Yup… we’ve all heard this bullshit before. “Losing weight is expending more calories than we take in,” and “a calorie is just a calorie… just eat fewer calories.“
BULL… SHIT!
To all the doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, and fitness gurus who claim this nonsense… you’re either dumb as f*ck or liable for the poor health and even deaths of millions of people.
First, from a purely scientific, textbook, laboratory POV… a calorie is just a calorie. It’s a unit of heat required to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. So in a lab or a textbook, yes… a calorie is a calorie. But, y’all know that’s different than the expression y’all tout falsely “a calorie is just a calorie” when giving the advice to lose weight. F*ck off!
So, let’s make this very clear to all you liars out there telling the poor folks trying to lose weight… “food” calories are NOT the same, and here’s some elementary average-person logic to prove my point:
You eat 1000 calories of twinkies, and I’ll eat 1000 calories of celery, and let’s see who loses more weight and is healthier on a blood and hormone panel in 30 days.
Now, let’s dive into this a little more but keep it average person easy to understand why:
To our bodies, these 1000 calories of Twinkies and 1000 calories of celery are entirely different. Our bodies (actually the digestive process is more about our ride-along friends in our gut and how they process food) take the broken-down food and look for glucose first and foremost for energy. If there is no glucose, it will ask the liver for help (hey, science nerds… yes, it is more complex than this, but let’s keep it simple). The liver will take the call and begin breaking down fat reserves for energy. This is how weight loss works: depleting glucose supplies and forcing the body to use fat reserves.
So, in the example above, if I am eating 1000 calories of celery, my body will use the little glucose from the celery, then ask the liver to break down my reserves. I’ll lose weight because those reserves are now being utilized. But, the person eating the 1000 calories of Twinkies will not get to the reserves as fast because the caloric makeup of the Twinkies is nearly all sugars.
But… it gets worse than that! There’s fructose, or in this case, high fructose corn syrup, in the Twinkies and almost all other processed food. The rub is fructose cannot be used as immediate energy by the body. Fructose goes straight to the liver to be processed and is immediately stored as fat. So if the Twinkie is getting most of its potential caloric energy as fructose, your body isn’t even burning it; it’s storing it. This leads to a vicious circle of continuously eating shit your body is not immediately converting, which causes you to be more hungry because most of the potential energy cannot be used and is being stored. So now you eat more Twinkies or another pizza or bag of chips and so on and so on and so on, and you keep the weight on or pack on more.
