Blunder of Counting Calories for Weight Loss

It is difficult to comprehend how is possible to make such a blunder but a little analysis will explain what caused such a blunder.

The undisputed fact is that certain people are naturally thin regardless of what they eat or exercise. With the abundance of food, many people stay thin irrespective of what they eat and how they are physically active.

Still, examples of naturally thin people are ignored in any approach to understanding obesity, but the examples of starvation are a basis for any approach to treating obesity like dieting, increased physical activity, diet pills and weight-loss surgeries- bariatric surgeries.

The fact overlooked or ignored by examples of starvation is that during a starvation period not all people will survive long enough to lose any significant amount of body weight. Whether they are obese, overweight or naturally thin before starvation, during the starvation period just a small percentage of them came to the point of reaching skeletal proportion body weight.

Many people died from starvation before they lost any meaningful amount of body weight. They starved to death before they lost any significant amount of body weight.

Another fact is, that even during starvation not everyone loses weight at the same rate. An article in the British Medical Journal concludes that those who are of normal weight will lose a higher percentage of their body weight and muscle tissue faster than those who are obese when starving during the first three days. Weight loss will be much faster in lean than in obese hunger strikers - U.S. National Library of Medicine

Since ancient times humans knew that for all people whether they were obese, overweight or naturally thin, and whether they are in process of gaining or losing body weight, a regular food intake is an essential factor for optimal work of the internal organs. (The pseudoscience bourn out of great academic blunder twisted nowadays human reasoning.)

• Prolonged starvation can cause organ failure.

• Popular weight-loss drugs Alli and Xenical may cause kidney and liver damage and organ failure,

• Anorexia, Bulimia and Other Eating Disorders ... have the potential to cause long-term damage to the body's organs and organ failure.

Instead of trying to understand why some people are able to come to the point of skeletal proportion they build the entire science of weight gain and weight loss on just one fact of starvation and ignore all the other facts of starvation.

The obesity scientists have picked up just one fact which is that starvation causes weight loss for everyone and inspired by the knowledge of how the internal combustion engine works like a petrol engine and diesel engines they have come to the theory that the balance between calories in food intake and calories spend for basal metabolic rate, plus calories spent through physical activity determines weight gain or weight loss

The “counting calories” as a scientific method to understand and control the weight of the body was introduced at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century and quickly was accepted as an unquestionable scientific truth by the medical establishment and the rest of the population.

For almost one hundred years, the scientists involved in research, prevention and treatment of obesity believed that every single calorie in food intake, if not spent, will be converted into fat mass and stored in fat tissue. This belief was in line with the anabolism and catabolism theory.

In reality, calories are just a measurement of the heat produced when food is burned in laboratories to dry powder ashes. In living organisms, this kind of process (burning) never happens, because the metabolic waste (faeces, urine, sweat, exhaled breath etc.) is not dry powder ashes and on the other side, some food leaves the body before it is fully metabolised and some food leaves the body after it is metabolised. “The counting calories” is the wrong method to determine how much of the food uptake is fully metabolised.

The difference between the energy intake and the energy discarded and excreted as metabolic waste is the amount of energy that is fully metabolised.

Even if we know how much energy is fully metabolised, we still cannot predict the exceeded number of calories that the body will use because some absorbed calories (metabolized food) body excretes through the skin and hair.

One sort of energy (matter) the body does not fully metabolise but excretes mainly through the digestive and urinary system (faecal matter - faecal energy), and another sort is the energy that the body first metabolises and later excretes as metabolic waste through the skin and hair, (for example some people have greasier skin and/or greasier hair than others).

a) The reduction in food intake doesn't always cause weight loss.

b) Under certain circumstances, (in some cases) a reduction in food intake causes weight gain. (Undernutrition causes sluggishness - Sligishnes cause weight gain).

c) The reduction of food intake always causes a decrease in metabolic waste.

The examples of medically unexplained weight loss are further arguments against the “Calorie In - Calorie Out” theory.

Unexplained weight loss when a person doesn’t eat less or exercise more usually happens among people affected with certain conditions. It is called unexplained weight loss because it can’t be explained with the model-theory Calories In-Calories Out.

Despite the fact that they called it unexplained weight loss, they still try to create theories like in the case of weight loss among people affected with cancer. The pseudoscientific explanation of weight loss which can be found on many reputable medical institutions' websites is: “The weight loss is partly due to the increased activity of cancer cells in the body that requires nutrition. That is an example of how the pseudoscience of one biological process (which is in this case the biological process of weight gain and weight loss), negatively affects the ability to understand another biological process (destructive biological process).

One other pseudoscientific explanation of unexplained weight loss relates to people affected with Type 1 diabetes before they start insulin therapy, and weight gain after insulin therapy. They have out of hand created the theory that insulin causes weight gain.

This explanation is not only pseudoscience, but it is the only cause for the epidemic proportion prevalence of diabulimia among people affected with Type 1 diabetes. (Diabulimia is an eating disorder in which people with type 1 diabetes deliberately give themselves less insulin than they need or stop taking it altogether for the purpose of weight loss.)

Apart from the theory Calories In-Calories Out there are countless other theories which their creators and their followers believe explain weight gain and weight loss. Most popular are: Good Calories-Bad Calories, The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity - Beyond “Calories In, Calories Out”, etc.

In reality, all those new theories are created by just slightly modifying the theory of Calorie in – Calorie out. Those theories are products of a rich imagination guided by pseudoscience.