It’s been a crazy couple of months of travel, research, and writing for me, but I’ve learned some incredible new things. Over the last three years of personal transformation, an amazing clarity of overall energy balance of Human metabolism has emerged. T S Eliot wrote in the Gidding:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

I believe I have arrived where I started and I’ve never known it better. One of the difficulties in discussing a more unified approach is just how unbelievably misinformed we all are about the basic words involved in the discussion. The diet industry has bantered about protein, carbohydrate, fat, calorie, and many other terms to such a wide-extent that my revelation was simply going back to the basics.

In simple terms, it was necessary to purge the mental construct I had grown to rely on in the past when discussing weight gain/weight loss.

I really doubt that this confusion is driven by mass corporate conspiracy.  I also believe that most who write diet books really believe their assertions and are motivated largely, because they want to help people. Everyone wants to profit and so I don’t condemn the large corporations for giving us what we demand/buy (salt, sugar and fat) nor the diet industry for rearranging the same message ad nausem to help you resist the three.

I will say the medical community, and in the United States, the USDA and NIH, on the other hand are probably more deserving of criticism. School lunch/breakfast programs begin misinforming our children at an early age and the net result has followed us all into adulthood to create a nation full of obesity. Now, this obesity trend is being exported to the rest of the world.  Physicians are able to get a medical degree without a class in nutrition and when they do study it’s the USDA Food pyramid scheme.

I certainly appreciate the efforts of Dr. John McDougall  and others for passing California SB 380 that mandates continuing education in lifestyle and nutrition in the management of chronic illness.  Rather than mindlessly attack, I’d like to pick back up from last March and present a new foundation of the calorie and in particular, its relationship to  the  macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate and fat, so that we can all at least share a common language.

During this exploration of protein, carbohydrate, and fat, I will ask that you temporarily put aside what you believe at the moment and to the extent possible, suppress the diagnosis bias.  I know that what I am going to discuss over the next few weeks is definitely contrary to what I was taught in undergraduate/graduate biochemistry class and what I believed to be true when I started my transformation; I also am confident that it is COMPLETELY consistent with the underlying science that was the foundation for nutrition.

Today, Seth Godin had an insightful blog entry that everyone should read. He’s amazing in both his deep insight to Human motivation, but most important to me, in his phenomenal ability to simply observe. These two sentences really pique my interest:

“You are welcome to believe that aqua metals will improve your sports performance and that z-rays will cure your arthritis, but only until it collides with things that are actually true. Placebos are a good thing, and everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but they’re not entitled to their own science.”

And that seems to be the issue we have and it’s probably why you haven’t met your goals.  He goes on to say,

“The trend I’m concerned with is the notion that we’re entitled to get upset when the truth doesn’t match our point of view.”

I’m both guilty of this and I have been the recipient of it from the other end.  Fortunately, I am not motivated by politics, popularity, nor dogma, and so I am perfectly willing to change my opinion in the face of sound new data that is contrary to the data I based my previous opinion.

What is interesting is that when one takes a thermodynamic view of calorie, nutrition, and weight loss, it all becomes very obvious how the system works. It also opens the possibilities of alternate ways to view “food” and in particular what is going on in the very complex interplay of Macro vs Micro nutrients.  Once  you look through this new pair of glasses, it won’t be necessary to understand how the watch works to tell time.

For today, let’s just start with a very basic understanding of nutrition and I will invoke the much overused car analogy.

The Drive-Thru

To keep your car running you need two things: fuel and routine maintenance. The body is no different. The fuel can be in the form of Protein, Carbohydrate, or Fat and the maintenance is provided by vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidant capacities of food along with routine cardiovascular and strength conditioning.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with that (long) sentence.

So, we have to routinely top-off the tank at the gas station and we also need to perform routine maintenance: change the oil, rotate the tires, check the timing belt, etc…  So what happens if you show up to the gas station three times a week, whether or not you need gas?  What if it became the center of business or social meetings, “hey, would you like to meet at the Exxon at 6 o’clock for a fill-up? or,  Wow, it’s about time for some gas, I haven’t filled up for hours?

Ok, these days you would go broke, but think about it. If you show up to “socially” or habitually fill up, where does it all go? Eventually the tank is full, so you put in in a can in the trunk. Then the the trunk is full and now we put it in the back seat – eventually strapping it on the roof. I mean, we are going on a LONG trip and have no idea where the next station is…

Get the picture?

Ah, but true to life, it’s far more complicated. We’ve just described macronutrients (fuel), but what about micronutrients (maintenance)? If it weren’t for the pesky maintenance side, we could just stop eating and hopefully by thanksgiving (or pick your favorite holiday – they ALL seem to involve food) we would have reached our goal in time for pumpkin pie.

Can we just take micronutrients in a pill and fast? Again, it’s just not that easy. Starvation (caloric restriction) does appear to lengthen life according to studies. Then again, I am told it is so miserable you just THINK life is longer. HCG/Starvation is one form of popular “severe” restriction diet. If you don’t eat you WILL lose weight. If you are not losing weight then you MUST be eating too much. NO exceptions.

This is the duplicity in the problem. We can’t just give up food like like other out of control habits with out all sorts of problems. When we forego calories, we ALL certainly lose weight. We need micronutrients (maintenance) and many of them come in macronutrient (fuel) wrappers. So an optimal plan would involve restricting macronutrient calories, while getting the maximum micronutrients.

What many diets suggest is simply limit calories without regard to all the micronutrients and since it is only for a short period, there is no long term impact. Still others try to promote supplements or enriched shakes to bridge the gap. These are all short-term solutions and probably the reason so many regain the weight.

So in the next few posts, we’ll take a look at the three macronutrients (fuel): protein, carbohydrates, and fat and begin to unravel this evolutionary mystery.  I’ll attempt to reframe them as fuel and give you a good way to think about not just how they the body “burns” them, but more importantly, how this ties back into the overall thermodynamic balance your body must maintain.

Fat or thin, fit or unhealthy, your body stays within a degree or so of it’s set point.  It does so by managing HEAT not TEMPERATURE and we’ll see that a lot of the issues with perceived contradictions of the calorie come back to misapplication of macronutrient  connections and an too much generalization about what your body really needs.