Latest / In Moderation / The Caloric Equation: Decoding Metabolism, Caloric Ingestion, and Yes, Poop Facts

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The Caloric Equation: Decoding Metabolism, Caloric Ingestion, and Yes, Poop Facts · In Moderation

• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Welcome to episode four, one week delayed because Liam decided to have a child.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: I decided this a long time ago, but apparently it takes a while for it to fully come to fruition, and if you hear any little squeaks or you probably hear that right now yep.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Right there yep, she's sleeping mostly right next to me, so we shall see how this goes.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Just what we needed a small Liam in the world.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: I think that's what everyone needs.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Let's see as many Liams as possible.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: The Liam clone army.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Oh gosh, okay.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: What are we talking about this week?
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: This week we're going to talk about calories.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, I guess I should get rid of my notes on the mating rituals of red pandas.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: This is awkward.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a further episode in Spoiler alert that's coming up in about uh, we planned that for two months, come on.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: The mating rituals of red pandas.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: This is going to be such a long episode.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: It's going to take hours is the problem.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I know there's so much detail to go into.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: So if we're going to be talking about calories, it's probably probably a good idea that we define what is a calorie rob.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Probably, especially since a lot of people seem to get it wrong.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: If you're on TikTok, yeah.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: But a calorie is a unit of measurement of energy, and so one calorie is the amount of energy required to heat a certain amount of water.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: One degrees Celsius Now, the amount of water is one kilogram of water if you're talking about a kilo calorie, and one gram of water if you're talking about a gram calorie.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: I remember when I got some British food and said kilo calories on the back, I was like is there stuff measured differently?
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: Is this is they have different type of calories than we do in America American calories.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: That's why we're so fat.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: There you go, yep.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: And just to specify here, what North America calls a calorie is a kilo calorie.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Is the same thing we just call.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: We just say calorie, make it easier.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: And since we're talking about energy, we should also briefly talk about what metabolism is, since that's how we utilize that energy.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I definitely heard metabolism, because I was watching TikTok and apparently mine is broken and I need to buy this guy's plan in order to, I think, reset it.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: That sounds right.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Right, rob, something like that.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Something like that.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: You got to fix it with.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: You know a couple of bandages here and there.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Right, no, you got to fix it.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Then you kickstart it.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Like it's a soccer ball.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: And yes, I say soccer, we're in America Boom.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: Not football, foo-dee, it is a soccer ball, damn it.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: So metabolism is the chemical process by which we break down the food and energy that we've took in in order to actually use it.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Now, obviously we use energy in the form of calories to do things, to move our muscles, jump up and down and all that good stuff, and that's normally what people think of.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Jump up, jump up and get down.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: We think of that first, but most about like 70% of the calories you spend goes towards your basal metabolic rate, which I like the way Lane Noren describes it is keeping the lights on, basically just you surviving If you were to just lie there completely still in bed and do nothing but stay alive, keeping your organs functioning, your body warm, all of those good things.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: That's about 70%, so a good majority of all the energy you burn just goes towards that.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: That includes things like keeping your heart running, keeping you breathing, keeping your brain moving right, right.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: For keeping keeping your brain moving, we're talking right now.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: you have to keep your brain moving, to keep your mouth moving.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Now, keep my mouth moving.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, it's funny because the designated exercise makes up about the smallest percent, something like what Is it probably like?
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: 5% of your total daily energy expenditure, tdee, having them be a little bit easier to say is designated exercise.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it does not take up a lot and of course it's going to vary based on how much time you spend at the gym, but most of us spend maybe an hour at the gym.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: That doesn't add up to a lot of energy burns.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: It's going to vary a little bit if you're an Olympic athlete or couch potato, all that good stuff, but it does make up a very small percentage.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: What makes up even more what 10%?
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Is the thermic effect of food, which is just the energy it takes to break down the food you eat, which I always found that really fascinating.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: And you know what's interesting that protein takes up?
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: The largest is the hardest to break down.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: So what is it?
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: 30% of the energy from protein is utilized just in breaking it down, because it's bound up in long chains of amino acids.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: So that's one of the reasons people say when you're trying to lose weight, add some protein to your diet.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: But yeah, even your stomach requires energy to break down the food that you eat.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: Right, and so it's funny like fats are the easiest to break down and then carbohydrates take a bullet like cuz cuz.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: Fats is like one to one or two percent, like it's so easy for body to take dietary fats and then store that as fat.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: So I always found it interesting like ketogenic diet.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: They're like eat fats and I'm like you know, fats are very calorie dense and it's very easy for your body to break them down, whereas even carbs take like five to 10% of the energy from carbs.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Yep, still a little fussy Five to 10% just to break it down.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: So you know, I always found that interesting.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Well, carbs also have that huge variety to them and we're going to get into that more into a further episode.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: But carbs have, you know, you've got your fibers, which are carbohydrates, and you've got your monosaccharides, which are quick digesting carbohydrates.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: So you've got a wide spectrum there.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: So yeah, even just you know we're talking about thermodynamic.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: Thermic effective food is higher than that, but also higher than designated exercises.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: Your neat non exercise activity thermogenesis basically all the moving you do that isn't designated exercise.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: Like, I talk with my hands a lot and I make a lot of weird faces in videos.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, he does.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: All would contribute to my neat and that is why I stay so lean, is just not.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Might be part of it is I'm very jumpy, flatable, arm flably and two man type thing.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: You know that sort of stuff.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Stuff like standing at your desk instead of sitting is going to increase your neat.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Things like if you are watching a sports game and you are actively cheering your team on flailing your arms around as opposed to just sitting there that is increasing your neat.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: So I mean, if you're trying to, you know, lose weight, designated exercise plays a part, like I always tell people.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: I say plays a part, but it just don't count, don't just count on it.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: You can't.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: What do they say?
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: You can't exercise out, exercise a bad diet.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: That is such good advice, like when you start working with someone, I think it's one of the first things you need to tell them you cannot exercise out, exercise a bad diet.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: One of the biggest things you can do that you have control over is simply just try to just be more active in life in general, not specifically exercise, but get up more, move, more, cook instead of order out things like that.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Just walking more like walking is just one of the best forms I mean you can, just because you can do it for so long, like yeah, it doesn't burn a ton of calories, but you really can.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: You know, I love Mulligan's on TikTok or whatever.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: He's always going for walks.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: I'm like, yes, I love that because you know you go and you have 10 minutes on like an elliptical.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: Some people are exhausted.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: I'm like you walk for an hour listening to your favorite podcast and you're like I don't even feel like I did anything, but it was easy.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: So we wanted to make sure you understand metabolism, because everything we just described there was your calories out.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: When we talk about calories in, calories out, metabolism is the calories out.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: That is the energy you are utilizing to do things, to keep your body running, to move, to exercise, all these things.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: So now that we've wrapped up a little bit on the calories out portion, there's another half to that and that would be calories in.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Calories in are, of course, the food that is this is very important absorbed by your body, not necessarily the food you put in your mouth.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: Exactly what's on the label.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: What's on that label in the grocery store will be different, and it will be different from person to person, which is what it's just fascinating, right?
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Because I mean you get somebody, yeah, who just depending on their gut, microbiome and all sorts of different factors, they some one person might absorb more calories than the next person.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: A good example of these things are like corn, because you've eaten everybody's eating corn and you look at the toilet next to you and you're like, hmm, I guess you can definitely tell Almonds another one.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like you, we absorb like what 70% of the calories we get from almonds.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: But if you make almond butter, you would absorb more calories from the almond butter than you would the almonds which I just.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: I find all of that just so cool.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Talking about corn, by the way, remember people, poop is the stuff you didn't absorb, plus dead cells and stuff like that.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: So if you see it in your toilet, you didn't absorb it.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: And speaking of poop, now here's the thing.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: I thought it was very interesting.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: I was looking into it and how they determined how many calories are in food was basically they would burn the food in a little device and see how much energy was in the food, by how much it heated up water essentially right and then they had people eat it and then they would like burn their poop afterwards to find out you know how much energy was left over, like in the poop.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's what made it.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Do it.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: It's really interesting.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: I don't know the whole story I would have to do a bunch of reasons that could be like an entire episode just doing that but just know they were burning poop and it probably smelled terrible and it's really interesting but also very funny.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the reason that actually works is because of the law of thermodynamics, which is that energy always needs to be equated.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: If one calorie is in, we can't make energy, we can't disappear.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: One calorie always has to equal one calorie.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: And so if you eat 100 calories, if 70 of that got absorbed by you, that the other 30 has to go somewhere.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: It can't just disappear.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: There's like all these like miraculous, like weight loss things, like there was that stuff that you would put on your food.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: You remember that would make you malabsorb fat, like it was just you would sprinkle it on your food and you wouldn't absorb the fats in it, and then you'd have all these like fatty poops, but like they were, there's the calories, they were in your.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: You didn't absorb them, you know.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: So it would it work?
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it'll work, but it's not something I would recommend.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't want to talk about poop, I really just want to keep talking about poop Like can we make the rest of the episode only?
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: about poop.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: The rest of the episode is now.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: This is now the poop episode.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: This is now forget calories.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: This is just a poop episode, hey.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Oakley, you want to hit on this.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: She probably already has.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: She probably already has endelved and whatever into the poop.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: And then next week we will talk about the mating habits of red pandas.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Sounds like a plan.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: Different podcast, change the name.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: So getting back on track when we are counting our calories, that means that there's actually a lot of variants going on there, based on your body, based on your absorbability, based on stuff like that, which means that when you're trying to determine your caloric maintenance and stuff like that, it can be kind of hard.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, it can be incredibly difficult, Even people who are like experts on it.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: Still, you know it's tough.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: So you're, it's square one, right?
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: You want to know how many calories I need?
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: So there's-.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: I want to know how many calories I need.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Never mind you.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I need a lot, like I don't know what is with all the neat.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: I need it up.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: So I need a lot Now-.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: You do need it up.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: I need the crap out of it Talking about poop.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: So I think that the couple ways you can really go about it, you can do the online calculators.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: You put in your age, your weight, blah, blah blah, height, all that stuff, and it'll spin out a number.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: It'll be a very generic formula.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Very generic, like it's, so it could give you a starting point, but it's not going to be super accurate.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: What I like to do instead, I tell people just keep track of everything you eat for I don't know, three days, seven days.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: Like I don't like to, I don't track calories but like I think it's good at the beginning.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: You can track things.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's worth doing it for a short amount of time to understand what you're intaking.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: You'll find out that, and you'll also find out a lot of things like wow, I didn't know spam, or peanut butter and so many calories or whatever.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: It is like those sorts of things which is always good to know.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: You don't need to track forever, but do it for a short amount of time just to understand these things.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Just to give you a general idea.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: And so track everything and then put it into how my Fitness Pal, whatever macro, there's lots of different my app I mean your Rob's app, shameless plug.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Shameless plug.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you put it into one of those and then you know, don't change the way you're eating during those times, eat just normally.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: If you eat like a whole diorotopeatsa, like by yourself, and just do that like don't change anything, and then you will get a general idea of like how many that's probably around your maintenance calories, the average of that, and that'll at least give you something decent to start with.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Because unless you are drastically gaining weight, you know you're probably sitting around your maintenance close enough.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to be close.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: We're looking for close stuff.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Don't do it when you're on vacation, like don't do it when you're going out to see the family during Thanksgiving.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, the three days I tracked were December 25th.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Like, what are you doing on Christmas?
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: What are you talking about?
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: You just get your normal daily life.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: You know just the things you normally eat.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: That will get you again close enough.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: And so from there, based on your goals, you can end up doing a deficit or a surplus simply by adding or subtracting calories from there.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly and people always ask, like how much it's?
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: You know how much to go into a surplus, how much to go into a deficit?
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: It really is up to you, but generally for most people they'll say something like three to 500 calories.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: If you go lower than that, like you don't know exactly because tracking, like you know, figuring things out, is tough enough as it is.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: So if you're only like I'm going to go into a surplus by 100 calories, 100 calories surplus would be just hard to you know, keep track of right.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So, based on that, don't do a super crazy deficit or surplus, because if you're going into a super surplus you're going to just put on a lot of fat.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: You're going into a crazy deficit that you may be missing out on nutrients and stuff that your body actually needs.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: And you'll just feel like shit, like if you're like a bodybuilder, we're not talking to you.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, we know, chad, that you're awesome and you can go into a thousand calorie deficit and be fine Like great, awesome dude, you're doing amazing.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, so, chad, that's a bodybuilder that listened to us.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: That would be awesome.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: But Chad.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: But for everybody else, you know three to five hundred calories.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: You know somewhere around there you'll be doing great because there's 3500 calories ish in a pound.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: So if you took away 500 calories a day, roughly over the course of a week, you'd lose about a pound of fat.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: A pound Again about because everyone's different.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Things are going to change, but somewhere around them.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: And, by the way, if you go into too big of a deficit, you don't go into starvation mode.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: That is not a thing.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because if you do that, you'll chatter your metabolism into a thousand little pieces and you'll have to pay so many people online.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: It's going to cost so much money for them to put it all back together.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Every time somebody talks about broken metabolism, they always bring up the biggest loser study.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, the people that were into extreme deficits lost a ton of weight and then afterwards they were eating negative calories and gaining weight, or whatever it was.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: So basically, yeah, the people from the biggest loser were followed around and after the show they found that these people were eating less calories while either maintaining their weight or they gained a little bit back.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: They never gained all of the weight back.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: That's a very important point.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: A lot of people say they gained all their weight back.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: They did not.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: They gained some of the weight back, but of course they were doing less extreme exercise and people always say they broke their metabolism.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: But there was no association of how much they were eating with their weight gain or anything like that.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: There was actually association with how much they were eating and the amount of exercise they were doing.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Basically, the more exercise they were doing, the less energy their body needed overall, which essentially translates to the more exercise they were doing, the more efficient their body was at living.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because not to get into it too much, but they've done studies on hunter-gatherer tribes that take close to 20,000 steps a day.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: They're moving all the time and when they equate for weight and size, they burned about the same number of calories as we do, and people see that and they go okay.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: So exercise doesn't burn calories.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: It's like no, you become more efficient If you train.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: I will burn fewer calories running on the treadmill than someone who is very out of shape.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: They will burn more calories than maybe because they are not as efficient.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: And so it kind of sucks that you burn less calories as you get better at exercise, but at the same time you're becoming better at living.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh no, that sounds terrible Like you're improving your heart.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: You're improving everything else, basically mental health.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: We've talked about it before.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Exercise is amazing.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: We're just saying, in terms of weight loss, it is not great.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: As you lose weight, you are going to burn less calories because you are a smaller body.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: You literally have less weight to move around.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: And as you exercise, you're also going to burn less calories because you're getting better at it.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly An elephant is going to require a lot more calories than I am.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: They're just a lot bigger and then a smaller elephant will require fewer calories.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: So as you lose weight, you will require fewer calories, but that is something you really don't have to sink your teeth into.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Just keep it simple.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: But you know, Liam, you know what the best way of burning calories is.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: Weighing your poops every morning.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, I was just going to say pooping.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, just pooping.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: No, I was going to go further and say, like you kind of have to weigh them out, maybe burn them to see what kind of energy you get out of them Depends how much corn you've eaten.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: That's a good point.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: How many corn, how much corn and almonds have you been eating recently?
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: Oh my God, a lot you only survive.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: The more you eat that goes through your body, the more you're going to fuel that poop.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: It only makes sense to end this episode with how we started poop.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: And I want to bring up the pandas thing again just because I did that Pooping, pandas, pooping pandas.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Okay, everybody look forward to more pooping pandas coming to you next week.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: At some point, I'm sure.