Myth #5 Weight loss means avoiding calorie

Till the Middle Ages the earth was considered to be flat. Mankind has always been surrounded by many myths and continues to do so even despite science is giving us new insights every day. Weight loss science is no exception. In fact, it is nearly plagued by huge popular misconceptions. I believe the reason behind more myths prevailing in this space is people’s lack of study and true priority. Weight loss to a large population still needs no expertise. But with time, change in our lifestyle, eating pattern, busy schedule, weight loss needs deeper understanding and right knowledge. If we had been living in jungles or villages, we would not have bothered about these facts or myths. But in city life it needs deeper knowledge to address this rightly.

Let us know about the 5 most popular beliefs which I find very prevalent in my conversation with people.

To help you allay these myths I started a series of my blogs. In my last 3 blogs I shared why all weight loss is not always healthy and busted the myth of exercising a lot for weight loss. I also shared weight not is not simply eating less and moving more and then you just cant anything and burn. Please refer to my blogs on these topics. In this blog I am sharing counter arguments against 5^th biggest myth

Myth #5 Losing weight mean avoiding calorie...!

Avoiding calorie at all cost starts with the mis-conception of weight loss means calorie deficit. Yes, calorie deficit do matters but it should be done in the right way. #1 its not the only thing which drives your weight loss. There are many more important things. #2 Eating right is more important than focusing on calorie deficit.

Focus on ideal lifestyle not calorie deficit

• Calorie deficit is one of the component and not the only component in your weight loss: There are other much more important things on which your obesity is highly dependent and those are; your eating habits, sleeping pattern and stress level also. Because they in turn affects hormonal functioning in your body. These poor habits also slows down the metabolism of your body. Metabolism is the pace of energy consumption by your body. A healthy person will have healthy and good metabolism. And slower the metabolism higher the obesity.

·     Your body weight is hugely dependent on hormonal functions in your body: Let us see what are the important hormonal functions that causes obesity. The fat storage in our body is lot    dependent on insulin level in your body. Higher the level of insulin higher the conversion of    energy into fat. In turn Insulin levels in our body depends on many factors. Important among those are our carbohydrate intake and stress level. Higher stress raises cortisol (stress hormone) level in our body and that in turn pushes pancreas to produce more insulin. Then again improper sleep raises cortisol level and again triggers same insulin cycle. Higher cortisol also causes craving and thus triggering emotional eating. Improper sleep also causes higher levels of hunger hormone ‘Ghrelin’ and triggers overeating triggering same insulin cycle. So to un-gain weight (read weight loss) you need to reverse these hormonal function. In simple words eating well (low carbohydrate and proper protein with sufficient micro nutrients and fiber), sleeping well and thinking well all three are much more important before focusing on exercise.

·      Your calorie deficit is not so simple mathematics : Mathematically its correct but practically its not true as we can not control ‘Energy in’ and ‘Energy out’ so simply. You can control input of energy in your body to an extent (by keeping control on your food intake) however your body will use that energy is not in your control. Its automatically done by body. Body has thousands of functions and mechanism to store and consume energy. With same calorie intake to human beings body can behave differently in storing fat,  consuming energy and deploying energy for various functions. Therefore it’s a complete fallacy that you calorie in and calorie out is a simple mathematics of food you consume minus your physical activity.

Its about right eating with right calories not just deficit of calories

    Not all calories are same, nutrient of the food matters: This approach completely disregards the nutrition of food and assumes that all calories are digested the same way and have similar effects on our body. However, this is not the case. Your body requires different nutrition for different purposes. Your body uses 3 macro nutrients that has calories ie carbohydrates, protein and fats It requires protein for building muscles, carbohydrates for energy and healthy fats for building organs and hormones. Proteins (e.g., eggs or chicken) and 

f  fats (e.g. avocado or olive oil) do not have a big effect on our blood glucose levels, whereas carbohydrates (e.g. bread or pasta) do. Eating excessive amounts of carbs increases our blood glucose levels and causes a spike in insulin. Insulin is one of the main hormones that control our blood 

sugar levels, and it also promotes fat storage. All foods in nature are available in mixed form of these nutrition in various ratios. In the name of restricting calories people starve the body of essential nutrition. This leads to loss of muscles and various deficiencies in the body. The right way to understand this is eat low carb high protein/nutrient food and focusing on right nutrient than calories…!

      Calorie absorption in body matters a lot: The absorption of calories by our body for different kind of foods also varies. White sugars calorie is absorbed very fast by the body. They have very high glycaemic index ( GI tells us the speed at which a particular food goes in blood as glucose) Calories in a can of coco cola and calories in nuts are not same.

     

     You can say there are good calories and bad calories. Drinking a can of coco cola and 100 g of peanuts have similar calorie but peanuts calorie composition is good while coco cola calorie composition is bad. Peanuts has calorie coming from protein, healthy fats. It has fibre also. It has very low GI. So its absolutely healthy to have peanuts with moderation while coco cola is extremely unhealthy. With very high GI it immediately spikes your blood glucose and makes you fat.

Therefore blind focus on calorie and avoiding calories is absurdity. Rather one should focus on the nutrient in the food.