Seven M&Ms a Day

It was hard to believe when I scratched out the arithmetic on my weight gain in a notebook.  It was 50 lbs over 20 years.  It seems like a lot, but when we think about this in a more scientific light, what’s quite astonishing is that I didn’t gain MORE.

If you did gain more, then let me give you a little reassurance that you’re not the only one.  Today we will start delving into the other side of thermodynamics to give you a more complete picture of my research over the last three years.

As most of you know by now, especially those who have reached out with data and emails, my life and study does not center on some malevolent plan to make you miserably “freeze your ass off.”

In fact, Thermogenex as I originally envisioned it over the last decade was about managing the total energy in and out of one’s body. I think the personal revelation was that the thermal environment counted for much more than I originally considered.   The “thermal diet” as it is often touted by the press is sensational. It gets attention and “if it bleeds, it leads.”  In truth, after I lost my weight through thermal loading AND caloric restriction/exercise, I did many more experiments with eating, particularly for nutrition and health.

I was more interested in why I GAINED the weight then how to lose it.

So let’s begin to explore that elusive calorie. We’ll look at it from a perspective of how it was orgininally developed – as a unit of energy of thermodynamics. This won’t require advance degrees or fancy math; EVERYONE can understand this and I think you’ll begin to look at food, exercise, and weight management in a completely new way.

Over time, you’ll see that what I’ve assembled will give you some incredible new tools to help on the input of energy, while the thermal loading will help increase the output side. Ultimately you have to output more than you input, i.e., create a caloric deficit, if  you want to succeed.

Seven M&Ms a Day

As you read in my Fuel the Burn Guide, 5o lbs over 20 years works out to, on average, only 168 extra calories a week. That arithmetic is pretty straight forward: 3500 cal/lb x 50 lbs = 175,000 cal; 175,000 ÷ 20 years ÷ 52 weeks = 168 calories/week.  That is an average of just SEVEN M&Ms a day in surplus calories – or SIXTEEN a week if you prefer peanut M&Ms like me.

Ultimately we have to run a caloric deficit to maintain progress with solid weight loss. From a thermodynamic perspective, nothing else matters; it’s a game of energy in and energy out and despite what anyone might tell you, no one is going to violate the laws of thermodynamics.  One can eat food that is only partially digested, burn off some excess caloric intake with regular exercise, or even thermal load to create deficits, but in the end, calories are a measure of heat or energy and we have to create a caloric (heat) deficit.

So, what is a calorie? Where did come from? are all calories equal?

[GEEK ALERT – proceed at your own risk]

It turns out that a dietary calorie is actually a thermodynamic kilocalorie (1000 calories = 1 kilocalorie).  I’ve seen a few stumble on this idea with “ice cube diet” calculations.  So a dietary “calorie” (kilocalorie) is the energy required to raise one kilogram of water, 1 degree Celsius. It’s an abstract term and what’s interesting is that it’s a measure of heat energy.  it’s conceptual and in reality you can’t taste, feel, touch or “count” calories and yet we all use them every single day while on a diet.

This is the problem. This is the discrepancy. Creating a situation of caloric deficit (burning more than you take in), is at the center every “diet” scheme. This is our struggle with losing weight and it is a fight with an invisible, esoteric villain. One of the best ways to understand a calorie is to look at how we measure it and that takes us to the calorimeter (of course). In much the same way as early philosophers described the “inner fire,” we will learn that with the right fuel and the right  environment, weight loss will be relatively effortless and staving off weight gain, automatic.

Da Bomb…

An adiabatic calorimeter, or more commonly, a bomb calorimeter, is a device used to measure the “combustion energy” of substances. It’s a way at getting a handle on how much energy is stored within the molecules of a given substance.  This heat energy, or calories, are equated to raising water 1 degree Celsius as we discussed earlier and that is exactly what scientists do.

I hate to admit it, but I can tell you that once long ago I spent an entire summer at NASA, nearly every day of one summer in my life, running one of these damn things. It was boring – akin to watching paint dry, but with an ever so slight possibility that something might blow up – hence the name, BOMB. It sounded like all of the glamour of rocket science, but with no fire and no spaceflight.

Here is how it works: a small quantity of what you want to measure is carefully weighed an placed in a thick, heavy, metal container. Next, we add the “fuse wire” used to ignite the material. Then we pressurize this with pure oxygen (sounds dangerous so far).  This is placed in an insulated water bath that is very carefully temperature controlled and then you wait…and wait…and wait… when the water temperature is fairly stable you push the “ignite” button (true story: someone years before me labeled ours “Launch”).

Today,  I’m sure that there are fancy graphs and software that spits out the answer, but this one was made in the early 70s and used just an accurate glass thermometer and you just stared at it through a tiny magnifying glass over and over, recording as the water the temperature rises.

While my job that summer was to determine how much carbon fiber was in filament wound composite rocket motor casings (sounds exciting – boring), occasionally, I tested french fries, corn, cricket/spiders (dead), and even M&Ms. It was the only thing fun about this otherwise boring job. Did I tell you I was bored?

Wilbur Olin Atwater

One of the realizations I had on about calories, was that the measured numbers didn’t matched what what is listed on the labels.  That is when I first learned about the Atwater factors. While you may not know them by name, they are probably familiar to you if you have ever read any diet book. When you read that “protein” has 4 calories/gram, “Fat” has 9 calories/gram and “carbohydrate” has 4 calories/gram, you’ve just learned the work Wilbur Atwater performed in the mid to late nineteenth century.

That’s right, this is based on science that is well over one hundred years old. That is not to diminish it’s importance, but what we’ll learn in the next post is that his goals, over 100 years ago, are very much at the center of the slow carb diet in The 4-Hour Body today. Atwater was tackling what would later become the Type II diabetes epidemic. He had the solution to our obesity problems.

It was only 100 years before Atwater’s work that Edmund Burke wrote, “Those that don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” It seems from the size of our obesity problem, we don’t know history.

To finish up today’s post, just know that Atwater put people in large chambers, calorimeters, to measure the heat/respiration their body emitted from eating certain foods. Further, he accurately measured caloric content of food intake and waste fecal/urine so that he could analyze the entire thermodynamic picture of what happened when people ingested proteins, carbs, and fat.

It was brilliant work and he did hundreds of experiments. To do them correctly, he needed to account for the whole picture and waste heat was a critical part of the problem; this exactly the reason i assert adding thermal loading makes a difference in your weight loss progress.

Those interesting experiments I performed in an otherwise boring lab at NASA in the summer of 1986 were another piece of the puzzle that magically fell in place as I watched a documentary on Michael Phelps’ enormous appetite. All food is not created equally and as we’ll find out there are some lessons that can make the diet-exercise-thermal loading trifecta work in your favor.

What do M&Ms, calorimeters and century-old work of a scientist have to do with your success?  Way more than you might think.  These results can be blended into an optimal formula to lose weight at the fastest rate possible. Ultimately it is about maintaing the caloric deficit while flooding the body with nutrient-rich food – managing the input. At the same time, we’ll need to exercise to create a deficit on the output side and add thermal loads to maximize the effect.

So, next week, we’ll dig into the calorie and you’ll finally why some of what SEEMS like simple substitutions based on product labels are not always the correct choice.

[special note to fitness bloggers]

Thanks for dropping in and following this site. I do appreciate you are spreading the word, sometimes word for word. I ask you one simple favor. I know you have your group of people following you and we all like to dazzle people and get them excited about new ideas and concepts, but if this site is your source of “inspiration” can you please just say so and provide a link?  It’s not much to ask and based on the feedback of some of the membership we share, it would probably make everyone look better… Thanks!