To lose weight, the standard advice is to follow this simple formula: estimate your metabolic rate to see how many calories you burn (calories out), then log your food to make sure you consume (calories in) fewer calories than you burn.  By creating a deficit of say, 500 calories a day, you will lose one pound of body mass per week…or so the thinking goes.

If only losing weight were that simple.  Energy balance (calories in – calories out) is the foundation of weight loss; however, the 3500 calorie rule for weight loss is misleading, we’re terrible at estimating your metabolic rate (calories out) and we aren’t great at measuring the calories you consume (calories in).  We’re playing the weight loss game with faulty information.

People want to know their metabolic rate, because they want to know how many calories they can get away with eating and still lose weight.  I believe this is the wrong approach and only leads to consuming too many calories a day to achieve the type of weight loss you’re looking for.

Losing weight is a social, emotional, environmental problem, not a math problem.  Instead of continuing to overutilize food for pleasure, we need to (temporarily) redefine our relationship with food, build in a “margin of safety” by eating far fewer calories than the typical weight loss diet prescribes, and live with the results, knowing that you did your absolute best.

Some of the topics in today’s episode include: 

• Why do we feel the need to estimate your metabolic rate? (1:11)
• We should use total daily energy expenditure, not metabolic rate (1:58)
• The Amazing Chewing Gum Diet for Detoxing and Weight Loss! (4:55)
• The two ways to measure (estimate) your metabolic rate in a lab (7:13)
• The third option to estimate your metabolic rate: an equation (13:03)
• A real life example(s) of equations being way, way off (14:16)
• The math that goes into losing weight (16:02)
• Most people with obesity actually have really high metabolic rates (16:47)
• Enlarged organs and metabolic rates in obesity and sumo wrestlers (17:19)
• How many calories can I get away with eating? Why we really measure metabolic rates (20:33)
• People notoriously underestimate the number of calories they consume (calories in) (21:35)
• We aren’t very good at estimating calories in OR calories out (22:17)
• Why you should eat the same number of calories regardless of your metabolic rate (22:44)
• Diets aren’t supposed to be fun, they’re a means to an end (23:26)
• Hypothesized weight loss in total starvation, 500, 800 calories a day for 8 weeks (25:36)
• You can only go down to eating “0” calories a day but eating more than 3,000 is easy (27:36)
• Your weight loss “margin of safety” (28:07)
• My confession about a mistake that I’ve made (29:56)
• Calorie counting (food logging) is a necessary evil (31:10)
• The precision we try to prescribe weight loss diets with is absurd and ridiculous (32:39)