Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why Calories Matter for Fat Loss (Evidence-Based) | Ep 339

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Why Calories Matter for Fat Loss (Evidence-Based) | Ep 339 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: Calories don't exist, they're just made up numbers.
• 0:05
  Philip Pape: You don't eat calories, you eat food.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: I've been hearing this argument more and more lately on social media, usually from people trying to dismiss energy balance or convince you that calorie counting is pointless and, by that same logic, miles don't exist when you're driving, watts don't exist when you're lifting and money doesn't exist when you're buying groceries.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: Today we're exploring why this argument reveals a misunderstanding of how measurement works in science and engineering.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: You'll discover why calories are actually one of the most precise tools we have for understanding energy and how this measurement has revolutionized everything from food production to space travel.
• 0:43
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of the most misunderstood concepts in nutrition and fitness.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: I'm not even sure why I have to address this, but I've noticed a trend on social media or in YouTube comments where people dismiss calories as not real or just abstract numbers, and it usually comes up when someone wants to argue against energy balance or suggest that tracking food is somehow meaningless.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: But as someone with an engineering background who loves data, who sees the power of how it helps people.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: This drives me absolutely nuts.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: It's like saying temperature isn't real because you can't hold a degree Fahrenheit in your hand, or horsepower doesn't exist because you can't see it under your car's hood.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: I mean, this is basic math, it's basic abstraction, but it's, I think, more fundamental than that and that's why I'm creating a whole episode about it.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: So today we're going to use this thinking, this database thinking, to break down exactly what calories are, why they're incredibly useful and why the calories aren't real argument misunderstands how measurement and science work and really the end goal here is so that you're better informed in explaining this and understand why I propose some of the methods I do that are extremely beneficial to people who are trying to do things like lose fat and build muscle Before we get into it.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: If you want to understand the fundamentals of nutrition without getting lost in the weeds, and simply want the steps for you to set up your nutrition plan, you can download my free Nutrition 101 guide.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: It just gives you the steps like energy balance, macronutrients and yes, calories and how to set them up in a way that makes sense.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: So grab your copy of the link in the show notes or go to wentsohatescom slash free.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into why calories are very real, very useful and why dismissing them is kind of insane.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm gonna start by fairly representing this argument, because I've heard it from multiple sources now.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: Every time it comes up, I'm like well, what is going on?
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: But I want to make sure I'm not straw manning anyone.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: And the basic argument goes something like this Calories are just a unit of measurement.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: They're not a physical thing that you can touch or see.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: You don't eat calories, you eat food.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: Therefore, focusing on calories is missing the point, because food quality, hormones and metabolism are what really matter.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: Some variation of that right, pieces of that, all of it maybe it's a little different.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Some variations I've heard include calories are just a made-up construct, or your body doesn't count calories in response to food, or calorie counting is reductionist thinking that ignores the complexity of human biology, and you get all different levels of, let's say, iq.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: In the way these statements are delivered, and some of them are very convincing sounding.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: Now there's a kernel of truth buried in there.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: There is yes, calories are a unit of measurement.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: Yes, you do eat food, you don't eat numbers.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: And yes, food quality matters beyond just caloric content.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: So let's get into why this just falls apart.
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: In engineering, we have a concept called measurement.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: Validity engineering and science right.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less real or less useful.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: In fact, measurements are often the only way we can understand and control complex systems, and I want to give you some examples that are really good parallels to the calorie argument.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about miles.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: Miles are kilometers.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: Miles aren't real.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: A mile is an arbitrary unit that we, as humans, created to measure distance.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: You can't hold a mile in your hand.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Your car doesn't drive miles.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: It moves through space, yet somehow GPS works and companies like Amazon can deliver your package and we can navigate the world using this made up measurements Money.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: Money isn't real.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: It's one of the most unreal things on the planet.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: It is just numbers on a screen or pieces of paper with agreed upon what's called fiat value, based on a government saying that this is what it's worth.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: You don't eat money when you buy groceries.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: You exchange it for food, yet somehow the entire global economy functions on this abstract measurement system.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, we have horsepower, which is a calculated measurement based on work over time.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Your engine in your car doesn't produce little horses, yet somehow engineers use horsepower to design everything from motorcycles to rockets.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: So you see the pattern here.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: That the calories aren't real argument could be applied to literally any measurement in science or engineering.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: It's like saying temperature doesn't matter because you can't hold the degree I mentioned that earlier.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Or blood pressure is meaningless because you can't see millimeters of mercury, and this is what we call a category error in logic.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: Just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less valid, less useful or less real in terms of its practical applications.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: And, by the way, if this all sounds obvious, I think it's important sometimes to step back and think of the fundamental philosophy by which humans categorize and describe things, or even what's called epistemology.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: It's like the science of knowing.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: Sometimes we even have to question why we created these things in the first place and how they are applicable.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: And as a guy who loves math, it comes a little bit more natural to me At least, the fascination with it is more natural, but I totally understand why it can be confusing in certain contexts.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about what calories actually measure and then why they're incredibly precise and useful.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: For our context on wits and weights, a calorie is simply a unit of energy.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Specifically, it's the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: So when we talk about food calories, we're actually talking about kilocalories, a thousand calories or lowercase c calories.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: So sometimes food labels will say K, c A L, that's the equivalent of capital C A L calories.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: That's, that's part of the confusion, right?
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: So a kilocalorie is what we call a calorie on food labels.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: It's a thousand of those units of energy, and this measurement is so precise that we can use it to calculate everything from how much fuel a rocket needs to reach orbit to how much food a submarine crew needs for a six month deployment.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: We actually use calories to determine that, and the energy content in a food is measured using bomb collimetry, right?
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: And that's a uh method where you literally burn food samples in a controlled environment I think it's in a vacuum and then you measure the heat that gets released, right?
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: So it isn't an arbitrary number someone made up.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: It is a direct measurement of the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of the food.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Now you might say, okay, fine, philip, our bodies aren't calorimeters.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: We don't burn food the same way.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: And you're right, this is where what's called useful approximation comes in.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: All right, in engineering we use approximations all the time.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: We know they're not perfect, but they're accurate enough to be incredibly useful, and if we didn't have them we would just not be able to make anything right.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: The calorie content of food, combined with how we understand human metabolism, gives us an approximation that is accurate enough to do lots of amazing things to predict weight changes with remarkable precision, to design nutrition programs, to calculate food requirements for military operations, to develop guidelines for public health Now I know that one maybe has an asterisk on it, given some people's skepticism for government and to help individuals achieve their physique goals.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Now, I say it that way in that kind of list, because these are all actual things that we do relying on calories.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: So is it perfect?
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: No, is it useful Absolutely?
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: And again, that's just by knowing how many kilocalories are in food.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: Just having that metric, that data right, which we only have thanks to a lot of great people that have looked at foods, required foods on labels, studying them, put them into databases for us, that's how we can do that.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: That's how we know how many calories are in a medium-sized apple.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: And then here's where this gets really interesting, if it's not already to you and I didn't lose you I want to take you down a rabbit hole that most people don't think about.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: The development of collimetry didn't just help us understand food.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: It was part of the development of thermodynamics, which literally powers everything today.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: The same principles we use to measure calories in food are what allowed engineers to develop steam engines, internal combustion engines, power plants and, yes, rockets and I don't know.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: I have a fascination with rockets in outer space, forgive me.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: So when we measure the calorie content of our food, we are tapping into the physics of thermodynamics.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: So that's another argument people make is like well, thermodynamics doesn't apply here.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: I'm not sure how anyone can back up that claim.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: I mean, this is the reason stars shine and the universe exists.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: So this is the beauty of measurement in science, because when you find a good measurement tool, it gives you an abstract ability to find connections and patterns that you didn't expect, and it usually leads to an explosion in science and technology.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: And I know you're like what does this have to do with a health fitness podcast?
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: I'm not connected.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: All for you in a very important way shortly, so please keep listening.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: Speaking of your body, your body is extremely efficient.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: A car engine is about 25% efficient at converting fuel energy in a mechanical work Of course, much more efficient now that we have electric cars, but that's not the point.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: Your body, when you're walking, can achieve about the same efficiency about 25% and that is actually pretty remarkable, given that it's a biological system and the calorie measurement is what allowed scientists to figure this out.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: Without the unit of energy, we couldn't compare our biological systems to mechanical systems, for example, which then allowed us to determine what kind of energy was coming in and out, and that allows us to determine metabolism.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: That allows us to determine metabolism.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: So it kind of boggles the mind that people would somehow dismiss something so embedded in our understanding of energy.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: And why then are people still so eager to dismiss this, to dismiss calories as not real or not useful?
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: And I think, in my experience at least, it comes down from one of three places.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: I narrowed it down to three.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: If you have another idea, let me know.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: The first one is the complexity argument, that human biology is too complex for simple calorie counting to tell you anything useful, right?
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: Or our metabolism is so complex, our body is so complex.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: Now, I've called our bodies complex, but I've also not used that as a scapegoat for being able to measure things that our body does.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: It's two separate arguments.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: Yes, human biology is complex, so what it's like saying we shouldn't use math to build bridges because structural engineering is complex.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: Complexity doesn't invalidate the measurement, it just makes measurement even more important, especially when it's approximating the system.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: So that's the first one.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: The second one is the personal experience argument that calorie counting didn't work for me or doesn't work for lots of people.
• 11:57
  Philip Pape: Or look at all the people on the GLP-1s.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Obviously calories didn't help them.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: And no, it's like saying speedometers don't work because you got a speeding ticket right.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: The measurement tool isn't.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: The problem is the way I'm going to put that.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: You know I'm not trying to gaslight anyone, but I can go down a litany of issues that are usually related to lifestyle behavior before we get to something like calories.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: And even when we get to calories, it's not the calories themselves, it's everything you're doing that affects how your body uses calories and your metabolism that results in, for example, not being able to be in a calorie deficit like you would have liked or would have thought right.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: So it's that personal experience, kind of straw man.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: The third reason I think and this is the one that concerns me, I guess is the anti-reductionism argument.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: This is from a philosophical position that says that breaking complex systems down into measurable components is somehow wrong or limiting.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: But reductionism is how we understand and control complex systems right.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: When engineers design airplanes and I know a little bit about that, being in the aerospace world they reduce the complex problem of flight into measurable components like lift, drag, thrust, weight.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: Think about how we make computers.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: They are so complex.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: But we have to use reductionism and break things down into components.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: Even just have a craftsman building a really beautiful, sturdy piece of furniture has to use reductionism to break down that problem into its separate parts, to make it possible at all, as a human, to not let our minds explode.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: And the same is true of nutrition and body composition.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: Yes, hormones matter.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Yes, food quality matters.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: Yes, individual metabolism varies, but calories provide us with a foundational measurement that allows us to account for and work with all of these variables, almost like an entire what's called black box in the business, where you don't even have to understand or know what's going on inside, but you can measure the food coming in using calories and then the energy going out based on your body weight and voila, you actually know how many calories you're burning.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: It's incredible.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: So it's not either, or it's both, and that's really my point.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: So how do we apply this to nutrition in a way that acknowledges both the usefulness of calories and the complexity of human biology?
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: And I kind of touched on it a couple times.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: But the first thing to really glom onto here is calories are a tool.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: They're just a tool.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: They're not a religion.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: It's not like we believe in them.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: Like any tool, they're useful when you apply them correctly and they're misleading when they're misused, period.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: The second thing is we understand that precision doesn't require perfection.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: This is a really important concept.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: We don't need to count every single calorie to benefit from understanding energy balance.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: You can approximate, you can estimate, you can have very rough orders of magnitude, and the fact that you're tracking at all and within what we found to be is around 30% plus or minus, is a superior for meeting your goals and having control over your food and weight change than not tracking.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: That is extremely imprecise or, I'm sorry, imperfect, but it gives you enough precision.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: Precision meaning like you're within the range of where you need, such that that measurement helps you.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: And then the third I guess practice here is that we use calories as part of a larger system of measurements.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: It's not the only thing we rely on.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: When I learned to fly a plane years ago, I got my pilot's license.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: We had six instruments that we relied on, and if anyone broke, we had five left to rely on right.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: There's redundancy.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: So just like we don't rely on one measurement there, we shouldn't rely on solely calories to understand nutrition, but we also shouldn't dismiss them.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: So in practical terms, this means understanding that calories do provide extremely valuable information about energy balance, and we also consider factors like food quality, nutrient timing, your individual response, your lifestyle factors, your stress, your training, and the list goes on right.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: And we don't have to even make that list too complicated.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: Each one of them has its own highly useful approximation use.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: I just use useful twice.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: So this is the approach I take with clients we use calories as a baseline measurement tool, but then we adjust based on real world results, based on your response, based on other markers, and it can give us information that hey, something else, a different thing we're measuring may need focus right now.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: So I think when someone says calories aren't real or they're just an abstract, I think they're usually expressing a deeper frustration with the reductionist thinking that we have today, in this world that feels increasingly overwhelming, overly complex.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: They want simple answers, but then they're rejecting the tools that could actually provide clarity.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: Or maybe conversely, they're looking for something more complicated and thinking calories are too simplistic.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: I don't know.
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: And I think what's beautiful about measurement of this type is it doesn't just simplify the complex systems by ignoring their complexity.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: It provides a common language, a common narrative that we can speak to each other in, and it doesn't even have to be the same like human language.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: Right, it's math which, effectively, is a universal language where we can understand and work with that complexity again, without our minds exploding.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: So every time you use calories as a tool to measure your food, you're participating in the same scientific tradition that goes all the way back to discovering antibiotics, developing space travel, creating the internet, using the same principles that allow engineers to build skyscrapers and doctors to save lives.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: Right, the measurement isn't the enemy of complexity, it is what makes complexity manageable.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: All right, but I do want to give one final caveat to this episode, and that is to acknowledge that because, or acknowledging that calories are real and that they're useful doesn't mean you have to obsessively count every single one, all right, I mentioned this once already.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: But it doesn't mean you have to ignore food quality.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you ignore hormones or individual differences.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: It means you have access to a very powerful tool for understanding energy metabolism.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: That's all it means.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: Whether you choose to use it is up to you.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: But given how easy it is to use it today with databases, with apps, with apps like Macrofactor that I love to use because it takes that information, that exact information of calories in and weight out, you know weight change and says here is your metabolism, and it actually does that pretty darn accurately.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: I mean, we make decisions every day based on that that are helping people get the body and the physique and the health that they want.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Calories are real, they're measurable, they're useful and if you understand them just a little bit, it's going to make you better equipped to achieve whatever goals you're working toward.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: To make you better equipped to achieve whatever goals you're working toward, all right.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: If you want to learn how to use calories and other measurements as tools rather than just rules, grab my free nutrition one-on-one guide.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: I'll show you how to think about nutrition a little more objectively, like an engineer, systematically, evidence-based, setting up the numbers for yourself, and then you can use that to see where else the focus might need to be.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: You can get the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: And remember just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less real.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: In fact, good measurements are what make reality manageable.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.