Is it easy to gain weight if calorie intake is greater than consumption? The results are surprising

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that when we subtract calories burned from calories taken in, what remains is the calories stored by the body. Therefore, many experts believe that as long as we can control the intake and expenditure of calories, we can control our weight and defeat fat.

Scott has no intention of challenging the first law of thermodynamics, but for most people, counting calories is often ineffective or even unhelpful, as detailed in the calorie series. A new study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition confirms Scott's idea: a low-calorie diet will not make you fat? Will you lose weight if your intake is greater than your expenditure? That may not be the case!

Experimental design

South African scholar Hume recruited 154 teenagers and 75 youthful female college students for his research. The literature did not mention the reason for not looking for male college students, but I don't think it was for any strange reason. Next, the scholars used advanced and accurate respiratory gas analysis, Doubly labeled water technology (Note 1), and Air-displacement plethysmography to measure the subjects' basal metabolic rate, calorie consumption and body fat percentage changes over two weeks.

With this data, we can use mathematics to accurately calculate the calorie intake over a two-week period. After the measurement was completed, the girls returned home and lived happily ever after. No, the story doesn't end there. In the next three years, scholars called the subjects back once a year to measure their body fat percentage.

According to the "calorie-determined obesity" theory, we can speculate that girls whose calorie intake is greater than their expenditure (positive calorie balance) at the beginning will gain weight in the next three years. For subjects with a high basal metabolic rate or in a negative caloric balance, their body fat should decrease. The result surprised everyone!

(Note 1: This technology allows subjects to drink "water" synthesized from hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. After a period of time, the amount of isotopes remaining in the body is measured to know how much carbon dioxide the subjects have discharged, and then convert it into calorie consumption during the period. Don't understand? It doesn't matter, this is not the focus of this article. Just know that this is an advanced technology that can measure short-term calorie consumption.)

Experimental Results

Scholars found that the group of people with the highest "calorie intake and heat expenditure" (hereinafter referred to as "calorie flow") in the initial two weeks had a gradual decrease in average body fat over three years. However, for teenagers with low to medium "calorie flow", their body fat percentage slowly increases.

What’s more interesting is that the calorie intake of the high-calorie flow group was 458 calories higher than the calorie consumption, while the intake of the low-calorie flow group was 437 calories lower than the calorie consumption. Simply put, people who eat more and consume more see their body fat decrease over three years, while those who eat less and consume less see their body fat increase.

Simply looking at "intake minus expenditure" (calorie balance) or basal metabolic rate cannot predict who will gain weight and who will lose weight. This discovery can be said to be a heavy slap in the face to calorie counting!

Scott's Thoughts

Why did this study come to such strange conclusions? People who consume more than they burn actually lose more body fat? Here are some possible explanations:

1. The author of this article believes that the human body has its own mechanism for maintaining a constant body weight, and this mechanism can only function properly with adequate calorie intake. If the state of low intake and low consumption is maintained for a long time, this mechanism will fail.

2. Intake and consumption are from the first two weeks of the study, not the total for three years. So is it possible that the initially positive heat balance is actually negative over a three-year period? Of course it is possible!

Scott: I confess to my readers that I don’t have a complete idea of ​​how to explain the findings of this study yet, but we can infer the following from this article:

1. A low-calorie diet may not prevent the onset of obesity.

2. It may be necessary to increase calorie expenditure through exercise.

3. Use In-Body to measure your basal metabolic rate, and then go to great lengths to measure and calculate your calorie intake. Even if the result is that your consumption is greater than your intake, it does not mean that your body fat will decrease.

Conclusion

In past articles, Scott has argued against calorie counting for the average weight-loss dieter, citing its lack of accuracy and the fact that the quality of food is as important as the quantity. This study once again confirms the idea that even with academic-grade precision instruments measuring basal metabolic rate and calorie intake, it is still impossible to successfully predict obesity or thinness. For the group whose intake was greater than their expenditure, their body fat percentage actually decreased after three years, which really surprised the experts.

Scott once again emphasized that obesity is a complex physiological phenomenon that cannot be simply explained by "calories in" and "calories out." The ideal (rather than reckless) way to lose weight is to restore the normal functioning of the weight regulation mechanism through high-quality diet, physical training, sleep, stress management, endocrine therapy, and nutritional supplements.

This article comes from: Dr. Scott's One-Minute Fitness Class

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