Marty Gallagher
The “settled science” of thermodynamics, sacrosanct dietary dogma for forty years. The moronic prescription is always the same, eat less, exercise more, a calorie is a calorie, nuance be damned.
My attorney is strong as an ox, has the endurance of a desert camel, and possesses a resting heart rate so low any lower and he’d be dead. He is on the wrong side of sixty and despite being strong and fit, he no longer wants to power through life with the physique of a water buffalo. He wants to trade in his grizzly bear body for a lighter, sleeker model. He seeks to morph into a streamlined wolverine, still ferocious, just sleeker, and leaner, this in deference to aging, health, functionality, quality of life and life extension considerations.
This man was a rugby enforcer, a physical brute that imposed his will. Ergo his training is rugged and quite effective, he drives himself mercilessly, evidenced by the fact that he is fit as a fiddle and strong as Hercules. Deductive reasoning leads us to conclude that the only remaining impediment to his sought-after sleekness is (must be!) nutrition, i.e., the fuel he consumes to power his body. His bodily capacities are analogous to having a 600-horsepower racing engine ensconced in a 5,000 pound 1966 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz body. His new goal is to keep his powerhouse engine but install it into a 3,000 pound mid-engine Corvette body.
His high-capacity body was designed to run on racing fuel, nitromethane. Currently he is running his powerhouse V-8 on kerosene. By improving the quality of his fuel and manipulating the quantity, my barrister buddy will alter his body composition. He is lucky. He has smart friends that can guide him along the transformational pathway.
99% of the wider world, those seriously interested in improving their body composition, are barraged with exactly the wrong dietary information. The mainstream governmental and medical community cling rabidly to bankrupt ideas and strategies vis-a-vis obesity and “weight loss.” Conventional body composition strategies are fatally flawed. “Nutritionist and dieticians of the conventional school of thinking have been instructed and will tell us that carbohydrates are the preferred fuel for the body, thus implying carbohydrates are indispensable.”
As recently as 2021, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology reiterated in their “lifestyle guidelines” the same fallacious, ineffectual recommendations that they have been pontificating for decades, i.e., those that are overweight, obese, or diabetic should reduce their calories, especially saturated fat. Further, they should exercise. Eat less, exercise more, a calorie is a calorie, saturated fat is the enemy, all dietary fat needs to be exorcised.
This strategy has been accepted dogma for fifty years during which time obesity has increased 250% and diabetes is up 700%. What are these flawed mainstream tenants? What are the common characteristics of this strange system that never gets held accountable for a stunning lack of results?
Following this advice worsened the problem. The medical community’s weight-loss prescriptions are worse than ineffectual, they are factually counterproductive. The authorities always offer the same solution: cut calories and increase (cardiovascular) calorie-burning exercise. Additionally, all calories are the same, i.e., there is zero difference between consuming 500 calories of salmon or 500 calories of ice cream. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. And what difference does it make if ice cream spikes insulin through the roof while fish does not?
The sacrosanct EBE, the energy balance equation, has no room for subtle nuance. It all comes down to caloric expenditure at the end of the day, the laws of thermodynamics are rigid: ingest more calories than you burn off and the excess is shuttled into fat storage depots scattered around the body. To lose fat, you must eat fewer calories. If you are obese, it is because you eat too much. Period. As Time magazine explained in 2000, “It is a medical fact that no dieter can lose weight unless they cut down on excess calories by taking in fewer of them or by burning them up via exercise and activity.”
Cardio exercise is used to induce caloric loss. Unfortunately, the caloric cost of exercise is terribly overrated and overestimated: an average person will burn 250 calories in a 30 minute stationary bike cardio session. Cancel that out by stopping off at the golden arches after training and treating yourself to a single 710 calorie McFlurry. The average human would need to pedal their stationary bike 65 minutes to “cancel out” a lone ¼ pounder with cheese (610 calories.)
Imagine that you are obese and diligent. You inherited your overweight, out-of-shape body from your overweight out-of-shape parents. You have starved yourself your entire life in pursuit of normalcy. You exist on all the proscribed lite, low-fat, no-fat, heart-healthy style foods. You are always dieting and deprived. You are athletic – yet remain clinically obese – why?
Slashing calories stunts the metabolism; the body, sensing real starvation, cannibalizes muscle tissue to fuel caloric shortfalls, eating its own muscle, saving precious body fat until the bitter end. All the carbohydrates within the body must be exhausted before the body is finally forced to use its stored body fat as fuel.
Those few select foods the eternal dieter are allowed to eat, i.e., lite, low-fat, no-fat, fat-free, heat healthy, the denuded foodstuffs, spike insulin through the roof. Here is an extremely inconvenient truth: there can be no fat burning if the bloodstream is flooded with insulin. This loops back around to the settled science that all calories are the same. All calories are not the same. Easily digestible carbohydrates are the problem.
Obesity is a hormonal imbalance, not an inability to control gluttony or because someone avoids exercise. Obesity is overcome by controlling (minimizing) insulin secretions. The solution to obesity has been known and recognized since the 1860s: to lose fat reduce carbohydrate and sugar consumption.
nutrition solution
Gary Taubes provides the science that backs up athletic intuition and empirical experience. He is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories; Why We Get Fat?; The Case Against Sugar & his recent book The Case for Keto. If interested in purchasing any of these books click on the link above which will take you to Amazon.
As scientist and best-selling author Gary Taubes notes on the very first page of his seminal book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, the solution to obesity has been widely known since the 1860s.
gary taubes
William Banting was a fat man. In August of 1862, at the age of sixty-six, the five-foot-five, 250 pound man began dieting. He ate three meals a day of meat, fish, or game and lost fifty pounds over the next two years.
William Harvey then formulated a dietary regimen based on Banting’s diet. It became a best seller because it worked. In 1951 British clinicians published The Practice of Endocrinology and prescribed a diet near identical to Bantings….
Eat as much as you like
Foods to be avoided
The profundity is that if the right foods are eaten (and the right one’s avoided) there is no calorie reducing, counterintuitively, every meal becomes an all-you-can eat protein-fat-fiber buffet. Note that in 1951 when the Brit establishment was advising all-you-can eat to lose weight, two in ten Brits were obese, nowadays it is seven out of ten.
Eat as much as you like and lose body fat. My attorney, being a retro kind of guy, would be advised to look backward for body composition solutions. As Taubes succinctly points out, “The true science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one – specifically the stimulation of insulin secretions caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables, potatoes and rice, and sugars, like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, these carbs make us hungrier.” Boom!
Avoid insulin-spiking carbohydrates. We’ve known this since the 1860s. And commonsense prevailed until the 1960s when dietary fat was erroneously identified as the probable cause for heart disease and a low-fat diet prescribed as the antidote. Low-fat became institutionalized as the ideal strategy for weight loss. “Over nutrition,” eating too much fat was the pat rationale for why we became fat.
Hence forth, my attorney and I will eat jumbo shrimp cocktails followed by giant salads, then a massive perfectly prepared bone-in rib-steak. We shall skip the potatoes and desert and get shredded. On alternate days, we shall eat BBQ until we get meat sweats, secure in the knowledge that body fat is being burn because we are denying it those insulin-spiking carbs. No hush puppies, cornbread, or beer for us. But we will console ourselves with brisket and coleslaw, secure in the knowledge that as we are stuffing our faces, we are getting ripped. This “no-carbs - but all you can eat of protein/fat/fiber” ultimatum is not a bad ultimatum as ultimatums go. We shall keep you posted of our progress as we roll into the spring transformative campaign.
Check out some of my other nutritional posts below. Combine intense hardcore training with a sound nutritional strategy and take your springtime gains to the next level.
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