The Truth About Calories | Jason Fung | Part 1

hey everybody today what we're going to tackle is the unasked question of weight loss so let's get right into it so whenever we talk about what causes a disease or condition the most important thing to understand is really what causes it so for example if you understand that an infection is caused by a bacteria then you can prescribe antibiotics if you understand that a heart attack is caused by a blockage in a blood vessel then you open it when we're talking about weight loss the most important thing to understand the most important question that we really want answered is what caused the body to gain weight in the first place and this is a question that we don't really think about a lot because we think we already know the answer seems so simple doesn't it well it's just calories in versus calories out but is that really the answer because what's interesting is that the human body actually has no way of measuring calories it has no idea and it doesn't care at all so in all the human physiology research that we've done over the past 100 200 years there's nothing in the body that measures calories there's no receptors for calories there's no hormones that measure calories the body actually has no idea how many calories it is or it isn't eating so what is a calorie so what are calories well calories are derived from physics they're really just a unit of heat so you use a machine called a calorimeter and what we do is we put a piece of food for example a bagel into this calorimeter and we burn it then we determine how much heat is given off we could just as easily put say a piece of meat into this calorimeter and measure how much heat is given off or we could put a piece of wood which is not even a type of food and we can see how much heat is given off the problem with this approach which is the calories approach is that the body has no way to measure that and it has no way of understanding what it's supposed to do with all of the energy that you've just eaten that is our body depends on hormones so those are the chemical messengers that tell the body to do specific things so for example if we want our body to store body fat we need hormones to tell our bodies to store that body fat the calories alone are not going to do it because if we eat 250 calories of wood for example that will just pass right through our body it's not food we don't absorb it and we're not going to store fat by eating wood so what's important is that the body only cares about hormones whereas this device only measures the amount of energy stored in that food and this is why we get confused as to why the body is gaining fat because we think it's about calories but the body only cares about hormones so we get to this concept called the energy balance equation and this is where things start to get complicated so this is what most people think about with calories is the energy balance equation and it's usually written like this fat the amount of fat that you store equals calories in minus calories out so the idea is that if you simply take a few extra calories say you eat an extra 250 calories whether it's from a bagel or whether it's from a piece of meat as long as that is in excess of the amount of calories that you're using in a day you're going to store body fat but let's think about this what if we were to eat 250 calories of wood for example well that's a calorie but clearly it's not going to cause us to store body fat because it's not even food so instead what we have to understand that different types of calories are going to evoke completely different hormonal responses so instead of thinking about it as a calories and calories out which does not come with the instructions as to what to do with those calories you have to understand that different types of calories are going to provoke certain hormones to go up and some of these hormones for example are going to be insulin so if you eat a bagel like carbohydrates insulin is going to go really high we have mtor for example so this is another type of nutrient sensor if you eat protein this is going to go up high so if insulin goes up high our body tends to store that energy if you eat a lot of protein mtor is going to go up and that's actually instructions for our body to start building building proteins building muscle that kind of thing if we eat protein another hormone called peptide yy is going to go up and that's a satiety hormone that tells us to stop eating so for example if we've eaten our fill at the at the all you can eat buffet it's very hard to eat another piece of a pork chop because of the peptide yy it's going to release it and we're so full that we don't want it and same thing when you eat dietary fat you're going to release something called cholecystokinin cholecystokinin is also a satiety hormone so when you eat fat such as with meat or when you eat eggs for example they're going to fill you up whereas if you drink a soda it's not going to now this is even for the same number of calories you're telling the body completely different instructions because the minute you put those calories in your mouth your body has a completely different hormonal response when you eat carbohydrates insulin will go up when you eat meat mtor peptide yy cholecystokinin goes up when you eat wood none of these will go up so your body has instructions as to what to do with those calories because it's not simply the number of calories that's important it's what your body does with those calories so when you take those calories in your body can do many different things with it it can store it as fat if insulin goes up it can use it to build muscle like if your mtor goes up it can also pass it out through the intestinal system as with if if you activate none of them and you pass it out like a piece of wood it can also burn it off as energy and those are going to have very different effects on the amount of body fat that you carry so it's not the number of calories but the instruction that those calories carry the hormonal responses of those foods that is going to determine what eventually happens to our body so when we think about the question of how do you gain weight it's really a question of what hormones are you activating for those calories that you're eating for the number of calories and for the type of calories what hormones are you activating that is leading you to get to this state where your body is gaining fat because if you think about it really makes no sense because if it was simply a calories and calories out the way that most people think about it it all comes down to calories in which is how much you eat which is something you control and calories out and oftentimes people say it's the exercise that you do both of which are under your own conscious control you control what goes in your mouth you can decide if you go for a run or not and therefore a lot of people think that body fatness is really a function of your own conscious control which actually makes no sense because if you look at a graph of what happened to north america over the last 50 years you can see that there was a very sharp turn somewhere around 1977 where the obesity epidemic really got rolling the rate that people especially americans started to become obese started rising very quickly in 1977 and it's not simply because all the americans in the world you know all the americans canadians and everybody over the world just suddenly decided that they were going to eat more it wasn't that it was the change in two things which is the types of calories that we're eating and also how often we're eating it which is giving our body different types of instruction so if you understand that it's really about the hormones that go along with those calories then you can focus on what different types of food and what different types of eating regimens can beneficially change those hormones so that you lose weight and that's going to be a much more successful way to get to the desired weight and that's really why calorie counting doesn't work because we're so focused on something that our body actually doesn't understand we don't have the instruction calories don't contain the instructions that we need we need to focus on the hormones and that's it for today we're going to go more into depth into calories and future lectures so make sure to look out for that if you liked it make sure you hit the like button subscribe to the channel below and turn on the bell for notifications you can also check me out at thefastingmethod.com and also check out my books the obesity code and the obesity code cookbook thanks for watching everybody

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 128,734

Rating: 4.9381051 out of 5

Keywords: weight loss, calories, calorie counting, lose weight, nutrition, health, jason fung, intermittent fasting, how to lose weight, calories in calories out, jason fung fasting, how to lose weight fast, healthy lifestyle habits, dr jason fung, keto diet, low carb

Id: 9k23IUb7Jf8

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020