Food Energy & Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

More On… Energy
Metabolism & Storage

If the inputs are wrong or erratic,
then the outputs will be wrong or erratic,
even if “the machine” is working perfectly.

What’s Wrong with those
“Low-Fat” and “Low-Carb” Diets?

As you probably already know, food energy (biological fuel) comes in four main forms: carbohydrate, fat, protein, and alcohol. What you may not know however, is that when eaten, each of these forms of energy causes the body to react in a completely different way. Each of these different reactions can be a powerful way to get rid of fat—or to put it on—depending on whether you understand how to use it or not.

These different reactions and how to use them properly are what we discuss in this chapter. At the end of the chapter we sum up what this means into several simple points of guidance for dieters.

There are three points that are worthwhile to keep in mind as you read, because they are important to the rest of the discussion.

1. Each of the four energy fuels influences the way the body handles each of the others.
2. Three of these energy fuels (carbohydrate, fat, and protein) are vital to the body for other things besides providing energy (alcohol is used only for energy).
3. Your body has a definite hierarchy of needs that it uses to “decide” how to use these four fuels if you eat them together.

Physiologists have known for decades that the body normally burns a mixture of carbohydrate, fat, and protein—that is, it burns all three at once. They have also found that the body has the ability to alter the composition of the mixture depending mainly on how much carbohydrate, fat, and protein you’ve eaten recently and what kind of activity you’re doing.

Obviously, what we Multi-Dieters want to do is to consciously alter this mixture of fuels to make sure that we’re burning mostly fat most of the time. It turns out that we actually can control this quite well.

All Calories are Not the Same

Although carbohydrate, fat, protein, and alcohol are substances that can all be sources of energy, when you eat them your body does not treat them in the same way. The reason is that the body has certain innate “preferences” as to what it would like to do with each of them.

These “preferences” govern what it does unless particular circumstances force it to do something else. For example, protein is needed for tissue maintenance and repair. It will be used mainly for this unless you are starving, in which case your body will ignore this preference and use the protein (and many other things) as fuel to keep you alive. (Energy has priority over all other needs.) Of course, in modern societies starvation is rarely a problem. The opposite situation—too much of a good thing—is much more typical.

Some of the body’s “preferences” are probably the result of the fact that different tissues operate on different fuels. For example, the brain and nervous system use glucose (carbohydrate) for fuel almost exclusively, and do not under normal circumstances use anything else. Certain blood cells cannot use anything but glucose under any circumstances. The skeletal muscles and heart, on the other hand, normally prefer fat for fuel, unless forced to use something else.

What this means is that the blood must constantly contain a “mixture” of these fuels so that the various tissues can select and burn the ones they need in the proper amounts. Since each type of tissue is always burning its particular favorite fuel, the body as a whole is always burning some mixture of carbohydrate, fat, and protein.

Physiologists have determined that under resting conditions the overall fuel mixture burned is mostly fat with much lower amounts of glucose (carbohydrate) and protein. (However, under exercise conditions this becomes much more variable. See more on… exercise.)

What are your body’s preferences for handling each of these fuels and how can we “leverage” these preferences into helping us lose weight?