Medical Weight Loss Blog

There are many diet myths out there and I want to dispel a few of them. First, that a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie. That is your body reacts differently to carbohydrate, fat and protein calories. To review grade school science, a calorie is the amount of heat (energy) needed to increase the temperature of one kg of water by 1°C. This is important; read on!

The second myth is that a low fat or no fat diet is good for us. It is not. We have learned as a society (unfortunately the hard way) that this philosophy leads to more people who are overweight and as we see as we look around, our society is doing just that. The problem with low or no fat is that most foods that are no fat are high in carbohydrate or foods that have no fat in them after recipe changes have increased carbohydrate. Too many carbohydrates are bad.

Therefore, we should primarily focus on 2 of our most important macronutrients: protein and carbohydrate. My recommendation is to aim for higher protein and lower carbs but with some caveats.

Protein is our primary metabolic fuel source. It is what drives our metabolism. Think of each of our cells as a small fireplace. The heat coming out of the fireplace is our metabolism (remember that a calorie is a measure of heat) and that we take “logs” of protein and throw them into our fireplaces. The fire (our metabolism) burns hot for the next 3 hours or so then starts to slow down. Therefore to keep our metabolism hot we need to eat protein again to “stoke our fire”. Eating protein about every 3 hours keeps our metabolism at its maximum. At night when we stop eating and sleep, our body cools off. This is normal and helps us to sleep. If we skip breakfast the next morning, our metabolism (internal fireplace) does not heat up adequately as we are still burning our fuel from yesterday. When we do eat, it takes a longer time to get the flame going as opposed to eating every 3 hrs. Think if you were to place a pile of wood on top of a birthday candle flame, it will burn but take a long time to get going. This extra energy gets stored therefore as fat until it is needed.

I will talk about carbohydrates in part 2.

Update on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 10:57AM by Dr. Primack

Click HERE for part 2