The dominant paradigm of weight management is calories in – calories out = weight gain or loss.  Supposedly, if you eat more calories than you “burn,” you gain weight because the calories don’t have anywhere to go but into your fat cells.  This makes people sound like machines that burn fuel.  We aren’t machines.  We’re much more complicated and interesting.

The reason the reason the calories in/out equation doesn’t work well is because your body doesn’t respond to sugars, fats, and proteins the same way.  The carbohydrates (carbs) you see listed on food labels and in weight loss articles are made of sugar molecules stuck together.  To digest carbohydrates, your digestive tract breaks them down into individual sugar molecules. The intestinal lining cells absorb those, then mostly transfers them on into your bloodstream for transport to the liver.  Likewise, the protein you eat gets broken down into its constituent amino acids, absorbed by the intestinal lining cells, then passed into the bloodstream. Sugars and amino acids are water soluble so they transport well in your blood plasma, which is 90-95% water. Fats get broken down into smaller components in your digestive tract for uptake by the cells of the intestine, but those components must be packaged with other molecules into lipoproteins, which can travel through the bloodstream to reach the liver.  Sugars, fats, and proteins are handled differently by the liver and have different effects on your body.  They trigger different hormonal regulatory mechanisms as well.  For example, only glucose sugar triggers elevated insulin. Fructose sugar has no direct effect on insulin, yet promotes fat production and storage.

Here’s an “equation” for disease– a diet of mostly carbohydrates in which more than 10% of the calories come from sugars (table sugar, high fructose corn, syrup, fruit juices, etc) plus a preponderance of easily digested carbohydrates, which become sugars, can cause obesity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancers, food allergies, and other problems.  There are a cascade of potential metabolically induced disease conditions.  Your exact genetic makeup will determine which problems you’re most prone to when you eat a high carbohydrate, inflammatory diet.  In my family, one area of weakness is the eyes. The root cause of all this is an evolutionary ancient mechanism. Animals store almost all excess sugar and protein from their diet as fat in various parts of body. When high amounts of sugar are eaten and sent to the liver, it goes into overdrive converting that sugar into storable fat. That’s normal and natural. Animals that evolved eating a lot of sugar, such as nectar feeding hummingbirds, turn the sugar into fat but use it quickly for energy production. We didn’t evolve with a lot of sugar around, and it piles up in storage around our internal organs and under our skin. A little of that is OK, and we’re wired to eat sugar until it’s gone, which was quickly when gorging on seasonal ripe fruits and berries. All sugar, all the time is really, really bad for us.

For close to 3 million years, the type of foods humans and their ancestors ate drove the evolution of the control of the metabolic paths in our body that used the food, as well as the anatomy of our digestive tract.  Herbivores eat plants with more carbohydrates and fiber, usually with way less fat and protein, unless the herbivore is a nut or seed eater.   Even then there’s a lot fiber. Carnivores eat other animals, getting most of their calories from fats and proteins.  Our lineage of hominids were omnivores with heavy fruit consumption that became scavengers, then predators, eating meat preferentially, although we could still survive on other foods.  On our species normal diet, appetite control mechanisms kick in and our body weight stays relatively constant. We could get a little fatter in fruit and berry season.  As I discuss in the Biology section, for at least 1.8 million years, our lineage was one of the most effective predators the planet has ever seen.  We’ve only been growing plants as food for a few thousand years.  We’ve only been eating refined sugars, most of the common seed oils, and processed foods for a couple of centuries or so, unless you were a rich person with access to high sugar foods.  When you eat foods evolution didn’t prepare you for, your brain and body can get confused and sick.  Conversely, if you eat foods you’re well adapted to everything works better.  The damage caused by long term inflammation that sugary food caused starts to repair, at least in part.

A dietary strategy I’ve followed for 13 years has been to lower my carbohydrate intake enough to put my body into ketosis, using mostly ketone bodies derived from fat for much of metabolism. That’s a diet in which you consume less than 50 grams (100 for some) of carbohydrates (sugars) per day + over 65% of your calories from healthy fats + sufficient protein + fiber + essential nutrients.  That’s probably very different from what you’ve been told is a healthy diet.  For most people, that diet will cause their body to flip to nutritional ketosis, using ketones for normal metabolism instead of glucose. I’ve found it works well for me.

Browse the site to explore different topics.  Go to the How-To section if you want specific diet and exercise suggestions.

 If you’d like a quick, very entertaining introduction to many of the key concepts on this site, watch That Sugar Film, which I review here.