Why You Should Forget Counting Calories

A Harvard doctor is saying, “Overeating doesn’t make you fat. The process of getting fat makes you overeat.” That’s an important distinction.

We’ve always heard that we need to reduce calories to lose weight. Eat salad with fat free dressing and drink zero calorie soft drinks. Dr. David Ludwig says that’s all wrong.

He’s a MD, a PhD, a practicing pediatrician and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. He’s also a professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. His book is called “Always Hungry? Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently.”

In an interview on the Bulletproof Radio podcast, Dr. Ludwig explained why calorie restriction sabotages permanent weight loss. Here are some of the highlights and why you should forget counting calories.

Your brain won’t let you restrict calories

Calories are actually tiny creatures that live in your closet and sew your clothes a little bit tighter every night. Okay, not really. Calories mean energy.

Your brain is critically dependent on calories.  The slightest interruption would lead to loss of consciousness, coma, seizure or even death. Therefore, your brain goes to great lengths to make sure the calorie supply isn’t interrupted.

Dr. Ludwig:

“The brain has very powerful mechanisms to get us to make sure that the brain has enough calories. The first thing it does is make us hungry. The second thing is it starts activating craving centers so our ability to say no vanishes. Then after that stress hormones start to be secreted, emergency stress hormones that drag calories out of storage sites, and that will temporarily solve the problem, but it does so causing great stress to the body. Finally, with these swings and calorie levels and hormones, if that continues metabolism will actually slow down.”

Calories have to be in the blood, not stored in fat cells, or your brain will signal stress, hunger and cravings.

This makes it easy to understand why people fail at weight loss. Think about it. Most set a goal that will take a year or more to realize. The perceived path to get there is self deprivation, feeling ‘hangry’ and mounting stress. They may lose weight, but keeping it off requires a 24/7 battle against their own brain.

We have some really bad conditioning to overcome.

Our learned behavior is to think that feeling hungry and self-denial is beneficial for us. It feels like we are ‘taking one for the team’ when, in fact, we are in a self destructive state.

A much better model is to work on feeling great today. That means not having cravings, not feeling hungry, having stable energy with mental focus and not getting sick. You accomplish that with food choice, sleep, movement and stress management.

It’s actually fun to keep finding new ways to feel better, while eating as much delicious food as you want and having weight melt off as a byproduct. I have a free blueprint to help you get started. It’s called The Wellness Repair Plan.

If calories are too low, the brain initiates hunger, cravings, stress and slowed metabolism. Share on X

Burn an extra 325 calories a day without moving

Dr. Ludwig did a study with 21 young adults of the same weight that were each fed one of three diets for a month. All were fed the exact same number of calories and the food was issued via lab-measured shakes.

The goal was to stress the body with a slight calorie deficit, which would – in theory –  slow metabolism. The results were striking.

One of the three diets was the government recommended 20% fat and 60% carbs. On this diet, energy expenditure plummeted. Metabolism slowed to a crawl as the body responded to calorie restriction as a stress. This was the expected result.

In the middle, was a Mediterranean style diet with an even split of 40% fat and 40% carbs. Metabolism still slowed, but not as much as with the higher carb diet.

The third was a classic Adkins diet with 60% fat. Astonishingly, metabolic rate didn’t drop at all! The  low carb diet completely abolished the negative stress effects of weight loss. The difference in measured metabolism – with the exact same number of calories – was 325 calories a day. That’s the equivalent of about an hour of cardio on the elliptical without moving a muscle!

Given equal calories, a high fat diet will burn 325 calories more per day than a high carb diet. Share on X

Fast acting carbs create cravings and addiction

Dr. Ludwig and his team conducted another study where participants were given blended shakes in random order. Each shake had had the same calories, the same protein, fat, and carbohydrate. The only difference was that some shakes had a fast acting carbohydrate and the other kind had a slow digesting carbohydrate.

They gave the shakes in random order on separate days and followed the blood sugar of each participant. As expected, blood sugar was initially higher after the fast acting carbohydrate shake.  Then it tended to crash a few hours later, at which point, participants reported feeling hungrier.

Then they did brain scans.

“The results were really remarkable. I’m not a neuroscientist. It turned out that one area, and I didn’t know what this area was at first, lit up like a laser in every single subject. It lit up after the fast acting or high glycemic index shake but not after the low. In fact, it was so consistent that we had astronomically strong statistical power. That area is the nucleus accumbens. For the rest of your audience who they aren’t neuroscientists, that’s the center of the dopaminergic reward pleasure center of the brain. It’s considered ground zero for the classic addictions of cocaine, heroin, alcoholism and the like…”

In a nice way, Dr. Ludwig says the food industry is culpable.

It’s one thing to feel hungry because your blood sugar is dropping, but it’s a very different thing if your nucleus accumbens kicks in. Because then your ability to resist that 500 calorie Bear claw you see in the pastry shop is going to vanish.

Hunger and cravings are a really difficult combination to fight. I think that the food industry would like to say it’s all our personal responsibility to just control our calorie balance, that there are no bad foods, but I think there’s quite a strong line of investigation to suggest that certain foods profoundly undermine our metabolism in ways that are not all that different to certain classic drugs of addiction.

Brain scans show fast acting carbs light up the brain's addiction center. Share on X

Why you should forget counting and cutting calories

The first reason is because calories are not a very useful notion. Not even the world’s most trained dietician could guess calorie balance accurately to within 350 a day. But if you are off by 350 calories between intake and expenditure a day, that could mean the difference between remaining lean or becoming massively obese in about five years.

I can hear you asking, “But basic physics proves that cutting back on calories results in weight loss, right?” Yes, but simply cutting calories doesn’t take into account the fact that different types of calories do different things.

The food source of a calorie instructs hormones and switches gene expression. It determines whether you store the calorie away in fat cells or if you get to feel it as energy.

Dr. Ludwig:

“The calories that we eat from highly processed carbohydrates, especially if there’s not enough fat and protein, they flood our blood stream temporarily for an hour or two after the meal. But insulin shoots up to try to push those calories into storage, and by three or four hours we’re worse off than we started. All those calories have been locked away in storage, importantly including fat, and there aren’t enough in the blood stream.”

If your calories are all stored away in fat cells instead of circulating in the blood, your brain fights back against the calorie restriction in an increasingly aggressive manor. Just cutting back on calories fights basic biological systems to control our body weight.

Dr. Ludwig say the key is to retrain your fat cells to open up.

“The problem with the modern American diet is, especially with all the processed carbohydrate, is that it increases insulin levels and chronic inflammation. Those force fat cells into a feeding frenzy. They suck up too many calories leaving too few for the rest of the body. That’s why we get hungry, that’s why we get tired. Just cutting calories makes that situation worse. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem which is that the fat cells have been on calorie storage overdrive.”

So the 100 calorie salad with fat free dressing will create a crisis in your body that shuts down your metabolism, makes your fat cells more likely to store fat and make you hungry and miserable. This is why the kind of dieting we’ve heard about for the past few decades dooms people to failure.

Obesity is not a state of excess. It’s more akin to a state of starvation when fat cells are hoarding more than their fair share of calories. Cutting calories makes that problem worse.

Dr. Ludwig says you have to change what you are eating to lower insulin and reverse chronic inflammation.

“What then happens the fat cells open up, the body floods with calories. The brain says, “Wow.” I mean in some cases it’s like the brain gets a sense of sufficiency and satiety for the first time in years. It then allows metabolism to speed up and you naturally will eat less but this way with your body’s cooperation rather than with your body kicking and screaming.”

When you change your calorie source to increase healthy fat and get rid of fast acting carbs from processed food, your body recognizes it’s got too many calories and it tries to get rid of those extra calories in the way that it knows how. Your brain diminishes cravings and speeds up your metabolism. People find that they can lose weight without the struggle.

Obesity is a state of starvation. Cutting calories makes that problem worse. Share on X

The five hour rule

We’ve lost touch with how to listen to the signals our body is giving and hunger is one of the least understood signals.

When you eat the right food, hunger should go away for a long time. If you’re getting hungry, or feeling low energy, or in a bad mood, or finding it hard to concentrate – it’s a feeling to associate with being on the wrong track. It means you did something wrong.

Dr. Ludwig has what he calls the ‘five-hour rule’.

We have a five-hour rule. If you eat a meal and you’re feeling not over stuffed initially but then not famished several hours later, if your energy remains good, your mental clarity remains good, then you ate the right amount and you ate the right type of food.

There are different ways to experience the sensation of hunger, so let’s talk about what you should be feeling after five hours.

One way to experience hunger involves low energy and makes you desperately crave food. The feeling comes from your brain being threatened by a lack of calories in your bloodstream. The brain is saying, “We’ve got a medical emergency!”

Offices deploy candy dishes for this kind of hunger. Sadly, while trying to do something nice, they are actively promoting nutrient deficiencies that lead to diabetes and worse.

Then there’s another kind of hunger that you feel when you have just the right nutrients and ratio. It feels more like a stimulating interest in food.  It gets to 1 pm and you’re thinking, “I could eat. I don’t have to, but it would probably feel good.”

They are profoundly different feelings with different meanings. It’s liberating to feel only mild interest in food after five hours.

When you eat the right food, hunger should go away for 5 hours. Share on X

What if you eat well but still experience cravings?

You can eat a pristine diet but still experience food cravings or unstable energy occasionally. It doesn’t mean you’re broken or failed. It merely means you came into contact with something that is stealing resources.

For example, you may have a food intolerance or quality issue that shows up as a craving up to 72 hours later. You have to be your own food detective to figure it out.

You could have an exposure to mold or a chemical (like a coworker’s shampoo) that causes your liver to go into overdrive, using up glucose that would have been available for your brain.

When that happens, snacking is absolutely okay. Snack sensibly, but definitely eat. And don’t feel guilty because your body really does need it. You’ll know you’ve found the right foods for you when you no longer feel a need to snack within five hours of a meal.

Dr. Ludwig says it won’t be the same for everyone.

We want there to be some flexibility, but the key is flexibility according to your individual ability to handle it, which is not going to be the same as somebody else. It’s going to vary with age, it’s going to vary with your physical activity level, with your genes, with what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years.

Hunger is data. Use hunger and the five hour rule as tools to dial in the diet that is right for you. Don’t abdicate responsibility to a calorie counting app.

Use hunger and the five hour rule as tools to dial in the diet that is right for you. Share on X

Review and what to do next

• Rather than setting a goal to lose a certain amount of weight, instead aim to eliminate cravings and have stable energy today.
• Battling cravings is self destructive, not beneficial. Change your mentality and change what you eat to eliminate the cravings.
• Avoid fast acting carbs to avoid addiction and retrain your fat cells.
• Stop counting calories and instead use hunger and the five hour rule to dial in the right nutrition for you.

You can buy Dr. Ludwig’s book: “Always Hungry? Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently.”

I also offer a free plan called The Wellness Repair Diet that provides a roadmap for nutrition that won’t cause cravings.

If this makes sense to you and you want to make life easier for some other people, click one or more of the social media options to share with friends.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 2 pm and I could eat.

Jeff

Additional Resources

Dr. David Ludwig: Food Addiction & Why Will Power is Not Enough