Calorie Counting is a Big Fat Lie

How many calories do you think you’ve counted in your lifetime? We’ve been taught for so long that the formula to weight loss, and even health, is to manage calories-in versus calories-out, to be consuming less and burning more.  But what if I told you that was a BIG FAT LIE?

This might come as a shock to you or sound absurd, so I’m going to ask you to keep an open mind and to carefully contemplate the facts I’m about to put on the table…

Fact #1- You actually aren’t consuming as many calories as you think.

A recent study at the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center found that “our bodies sometimes extract fewer calories than the number listed on the label. Participants in their studies absorbed around a third fewer calories from almonds than the modified Atwater values suggest. For walnuts, the difference was 21 percent.” (Read more on the study here.)

Wouldn’t we all be losing weight all the time if we were chronically under-absorbing calories in comparison to what we thought we were eating and burning?

Back in my days of calorie counting I targeted an intake of 15-1800 calories and was burning about 24-2600 (according to my old Bodybugg).  With this new research that means I was actually absorbing less calories, putting me in even more of a deficit, yet I struggled to lose weight.

Fact #2- One pound of fat is not 3,500 calories.

This is what we’ve been told forever!  To lose one pound a week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories a day which equals 3,500 calories in a week, and voila you’re supposed to lose one pound.

Researcher Zoe Harcombe so eloquently debunks this myth.  In her research she shows that one pound of fat actually does not equal 3,500 calories, but in fact it could be anywhere from 2,843 to 3,752 calories. (See Zoe’s full breakdown here.)

Frustration sets in again. If one pound of fat could be less than 3,500 calories then why are people still struggling to lose weight if they are restricting calorie intake and working out more?

Fact #3- We are not a closed system.

The weight loss formula of calories-in versus calories-out is said to be based to the first law of thermodynamics- energy is neither destroyed nor created, it’s simply transformed- the energy of a calorie is transformed as you work out and burned off in the form of heat.

Here’s the flaw, this law only applies to closed systems where there are no outlets.  And as Sean Croxton says in his book The Dark Side of Fat Loss “The human body seems pretty damn open to me. It pees, poops, and sweats into the environment.” (Check out his book here.)

Don’t worry, I felt lied to also when I came across these facts.  I majored in fitness, nutrition and health, and counting calories was the cornerstone of all my studies.  This is what lead me to do my own research and what I found was…

You have to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy.

In this week’s video I go into more details about these calorie counting facts and explain what’s really going on with weight loss and your health.

Bottom line is that our body is a complex system and all parts need to be firing correctly in order for it to be in a healthy place to allow weight loss to happen.

The most overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to weight loss, and frustration over calorie counting, is the detoxification system.  When it gets jammed up and clogged, it becomes overloaded and puts the breaks on weight loss.

This is why showing your liver some love and cleansing the body of toxins regularly is SO important.  Not only does it promote weight loss but it also helps with energy, brain fog, sleep, hormones and so much more!