On this special episode of the podcast we talk about the difference between building strength and building muscle.
00:02
Welcome back to My Take, a podcast that discusses current events in nutrition, the business side of the health and fitness industry, and a little bit of everything in between. I'm dropping a special episode. We actually recorded a Facebook Live in our Facebook group. So go join us in the Facebook group if you want to catch these live. We have a ton of fun in there. We answer questions for free. But Dylan joins me and we talk all about calories, how context matters, what they are, and how you should think about them. So let's get into...
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The show.
01:12
All right, welcome back to Macros Inc. Live, your show for some things fitness and nutrition related. I'm your host, Dylan, joined by Brad Deter. Did you like that intro, by the way? That's your first time hearing the intro music. Did you like it? Did you get pumped up? I got super pumped up and I was rocking out and I just really wanted to make a joke and just like, did you guys know that's Dylan actually shredding on the guitar? I've actually tried. I've played that on my guitar, but it's acoustic and
01:37
It doesn't sound nearly as good. It is a very easy song to play, but it's not one you want to play on the acoustic. Anyways, guys, each week we bring you a new topic to discuss to help you reach your goals. And this week we're going to be talking about calories. So the energy equation, all things calories. So pull up a chair, listen in, and let's get started. I'm pretty excited about this one, Brad.
02:07
This is a topic that I think it's a very fundamental topic, but I think it's one of the most misunderstood. We can dive into this, but I think this is a... Everyone knows or has at least heard of a calorie. I think most people, when they hear about consuming calories and too many calories, they know what happens, but the mechanisms behind it and there's a lot of myths. There's a lot to dive into.
02:37
So I'm pretty excited about this one. Before we get to the questions, do you feel this is a... Obviously you've worked with people for a long time, but do you think the general population has a misunderstanding or a misconception of calories and how they affect the body? How well understood do you think this is? I think it's one of those topics that is both...
03:06
well understood and completely misunderstood at the same time. I'm sure we're going to talk about this as we get into more details, but I think basically everybody knows what a calorie is or what it means when we talk about calories. It's just the energy that we get from our food and the energy our body expands. I think understanding how that...
03:31
energy equation actually works, especially in modern society. I think most people just don't really appreciate and understand the variables that go into that equation. And while it's very simple, and I'm sure we're going to talk about it in more detail, but like while it's very simple in concept,
03:52
it's a little, sometimes I feel like it's a little too personal and visceral for people to really accept and understand. Probably a good way to put it. I think it's, and we will get to a lot of that, but to touch on something you said, one of the most common things that I see people say, not just in our group, but
04:20
but everywhere is not all calories are created equally or where those calories are coming from has an effect on your weight and all that. Like I said, we can dive into that. The thing that I always try to clear up is a calorie is just a calorie. It's just a unit of measurement. That's really all it is. It just happens to be the unit of measurement that we use to describe the energy value.
04:50
within your given macronutrients, so fats, carbohydrates, and protein, right? Each of those per gram has a certain amount of calories. But that's really all a calorie is. It's a unit of measurement, right? So it quantifies the amount of energy in food and your beverages. But then from that stems all this, you know, all the misconceptions. So anyways, we can dive right into the questions. Like I said, I'm excited about this one. So let's get started.
05:20
The big question that we got from people is, what exactly is a calorie and how is it measured? I already touched on some of that. It's a unit of measurement. It quantifies the amount of energy in our food and the things that we drink. It actually represents the amount of energy required. You can correct me if I'm wrong. If my memory serves me right, a calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. That's like
05:50
That's the scientific way to define a calorie. So anyways, what exactly is a calorie? How is it measured? Is that close to your understanding as well? Yeah. So that is the technical definition of it. But I think what we often don't think about or maybe don't understand is that's like calorie with a small c. Correct. And you've got kilocalories, right?
06:16
We talk about food and our total energy expenditure. We're talking about capital calorie or it's a thousand calories. That's why you sometimes see calories with a capital C or K cal for kilo calories. So it's a thousand calories. So when you eat two thousand calories your day, you're actually eating two thousand thousand calories, if that makes sense. But to your point is, yes, it's a unit of measure.
06:43
Right, it's a unit of measure of the amount of energy in the food that you eat or that your body expends.
06:52
So how do the, sorry, yeah, go ahead. And so when we actually think about, you know, like human metabolism as it relates to calories.
07:03
The way I like to put it is the human body is basically just like a giant biological engine, right? Like when we eat food, we extract energy from the food and chemical energy, which is the calories. And then our body transforms that into either like a movement, right? Like mechanical energy. I don't know why I decided that this was the movement. I was gonna make. Mechanical energy, right? Our body produces heat.
07:32
Right? Our core temperature is actually hotter than the environment most of the time. So 98.6 degrees or I run cold, so I'm like 97.2. But we produce heat as a byproduct. We also transform that chemical energy and the bonds in our food into stored chemical energy and glycogen in our fat tissue and the other tissues that we build. Your muscle tissue is...
08:02
in theory, just stored calories in a specific form of tissue. It's stored energy. That is a form of stored chemical energy. That's really what our body does is it just transforms chemical energy from our food into different types of energy. When we think about energy balance and that larger concept, when you think about it in that terms, it starts to intuitively make sense. Then how do you actually transpose that into what you experience in the real world is where it starts to get tricky.
08:32
Right. Yeah. The how to is how's it measured? Right. I think that's that's an interesting one to me. Have you ever been in a lab where they've actually like where they can measure the calorie content of food? Have you ever seen it either in person or just or anywhere? So that's interestingly, that's one of the things I've never actually done is like use the bomb calorimeter. So basically what they do is they just take food, they light it on fire and they see how much like
09:01
Energy is from that food generally in heat. I'd have to go exactly how they do that, but it's the same thing of like How do you determine the energy used by your stove? How do you determine the energy used by the like lights in your house? Like there's very quantifiable like measurement tools for measuring calories Yep Let's dive into the next question which is how do calories provide energy?
09:30
to our bodies. And you can elaborate on this as well and provide more context. But I think the interesting thing that, and this kind of comes down to when people mention different calories affecting you differently, what they're inadvertently referring to is the macronutrient content in the food rather than the calories itself. So.
09:58
You've got digestion, right? Those macronutrients are broken down into smaller molecules. Carbohydrates get converted into glucose, protein into amino acids, fat into fatty acids and glycerol. Then from there, you get energy through a series of chemical processes. Carbohydrates get glucose. That's the primary product of carbohydrate digestion. It's absorbed into the bloodstream, transported to the cells.
10:28
The glucose undergoes oxidative phospholuration and all this other scientific stuff happens and I'm sure people's eyes are rolling in the back of their heads by this point. But basically there's different processes that occur within the mitochondria to get energy from the macronutrients that you consume, right? And where the calories come into play is that...
10:55
during that process, during the breakdown of these processes, certain amounts of energy are released. And that's why we say that per gram of carbohydrates, per gram of protein, there are about four calories each. Fats, about nine. But so during that breakdown, that's about the amount of energy that's released. Is that an accurate summation of that process and how calories are extracted? I know there's more to it than that, but in a broad sense.
11:24
Yeah, so I think when we talk about it in the most fundamental senses, the energy in your food is actually found in the bonds between atoms, right? So like when you consume a glucose molecule, the bonds that are between the carbons and the hydrogens and the oxygens, that's where all the energy is. And so your body basically has these chemical reactions that start to split those bonds.
11:50
when they split, they release energy and that energy is then captured and transformed into like ATP, which is what our body's primary form of energy is. So that's for carbohydrates, fats, proteins, it doesn't matter. That's how it works. Each of those macronutrients has a different level of density of energy in a gram of those molecules. Like a gram of carbohydrates has fewer energy and
12:20
than a gram of fat. And so that's how that works. Now...
12:28
One of the things to make sure we're pretty clear about is this whole trope of a calorie is a calorie and all calories are created equal is true. A calorie is just a unit of measure. The calorie from glucose is the same as a calorie from fats is protein. The calories and the carbohydrates from an apple are basically the same as the calories from the carbohydrates in Sour Patch Kids. Technically true.
12:58
And this is kind of where I want to get this discussion to, but the context of how you consume those calories makes a big difference, right? That's why when people say things like 200 calories from a donut is different than 200 calories from broccoli. It's like, technically no.
13:17
Practically, yes. And it has to do with the context of how you're consuming that food, right? And so when we talk about, like let's talk about the, maybe you have this other in the questions, but let's talk about the energy balance equation, right? And since we're talking about food, we'll start there. But like, so the energy balance equation is basically just down to fundamental thermodynamics, right? It's basically like calories in plus calories out.
13:46
or minus calories out equals like body weight change, right? It is physically impossible to have more energy going out. So expending more calories than you're consuming and gain weight, vice versa. It's impossible to consume less calories than you're expending and gain weight. Like the math just has, it works out. It just.
14:15
You cannot violate the law of physics, but... Right.
14:20
The food you consume, how you consume it, will affect how much energy you consume, right? We talk about this in the NutriWiki course, which you can go to course.macrosync.net and there's a free entire course that we spend, I don't know, 10, 15 pages talking about this.
14:41
The...
14:45
The aspects of the food you consume drive how many calories you consume, right? And there are certain things we know about, like the inherent characteristics of the food we eat will drive you to consume more or less food, right? So for example, one of the most basic things we know about food, and this relates back to macronutrients, is how energy dense is your food, right? I have a bag of almonds right here, right? This is...
15:15
um, one serving, 28 nuts is 170 calories. This is like a very energy dense food, right? Very good way to get overweight if you eat too many almonds. Yeah, I can have four handfuls of these and that's 500 calories. It's so easy to eat. And they're so delicious, too. That's the problem. Those things are awesome. And so the food that we consume basically falls on the energy density scale, right? You have things like olive oil, butter,
15:43
other pure fats are basically 100% energy dense. So every gram of food has calories in it at the highest density of calories we consume in food, which is 9 calories per gram. So if you have 10 grams of olive oil, you have 90 calories. On the other side of the spectrum is you have things like celery, which are so non-energy dense.
16:12
that it's almost impossible to get a meaningful amount of calories from celery. There's kind of this whole trope of you burn more calories eating celery than you do actually from celery. Which first of all, you're eating celery, gross. It's like hairy water. I don't know what people eat. My wife eats celery and I'm just like, I can't. Does she eat celery with peanut butter? No, she just eats celery. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. I should have known this before I married her.
16:42
So those are like the two ends of the spectrum, right? And then everything you eat falls somewhere in between that, right? And if you kind of isolate that variable out of, and we just take that in an isolation out of everything else.
16:57
The more, the higher your diet is in energy density, the more calories you consume. Like on a daily basis. This has been studied, we know this, this is not new. This is like several decades old of information, right? This is fundamentally one of the reasons why a lot of times when people switch to a plant-based diet, vegan or vegetarian, they lose weight because on average.
17:22
vegan and vegetarian diets are substantially lower in energy density because they're eating per gram of food, just the energy density of per gram of food drops, right? This is why when you switch, you usually drop about, like in the first four to six weeks, your average daily calorie intake drops by about 400 to 700 calories when you switch to a point-based diet, right? So that's one of them. Another aspect of the food is nutrient density, right? So you have things like,
17:52
Like, let's take really dark berries, right? Like per gram, they have a ton of micronutrients, right? Even things like organ meats like liver, right? Per gram, very high in micronutrient density. On the other end, you have things like, let's take like highly processed refined oils, right? Those have a ton of energy density, but they have basically no nutrients in it. It's just fat, right?
18:22
The same kind of concept applies, but in reverse, where if you consume a diet that's very high in nutrient density, you're more likely to consume less calories. There's a lot of these aspects of food, and we talk about this like this and palatability and some other things in the Nutri-Oakie course. It just breaks down the different characteristics of food and how the context of how you consume them actually helps drive your overall energy intake.
18:52
higher in nutrient density, lower in energy density, lower in palatability, higher in protein due to satiety. Like they drive fewer calories to be consumed and it's all based on the context, right? This is why like 200 calories of a donut is the same as 200 calories of celery, but the context of them is way different.
19:19
Um.
19:23
I had a thought, but we'll come back to that. I think, by the way, you should try celery with peanut butter. Just saying. Yeah, ants on the lawn. We used to do that when I was a kid.
19:37
That's with raisins too, right? You put a little raisins on them. Yeah, answer that. All right, so the other question that we get, we've talked about how calories provide energy, what a calorie is, and we did get the question about how calories are calculated. So somebody had asked, I'd like to know how calories are calculated for each individual.
20:06
And then how a deficit is calculated. I like to understand numbers. I get putting them into your calculator, but I'd like to have more detail about the science behind it, especially for people who have a lot of muscle mass and gain muscle easier than others. And so there's a couple ways you can do it. First of all, they're all based on equations. And there's several equations you can use.
20:35
There's the Paris Benedict equation, and then there's my personal favorite, the Mifflin-Saint-Giorre equation, which I call it the Dunder Mifflin equation. For anyone that likes an office reference. But essentially, calculating your calorie requirements, it comes down to using one of the formulas. So you've got the...
21:02
in whatever formula it is, let's say it's the Harris Benedict equation, the Dunder Mifflin equation, what those primarily do is they first calculate your BMR, so your basal metabolic rate. And what that is, it's like that's basically for anyone not familiar, your BMR tells you how many calories you would need, roughly.
21:30
if you were to sit around and do nothing all day. So like if you were just to lay in bed, how many calories would you require to stay alive, right? And just sustain yourself. And then from there, once you've got that, then you just, then it's taking your BMR and multiplying it by like your activity factor. So if you're sedentary, lightly active, if you're moderately active, if you're super active, you're gonna multiply that. The calculator, our calculator, takes your BMR and multiplies it by a certain amount.
21:59
So like if you're super active, like you have a, let's say a construction job and you work out on top of that, you'd probably multiply your BMR by like 1.9 or two. So, whereas if you're sedentary, it might be only 1.2. But can you talk a little bit about how that's, anything you wanna add to that and also maybe dive into our calculator for this, for people that want to know about
22:27
How do we calculate people's calories and then divvy up the macro targets from there? Our calculator works on FM, as my wife would say. F in magic, that's how it works. So I think- We can get Marissa on the show sometime, by the way. Let's get her on. She's by far the funniest person I know. We're gonna get her on. Like, this is just an example. I don't know why we're-
22:55
going on this tangent, but were you here at the dinner where she just like randomly pulled out the dinosaur costume and was running around my house? Yeah. Yes, yes. So work party and my wife just pulls out a dinosaur costume, but yeah. We told her to do that. She was influenced. She's a who. So let's- We're gonna get her on. Let's dissect the-
23:20
Calorie calculator how it works. Let's talk a little bit more about BMR And then I'll kind of give some insights into how our specific calculator works without giving away the secret sauce But before I jump in I do think we should Refer to it from now on as the Dunder Mifflin equation with the Dwight Schrute modifier instead of the physical activity multiplier So basal metabolic rate like Dylan said just represents the total amount of calories that your body burns
23:49
just to basically have basic metabolic functions run, like breathing, heart beating, kidneys filtering, like your cells maintaining cellular integrity, etc. That number is almost entirely driven by your total body mass. So that is your height, your weight. And then there is a slight adjustment for age.
24:15
And there's a slight adjustment for biological sex because we know that the distribution of adipose to lean muscle tissue, the means of the distributions are different between men and women. Obviously, there's some women who are leaner than men and there's some men who are less lean than women, but the mean of those distributions is different. So we adjust that. Now that BMR number has been developed.
24:43
by basically measuring the true metabolic rate. So you can measure that by keeping people in a metabolic ward. You can do doubly labeled water. Like there's ways you can actually measure total energy or BMR. And then they put in all those variables and they can plot an equation that best fits that. So these are all estimates.
25:08
So once you have an estimate of BMR, like Dylan said, then you can adjust for physical activity and then you get your total daily energy expenditure. Now, one of the things that people often say is, hey, my BMR is not normal. It's either way low or way high. So these calculators don't work. Here's what the data actually suggests about that.
25:38
If you take a distribution of all people, let's just say 100,000 people, and the mean basal metabolic rate for them is, let's just call it 1,700.
25:54
The variance on that is about 5% to 8%. So that means one standard deviation, which would be 60%, what plus or minus would be 70% of the entire population. They're true basal metabolic rates. So the discrepancy between estimated and true is about, it would basically be plus or minus 100 calories. So it's either 1,700 or 1,600 or 1,800. It's somewhere in that range.
26:23
If we expand that to 95% of people, the true metabolic rate is plus or minus 200 from that estimate, right?
26:32
most people are not going to gain or lose weight based on that small of an error. That's just the reality, especially when we set most people's deficits at a minimum of 500 or 700. So this estimate of your calorie needs, which is based on basal metabolic rate times your physical activity, is within probably 200 calories of correct for 95%, 98% of people. If we set your deficit at 500
27:03
The only thing that's going to change if you are 100% adherent is how quickly you lose weight. Right. So you're either going to lose a pound a week or half pound a week or a pound and a half a week, whether you've over or underestimated. And so I remember there was like a two-year span of my career where I just was on an absolute tirade of people need to stop going to pay for these basal metabolic rate tests because they don't do anything and people yelled at me. But the data supports like...
27:33
If you are, if your basal metabolic rate is 200 calories lower than expected, like it makes a small difference, but not that big of a difference. Now, the group of people where it may make a bigger difference is one, people who are very small, right? So like the four foot 11, 108 pound people of the world, who their deficit is already maybe like 200 calories a day is what they can actually do because you can't diet somebody that small on very low calories.
28:00
So like there's some extremes, but for most people, those equations are fairly correct. So- What about endurance, like lean endurance athletes? Yeah, so much of theirs is driven by their physical activity that like the air and that, and the BMR doesn't really matter. So, okay. So how are our calculator works? We have one that we're using now, and then we have another one that we're developing that will be launched soonish.
28:29
is we initially took the basic equations that have been generated in the scientific literature, and we then just mapped them into a calculator that made slight, what I'll call, self-empirically driven data decisions like, hey, we know that most people actually overestimate their physical activity.
28:53
And then we made some adjustments for that. And then we also took some liberties like, hey, if you want to lose weight or gain weight, here's how we think we should set up these equations. And so we took some like our own intuitive knowledge and understanding of working with I think collectively as coaches, like 50,000, 60,000 people at this point in our careers, plus large data sets. So now what we've done is we've actually been able to take the... So that was the initial calculator. We've now had over...
29:23
I think two and a half, three million people run the calculator. And we've had clients that we can track what our coaches set their calories to. We can match their user information with what the initial calorie calculator that they inputted, right? And see how close the estimates were with their progress. And so we've been able to do some like...
29:50
quasi machine learning AI like statistical models to adjust from actual real world data to like estimated data back to the original estimated equations and we've updated that to match. We've also made some adjustments for like, hey, if people weigh 400 pounds, their protein recommendations are gonna be slightly different. So we've made some like categorical adjustments as well. So that's kind of how our calculator works.
30:19
Speaking of that, anybody that's watching, if you haven't used the calculator, it's right on our website. Just go to macrosync.net, you'll find it right there. It's actually macrosync.net slash macro-calculator. But if you go to our website, we'll find it. It's free, get your macro targets, get our ebook, all the free stuff that we give out. You can put the link in the little banner thing below for a few minutes if you want. That's actually probably the best idea. Let's go ahead and do that.
30:52
In the meantime, actually, I'm going to create this banner in a second. Why don't we dive into the next question? This will give me an opportunity to do that as well. But we can answer this next question, which is, and I love this because we do get this one a lot. I'm going to give the straight answer. You can expand on that if you'd like. Can you lose weight just by cutting calories without exercise? The answer is yes. If you'd like to elaborate, take it away.
31:22
When you look at the research and you compare diet versus exercise for just weight loss, diet wins by a landslide in every study. That's because exercise alone generally only increases your calorie expenditure in a given day by 200 to 300 calories. I think a lot of times people overestimate the caloric expenditure of exercise for a very simple reason. Let's just say you go to the gym.
31:52
and you get on the treadmill, and it tells you you burned 250 calories in an hour. Well, that 250 calories also includes the basal metabolic rate of what you would have, your body would have burned if you were just standing still for that hour, right? So let's just say 70 of those calories are just basal metabolic rate calories, right? So you really only burn like 180 calories. So generally exercise kind of overestimates our total calorie expenditure.
32:21
Plus, for most people, there is a ceiling on how much time that you can spend exercising in a day. Like, unless you have nothing else to do besides you want to walk all day and swim all day and lift weights all day, most of us can maybe increase our total calorie expenditure in a week just from exercise by 1,000 to 2,000 calories, right? Like at most in a week. Where with diet, even a modest deficit of 500 calories a day is 3,500 calories in a week.
32:50
Exactly. You just have so much more control on the downside through dietary restriction, calorie restriction than you do on the upside of exercise. Now, that doesn't mean that exercise isn't important. The exercise component allows you to maintain a relatively decent deficit while eating more calories. Let's say your maintenance is 2000 calories and you want to lose a pound a week.
33:19
So you go to a 500 calorie a day deficit. Well, now you have to eat 1500 calories. Like, I don't know about you, but that sucks. Like that's just not a lot of food. Right. That'd be miserable. 1800's miserable. I mean, for me, like a six foot hundred and seventy five, 80 pound person, like that would be, that'd be a fairly small amount of food. Right. Now, if I add in two to three hour.
33:43
two to three hours a day, two to 300 calories a day of exercise by lifting weights. Not only do I get the benefit of I'm going to retain muscle mass, I'm going to improve my cardiovascular health, my bone density is going to go up, but now I can now eat 1750. I can eat more calories and still lose the same amount of weight without massively restricting. I think that's the other side of the equation that a lot of times people don't talk about. This has been one of my...
34:13
uh, my banners that I have flown for my entire career is the goal of weight loss is to lose weight on as many calories as possible, not as few calories as possible. Sure. Cause the other side of it is
34:32
The data supports this too. Our bodies do better consuming more calories than consuming less calories up to a point where it's like you're in an energy surplus. The data is very clear. If you have a 500 calorie a day deficit at consuming 2000 calories a day, so let's say you're consuming 2000 and burning 2500, you get much better outcomes than consuming a thousand and burning 1500. You just do. Your body's just so much
35:01
better when it has more stimulus than when it has less stimulus. And so that's why it's important to try to couple exercise, even though you can lose weight with diet alone, it is important to do exercise with it. It's important for exercise. Everybody knows that exercise is important. It's good for your health. It's good for your heart. It's good for your muscles, your skeletal system. It's good for your brain. I think everybody knows that. I think to sum that up.
35:30
One of the things I tell people in the group when they ask that question is, or we'll get the question, how many calories do you burn by doing this exercise? And it's kind of like, I don't want to say that, I don't like saying, well, it doesn't matter, don't focus on that, but it's so much, it's hard to know how many calories you actually burn in a particular exercise. So focusing on that side of the equation doesn't make much sense when you have so much more control over the intake side of the equation.
36:00
I think that's one of the points that I try to make is when you're trying to lose weight, you can certainly do without exercise, but you're better off focusing on the intake part of that because you have control over that versus worrying about how much energy you've expended on the output. Just sort of tying up your point in a bow there. But yes, the answer is you can, but don't...
36:26
Don't use that as an excuse to not exercise if you can, because it's definitely important. The next question we have is, and this is a good one too, and people are gonna appreciate us diving into this one, I think, and that is FDA labeling rules, right? So we know that they're allowed, like our food labels aren't, nothing's 100% accurate, but like food labels are allowed to be a certain amount off of the actual calorie content.
36:56
So, the question is, why is that? The labeling rules for calories and why the food label won't always match what the macro calculation is. I don't know all the legislation and all of that and when all that came into play, but basically the FDA allows food manufacturers to round calorie counts on labels. So for example, if a product has...
37:22
let's say it has five calories, it can actually be rounded down to zero on the label. If it has more than 50 calories, it can be rounded to the nearest tenth increment. So you could say 40 calories. And then there's something called, I'm going to probably defer this to you because maybe you know a little bit more about this than I do, but at water factors.
37:52
usually calculated using what they call at water factors, which assign... What we talked about earlier is each macro has a certain amount of calories per gram, and they're just averages. Protein, carbs, each roughly have about four calories per gram and nine calories per gram of fat. But again, those are averages and the actual energy can vary slightly based on...
38:21
how the food's digested, like fiber, for example. So aside from the rounding rule and the what they call at water factors, is there anything else that you're aware of? And would you like to dive into any of those factors as to why are labels off? Because I think it can be pretty frustrating for people, and they struggle to understand and handle that, especially when they're first starting out counting their macros. It can be confusing.
38:50
Yeah, so...
38:53
I'll dive into some of the specifics here in a second, but I think...
38:59
There's so many more important things to focus on than the like super minutia of what's in the nutrition label with a few exceptions. Some of those exceptions would be like, to your point, there are some foods or like cooking sprays for example, that say zero calories because the serving size, if you use it exactly as the serving says,
39:28
It says zero calories when in reality, it's probably like two, two and a half calories per serving, but they can round down. So if you have a hundred servings, like if you spray the absolute, you know what, out of a pan or food, like you are actually probably getting a hundred calories or so. Right. So there are, by the way, so there are some things like that where it actually may matter, especially if you use a lot of it every day or like, let's say you have a beverage that's like, you know,
39:56
zero calories per serving, but it's actually two and you drink a hundred servings of it in a day, like, okay, that's a hundred calories. Those things may matter over time. But what I think when you get into it, like let's say there's a food that it's true calories after you like adjust for the net carb calculation and you adjust for like all the rounding is actually 200 calories, right? But the box says 190 calories.
40:25
and you eat that food four times a week, twice a day. That's what, 80? If you double the serving, that's 160 calories a week. 160 calories out of your targeted 3,500 calorie deficit probably isn't that big of a deal, right? And I think sometimes we focus on the minutia because it seems like it's something we can control. And I just don't know if for most people it's that big of a deal. What I always tell people is
40:56
Just pick a method for how you want to track it and just stick with it, right? If you're doing that carbs, doing that carbs, if you're not, don't. If you're inputting the macronutrients and auto calculating the calories, like just do, like just pick a method and be consistent. But I don't think.
41:13
it really is that big of a deal for 98% of people. I myself haven't worried about that since 2010. Yeah, I think that's good advice. I would definitely agree with that. I think it's more of one of those things where people that are just starting out, or even people that have been doing it for a while, they come across, wait a minute, this is off and it's confusing, and it can throw them off. So I think...
41:39
I think that's a really good point is look, yeah, there's going to be some variance there. Don't worry too much about it. If you're consistent with your intake and you're consistent with your, you know, your weekly routine, your exercise and all that, it's going to, it's going to work out just fine. The, the, the difference isn't going to be big enough to like offset your week. When it comes to like food labeling and error rates allowed in food, I'm more concerned with the amount of cockroaches that are allowed in like canned food. Like what's legal.
42:09
Have you heard about how much sawdust is allowed to be in cheese? Yeah, well, see, I don't know if it's actual sawdust or if it's cellulose. It's fiber. They say they call it sawdust. It's like it's not actual sawdust. I know. Yeah, yeah. I'm more worried about the amount of insects that are in my food from when I eat canned food or flour or rice or whatever than my label being off by 10 calories. If you could know.
42:38
how many cockroaches you've inadvertently eaten in your entire life through the food supply chain? Would you want to know? No, absolutely not. It's like when you read that fact of like the average person swallows five spiders a year and they're asleep and you're just like, I could have gone my whole life without knowing that. Is it not true? Is that what you're baloney? As far as I've read that that's like an old wives tale and that like spiders don't actually like a...
43:08
a moist place like your mouth would be, they would just stay away from that. But by the way, I don't know, some of us get dry mouth when we sleep. So some of us don't have moist mouth when we sleep.
43:19
That's How do I interpret this I don't know how to yeah, no I was just gonna say my my wife I Promise we'll get on top. This is why I say the show is something's fitness and nutrition related But my wife works at a pharmaceutical company and they have packing peanuts And I when I when my kids were younger my two oldest older daughters when they were younger
43:43
Like the first couple of times they had gone there, my wife's like, here, you can eat these packing peanuts. And they thought it was styrofoam, but it's like actual edible, like it's just cellulose. So my wife just kind of was joking like, here, look, I'm going to eat this styrofoam, puts in her mouth. And my kids are like, what the? Then of course she tells them it's okay to eat it. And they started just eating packing peanuts. Like, oh my God. It just dissolves in your mouth. But yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend that. Okay.
44:10
Next question that we got, I also love, I love all these questions, but I really like this one because I think it blows people's minds. And the question is, is it true that you burn the same amount of calories walking as you do by running? And I want to put a little caveat on that because that was the question we got. It's all about the distance that you travel rather than like the amount of time, right? Because if I run for 30 minutes, I'm going to burn more calories than if I had just walked for five. So that's a time thing.
44:40
So I think what the person is asking is, let's just use a mile as an example. If I walk a mile, will I burn the same amount of calories?
44:54
as I would have had I run that mile. I think the answer will surprise people. For the most part, you do pretty much burn the same calories with the difference, with any difference probably being heat production, I would imagine. Can you shed some light on that and the differences between running a mile or walking a mile or X distance, whatever you want to use? This is why I love science and the internet. This is actually a perfect example.
45:25
This has been a concept for a long time that people have said, that you burn the same amount of calories walking a mile as you do running a mile, or whatever distance. And it's sort of true, but it's not quite true. And so...
45:43
It comes down to the fact, not because when you run, you are, your metabolism's higher or you're producing like substantially more energy. There is a slight difference between walking and running. And it doesn't have anything to do with heat. If you had to guess what the difference is, what do you think it would be? And I'll give you a hint. It's a very fundamental aspect of physics.
46:13
and the difference between running and walking. I'll give you a second to guess and then I'll just tell you.
46:19
I would say it has to do with the load that's being moved. Nope. Low is the same. No? Okay. Right? Because you're moving, for me, 175 pounds regardless. What's different is... Are we talking about maybe muscle mass or body composition? Nope. Huh. Okay. It is the vertical displacement that is different between running and walking. So let's say you walk a mile. Your hips and your whole body...
46:47
Yeah, you're a little more right there moves horizontally, right? So in physics, work is defined by force times distance, right? And force times distance includes the entire distance. So up, left, down, right, whatever the amount of total movement. When you walk a mile, your cumulative horizontal and vertical displacement is slightly less than when you run, right? Because when you run running by definition is you have flight time, right? Walking is you by definition don't have flight time, you always have one foot on the ground.
47:17
And running, you have a certain portion where there's flight time, right? Both feet are off the ground. Right? Like that's the, that's the definition between running and walking. Like if you look at the Olympic speed walk, and I don't know if they still do it in Olympics, but it's like a professional sport, right? Yep. Um, so you get more vertical displacement that accumulates over a mile running than you do walking. So you get a slightly higher caloric expenditure running than you do walking. It's not huge.
47:43
But it is there. I'll have to go find the paper because someone like did the math and then actually measured the calorie expenditure and it lined up like almost identical from the work equations to calorie expenditure. So I thought that was really interesting. How much different? I mean, are we talking like I'm different to like five calories, 10 calories, a calorie? It's like, it's small. It's probably five to 10%. I'll have to go check and I will find the article and I will get sent it to you and you can post it.
48:12
So the general answer is like... It's similar.
48:19
Oh, take my... Nope, I don't know what happened to my camera. It's so much nicer when it's black. It's just dark. Black screen- Can you hear me still? I can still hear you. You just, you died. Okay, I don't know what happened. Let's try this again. Sorry guys, I don't know what happened there. My mic, or my camera decided to black me out. So, overall, basically your answer is yes, but with like
48:49
a caveat. So kind of yes, but kind of no. It's not entirely black or white. Yes.
48:59
I love that topic. That's an interesting question and answer. The next question that we got was...
49:13
How accurate, you may or may not know this answer. If you don't, we can certainly research it. How accurate are lab-tested BMR calories with indirect calorie- Calorimetry. Yeah. So, like, you know, where you relax and breathe into a mask. Says, is that more accurate than a calculator? Mine has my resting rate higher than average. And obviously, you know, the calculator is a, it's an equation.
49:42
It's not going to be, you're not hooking up to a machine, you're not breathing into a mask. But correct me if I'm wrong, I think if we're talking about a metabolic ward where they actually measure your caloric output, that's measuring things like, what exactly does it measure like? In a metabolic ward, for example, and you're hooked up to this machinery.
50:06
like how is that measured and is that more reliable? Like if you were really looking for like a reliable number on how many calories do I expend doing XYZ, that's gotta be more accurate than a calculator, I would think, right? And can you dive into that a little bit? Yeah, so this is an interesting question in that.
50:28
When you say how accurate is indirect calorimetry in a lab versus a calculator, the way we measure BMR is indirect calorimetry. That's the reference. That's technically the most accurate. There are a couple other ways you can measure, like you can truly measure BMR. One of them is doubly labeled water. You basically...
50:57
It's a little bit over my head of how it works, but basically you can radioactively label water, have someone consume the water and track how it goes through their body, and you can actually get estimates of energy expenditure that way. There are some discrepancies. I think depending on the way the study is done, doubly labeled water is probably plus or minus 5% to 10% of BMR, like the measurement. So they're all...
51:26
all three different ways to obtain a basal metabolic rate measure with indirect calorimetry being kind of the standard way we measure quote unquote true BMR. The estimating equations are within 5% to 8% for most people, within 10% to 15% for basically everybody, doubly labeled water is within 5%. So they're all kind of right around the same. And so if you're...
51:53
If your BMR from the calculator is overestimating by 5% to 10%, so like 100 calories, 50 calories, it's within that error rate of all of those types of measures. So yeah.
52:10
Um.
52:12
This next one talks about surgery. And this one says, how important are calories after a major surgery to heal but not gain fat? And I think that one's interesting because, and we've gotten that question before, we've seen it in the group. We have clients that are working with a coach and have to pause what they're doing to...
52:41
recover. So like if they were trying to lose weight before surgery, well, now they're not going to be obviously not attempting to lose weight while they're recovering. But there's the obvious part that calories, you need the energy for recovery. Like after surgery, your body needs energy to heal the wounds, to repair tissues, support your immune system, all that. And obviously having adequate calorie intake.
53:08
ensures that your body can do that and perform those vital functions. The other important thing is that after surgery, protein synthesis is crucial. Again, you're talking about tissue repair. You need the calories and the protein for that. If you don't have enough calories, your body's going to... We know what happens when you don't have enough calories and your body starts to break down tissue to meet the energy demands. That can slow your...
53:38
recovery. And then obviously you've got things like avoiding malnutrition. But talk a little bit about that and the people's calorie requirements post-surgery. And maybe even like, is it wise to stay at, should it just be maintenance or maybe do you aim a little bit above maintenance after a surgery, like a major surgery? So this is a really good question. And I think...
54:05
There's a few layers to the answer. One, obviously it'll depend on the type of surgery you have. If you have a quote unquote surgical operation to have an ingrown toenail fixed, that's slightly different than having major open heart surgery. Those are different surgical operations. I don't see how that's different. That's not the same procedure. That's like a man cold, right? Like, oh my god, I'm dying. It's all the same. We're all dying.
54:34
Um, yeah. So just realize this information occurs on a spectrum based on the surgery, right? Like total knee replacements or major surgery, um, total, like large GI surgeries, like, um, if you have like diverticulitis surgery, like major surgeries and very minor ones, there's a spectrum.
54:56
There is a much larger requirement for calories post-surgery than most people think. In fact, like major surgery, generally speaking, the body requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 calories per pound after surgery. So that's a lot, right? Like, so my main calories for me, just on my normal activities, probably like, let's call it 2,700 calories a day, roughly.
55:26
So post-surgery, it's more like 3,500 probably. Yeah, that's a big difference. That's a meaningful difference. And so they've actually done quite a bit of research on this. And interestingly, carbohydrates post-surgery are substantially more important than you would think. So like studies have actually looked at healing times and recovery from surgery and like getting more carbohydrates post-surgery actually.
55:54
pre and post surgery actually is relatively important. Protein obviously is important too. And then the rest is just rounding out the calories. But one of the things that I tell people all the time, and this relates to recovering from surgery, injury, illness, the goal during those periods should be to get recovered as fast as possible, right? So it's like, this is not a period of your life where you're trying to like thread the needle of like,
56:23
How do I kind of maybe make sure I recover from surgery? But oh my God, if my body fat goes from- I don't want to gain too much. 15 to 17% of my life's over. It's like, I would much- Yeah, don't do that. We can lose 2% body fat in a couple of weeks. Like, let's just not, let's focus on get your body back to optimal as fast as possible and we can diet the rest of our lives. Like, whenever I have had a major injury or I had my first surgery a month ago, whenever I'm sick-
56:52
have a major injury or whatever, it's like recovery is recovery. Just focus on getting back to normal as fast as possible. I think that's the perspective a lot of people need to take of just heal your body as quickly as you can, and then you have time to get 40 years to lose two pounds. Who cares? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, don't... Focus on one thing. That's good advice too. I'm surprised at how much...
57:21
more you actually need. It is pretty substantial. That's a big difference. You've got to think your body requires a lot of calories just to survive. And now you've got to survive and you have to repair a whole bunch of tissue. And repair. And you're probably fighting off minor infections and all sorts of stuff. So it's like you just have this increased metabolic rate. It's very energy demanding, I suppose, to heal from...
57:51
a major surgery. So yeah, that's a great question. So thank you to the person who asked that one. I think we got a couple of minutes for a couple more. We're pretty much near the end of our questions anyway, but a couple more here. I don't know how much we want to dive into this one because I think this one's pretty nuanced and complex and we could talk about this one for a while.
58:20
The question was, what role do calories play in muscle gain? And the obvious answer to that is you're not going to gain muscle if you don't have enough... Somebody once put it this way. I thought it was a good analogy. You can't build a house without bricks. So you need to have... You got to have bricks readily available to continue to build the house. And so...
58:49
If you don't have enough calories, then you're not going to be able to build muscle. You can't create something out of nothing. So I don't know if you want to maybe take a stab at answering that question. Again, it could probably get pretty deep into the biochemical part of that. We should do an entire podcast or episode on body recomp. But we've got like 90 seconds.
59:18
The take home is with rare exceptions being brand new, people brand new to training or people who are like very de-trained athletes. So they used to have large amounts of muscle mass and then they just like stopped training entirely. With the exception of those two people, you have to have a calorie surplus of around 200 to 300 calories to build muscle tissue. Like you just have to. Like there's just no, that is the way it works, right?
59:48
Otherwise, you're just kind of, I mean, you may be toning by just like maintaining your muscle mass and losing body fat, but like you're not actually building, maybe you can add like a half a pound of muscle tissue over a year, but like you're not doing anything meaningful. Yeah. That's a good idea. We can do a topic on that one of these episodes. I think that would be very helpful to people. Well, we got through most of the questions.
01:00:18
didn't quite get to, but I'll post those in the group and we can answer them for you guys in the group. So, but yeah, that's it for this week's episode. I appreciate you all who are watching. Thank you for tuning into the show. Appreciate each and every one of you. So make sure to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode and be sure to keep your eyes peeled in the Facebook group on Monday for the next topic reveal and drop your questions that you want us to answer. So then Brad will continue to dance for you guys.
01:00:49
Hope you all loved it, loved the show and until next time. Yeah, we will see you guys next Tuesday for the next episode. Until then, take care everybody.
01:01:02
you