphis