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It's free! On this episode of The Daily Dollar, we're chatting about weight management news. When the majority of the nutrition information on the internet is all about weight loss, it's really difficult to know what's the truth and what's just marketing to make you buy into a product or program. Let's unpack this today.
It's dollop time. Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation.
You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed, covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics, and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice.
Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Dollar Podcast, everyone. This whole week, I'm actually talking weight management myths, so not just today's episode. I'm on for the whole week.
And that is because I just have so much that I want to share with you on this topic. So you can expect me to cover the following things. So, in today's episode, we're going to talk about energy in versus energy out and food rules, and just some of the common myths that you might hear talked about on social media or the internet or with your work colleagues. And I'm going to unpack this so we can understand where these myths come from a little bit more.
Next episode, we're going to talk about fasting, special foods, and special diets, where they originated and why they've become so popular. And then we're going to finish off the rest of the week covering topics such as body image, shame, guilt, and then its association with weight and our bodies and just unpack that whole can of worms. I'm going to talk about weight versus health, and can we use our weight as a proxy for our health and just all about that. And then lastly, I guess present a different approach to your nutrition that is not weight loss based.
It's just health based. So let's get stuck in because I do have heaps to cover in today's episode. I do want to preface all of this information this week by reminding you of a few things in nutrition. Firstly, nutrition advice requires a context, and that context is often the individual is you.
And so you can't make these assumptions about food and make blank statements about food, and that's where a lot of confusion comes from. So really important to remember that context is so, so important. And often really the only context that matters is the individual. But I will try and articulate different contexts when I am talking about different elements throughout the series this week.
The second thing is that the best diet for you as an individual is the one that you are willing and able to do. And I think that this is a really important thing to understand about nutrition, because let's just say that there's an app out there that uses AI to search a big database of genomes and it measures your genetic material and it tells you exactly the foods you should and shouldn't eat so that you can maintain your health. If you cannot do that, whether you have the environment around you, the means, so the financial means, maybe the physical means, so the skills, you can cook, you've got two arms, you can use your arms, you've got, you know, eyesight and right, you've got the ability to do that. You have the time, etc.
Right? That diet is completely useless to you. All that information is useless to you unless you can put it into practice. And so oftentimes it's actually so much more productive to focus on where you're at, what you're willing and able to do.
And to know that what you're willing and able to do is not static, it's dynamic and it can change over time. Like you can improve and learn new skills and do different things. But when you're trying to expect too much from yourself and you actually don't have the means to put what you think is healthy eating into practice, you will feel frustrated. So that's really important.
The third thing is there is no such thing as the perfect diet. And no matter what anybody on the internet says, this has to ring true for you in order for you to move forward with improving your eating habits long term. There's no such thing as this one perfect eating protocol. There are many different ways that you can meet the key nutrition principles that science has shown us promotes health in the body.
And the sooner you can ditch that perfection mindset, the better you can just move on to making sustainable and realistic changes. Fourth thing is that eating is so much more than just fuel and nutrients. And this is also really important because if we just treat it as such, we neglect this whole other side of ourselves, which is the fact that eating is social, cultural, psychological and emotional. So it's really important that we remember that there's this whole other element of food that is just as important as it's fuel and it's nutrients.
So keep all of these things in mind as we're going through the information today, it will really help you. So myth number one is that calories don't count. Now the complete opposite of this myth is that calories are all that matters. And so essentially the myth that calories don't count or the statement that calories don't count has come from a really big push in the industry where it's people have just talked about.
It's all about calories in calories out. Now when I say it's all about, essentially this is nutrition information given in the context of weight loss. And so let's unpack this today. So the truth is that calories, so the energy calories is simply the word that we use to describe the energy value of food, the energy that your body is able to unlock with food.
Calories do count. They are 100% count, but they don't count in the way that you think. And the statement that calories don't count or that calories are all that's important are oversimplified and sort of miss the nuances. So let's talk a little bit about energy balance.
So weight loss or fat loss occurs when there is a lack of energy consumed through food compared to the energy that the body needs to function optimally. So under these conditions, the body must break down its own tissues. So fat, mostly and some muscle in order to survive. And it's the interpretation of this that gets a little bit lost when we think that calories don't count or that calories are all that matters.
So if we understand energy balance a little bit more, everything that we eat and drink contains some kind of calorie value unless it's water or some kind of flavored water or tea. And so salads, soups, meals, pasta dishes, snacks, chocolate, protein shakes, takeout, whatever else we want to eat has a calorie value because it contains carbs, fats and proteins, which can be broken down by the body to release energy. So that's what we call calories in. If the calories in through food match the calories expended by the body, which is our basal metabolic rate, so that's just the basic energy needs of the body to just keep functioning and ticking over plus any activity, whether that's planned activity like an exercise session or a walk with a friend.
Or incidental activity, so just moving as part of your life, so brushing your hair, watering the garden, mowing the lawn, doing the washing, vacuuming the house. If those two things match energy in versus energy out, essentially, we have weight maintenance because the body is getting everything it's need. There's no surplus to store as fat and there's no deficit for it to have to break down body fat stores. It's what we call energy balance.
Then if we have a surplus, so more energy in through food, meals, snacks and drinks, then our body is using. When we have an energy surplus, the body stores that excess energy as body fat because it's kind of like we might use this for later. And the thing that you do have to understand about your body's tissues in particular body fat is that it's a dynamic tissue. There's constantly pathways being activated that store body fat or building fat and storing it in cells.
And there's constantly pathways that are being activated that are breaking down fats and releasing fats into the bloodstream to use for energy in the different cells. And it's the sort of net effect of what's going on. If there's more breakdown, then there is building, then we have fat loss. And if there's more building, then there is breakdown, then we have fat gain.
And so then, therefore, the opposite is true. If you've got less food coming in than your energy needs, then the body is having to access those fat stores to get that extra energy to make up for the fact that it's needing this extra energy. And this understanding of energy balance, it works to a point for weight management. But there's a couple of things that we need to really understand.
Firstly is when it comes to weight loss, an energy deficit must be significant. And that means that it must exist. And the thing is, is that your body actually adjusts itself based on different things every single day. And what I mean by that is that you don't have a set amount of calories that your body burns every day.
You're not a computer. You're not like a set, you know, standard. This is how much energy I burn. So therefore, if I eat this much, I'm going to lose weight.
This changes. And in fact, research shows us that the amount of energy your body burns every day is dependent on what you eat. So if you eat a little bit too much, your body will ramp up its energy expenditure. So it'll burn a little bit more, it'll be a little bit less efficient.
And that if you eat a little bit too less, it will start to put some efficiency measures in place so it doesn't burn enough energy. So the body can adapt. So an energy deficit must be significant enough to actually cause the body to make that extra sort of step to burn fat and therefore lose weight over time. The next thing is that the energy deficit must be consistent, meaning that it must exist on average every day.
And so if we've got an energy deficit for a couple of days, but then not for another couple of days, et cetera, and we're swinging from restriction to binging or we're going from being good during the week and overeating over the weekend, we don't have this consistent deficit being created. And therefore, as far as the body is concerned, there is really no energy deficit there. And thirdly, the energy deficit must be sustained, meaning that it must exist on average every day and then last for weeks and months. But there are some key problems with this.
Firstly, is this short term thinking that people think about energy and they might have a good three days and then weigh themselves, and then that will either make or break their day by the loss weight and they're like, yes, great, I'll keep going. Or they put on weight and they think screw it, I don't want to do this anymore. But the truth is that the energy deficit needs to be consistently there on average every single day for weeks and months for there to be true fat loss. So you can't have a short term mindset with this stuff.
Any kind of short term fluctuations in your weight is not a true reflection of what's really going on. Secondly, is that genetics and individual bodies respond differently to deficits. And this is really important. And if you look at lots of weight science, you will see that there'll be an average weight loss of the participants in the study where they're testing a particular weight loss method.
But there'll be some participants in the study that will lose a lot of weight. Then there'll be the ones that sit around the average and then there'll be the ones who didn't lose weight at all or they put on weight. And so there are huge individual differences about how they respond to deficits or different dietary protocols. And then of course you've got a lot of variation in the way individuals stick to particular protocols like what's going on in their lives.
Right, so there's so much nuance in this that it's really important that we don't just assume that someone's not trying hard enough or they're not sticking to the diet properly because there are situations metabolically where people's bodies just don't respond to the deficit. Another problem is that there's inaccurate measure of calories. One in that people are really bad at one measuring and recalling food and tracking calories. It's just difficult time consuming and energy-sapping activity to do.
But secondly, calories in and of themselves are an inaccurate science. So I'm not going to go into it in today's episode, but what you read on the packets of foods have a high margin of error. You know, you can do an equation to estimate your body's energy expenditure, but that has a high margin of error. So we're really working with lots of different elements that have high margins of error.
So you might be thinking you're creating a deficit, but you're actually really not. The other thing is that restriction of food can trigger overeating and make adherence difficult. So I see a lot of people sticking to really low calorie intakes, and this makes their adherence really difficult. So that's followed by binging and overeating.
The next problem is that there's this overriding of hunger-fulness cues. And so we're using an external measure of amount of calories that I should be eating to dictate whether you should eat or not. Rather than using internal cues of the body being like, I'm full, I'm going to stop eating, or I'm hungry, I'm going to go find something to eat. The other thing just to finish off this episode is that it doesn't address any underlying causes of overeating like binge eating disorder, or emotional eating, or boredom eating, or other kind of food triggers.
It also doesn't take into account the nutritional value of food. So if we're just tracking calories, we forget about the types and the quality and the quantities of food. And the truth is, is that over 80% of people regain any weight that they lose who have lost weight anyway. So there's a bunch of challenges with this myth, but calories do count, but there's complexity and nuances and a lot more going on than what social media tells you there is.
But that's it for today's episode. Join me and we'll keep going tomorrow. If you've got a topic you'd love to hear a chat about on the Daily Dollar, please let us know. Email us at hello at ailerhealth.com.au, or you can send us a message on Instagram.
Until next time.