Hi Lauren,
Just a quick reply while I wait for a facebook training event to start. – There s no mechanism in your body which responds to the number of calories you eat, your body does respond to the amount of carbs, fat and protein in your diet.
I like Dr Bikman’s explanation about the reason for not sweating too precisely on the number of calories.
All the statistics on the calorie value of every food stuff comes from how much energy is created by burning it in a lab setting. –
When we eat food we chew it, different ways of chewing will effect the success of the digestive processes in the stomach
Then it goes into the gut where the gut bacteria break it down and in the process are fed themselves by it.
Finally it goes through the gut lining (how easily depends on health of the gut lining) and is used by the body, but how it is used is controlled by hormone systems which are responding to the mix of macros (carbs, fat, protein).
Therefore there are so many variables for each person that no scientist can tell you how much of the calories in that cauliflower floret will make it through the gut lining and how it will be used by your body.
Obviously, if there is a big mismatch between the number of calories you eat and use 9ie eat 5000 calories a day and have a desk based job) there is a problem.. If you want to discard weight you do need to be in a calorie deficit, but the key to remember is that calories in / calories out model for discarding weight has been discredited. Its the make up of carbs, fat, protein in your diet which controls how your body responds to food.
The most important is the impact your food has on your insulin levels. High insulin your body is focused on getting harmful sugar out of your blood stream, low insulin your body is able to burn body fat for fuel. ———- – Insulin levels is not necessarily just the number of carbs, for example artificial sweeteners trigger an insulin response.
A fact that helped me understand how sensitive the body is to carbs was a paper which described blood sugar levels in terms of teaspoons of sugar dissolved in blood. The average adult human has 4.5 litres of blood. Normal blood sugar level is equal to 2 teaspoons of sugar dissolved in that 4.5 litres of blood. – The level of additional sugar which would be in the blood stream if you are diagnosed as diabetic and have sugar levels which are causing harm to your body is an extra 0.75 of a teaspoon. – That’s why our bodies are so quick to release insulin to get any sugar in anything we eat out of our blood that insulin is released if we just taste something which is sweet, so even artificial sweeteners trigger an insulin response.
Experts are now saying they think over 80% of the population in developed countries are Insulin resistant. – A state where our bodies have been fed diets which trigger an insulin response for so long that it has to produce extra insulin to force the body to react to the sugars in the diet. – There are a lot of health implications for being insulin resistant. Not just it being a stepping stone towards diabetes.
If you have low insulin levels your body is in fat burning mode (ketosis) that means that your body will first use the fat in your diet for fuel and when that is used will turn to your body fat for fuel. So providing you are in ketosis, healthy fats in your diet just limit the rate at which your body turns to your own fat stores for fuel.
The final figure is protein levels, here the experts are divided on the importance of protein to provide the material to build muscles v no protein to trigger autophagy to cause your body to break down old cells to build new cells.
