Health activist and calorie skeptic Sam Feltham is our interview guest today in Episode 739 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show.”

Calories, calories, calories. It's all we ever hear about when it comes to weight loss and health these days. All the so-called health experts say you just need to eat less calories in your diet and exercise off more calories through activity to create a calorie deficit and you'll easily lose weight. It's as simple as that. But is it really? Skepticism about the calories in, calories out hypothesis has been growing over the past few years, even amongst mainstream public health researchers at Harvard University. Health podcaster Jonathan Bailor will be releasing a book about this topic in December 2013 entitled The Calorie Myth: How to Eat More, Exercise Less, Lose Weight, and Live Better that will challenge everything we've always believed to be true about calories. But over in the UK, there's a man who decided to take a different tactic in tackling the problem with obsessing about the quantity of calories while neglecting the quality of the calories you are consuming.

His name is Sam Feltham from "Smash The Fat" and he wanted to put this calorie thing to the ultimate test--he sacrificed himself for science to demonstrate the differences between calories consumed on a low-carb, high-fat diet vs. the calories from a low-fat, high-carb diet. In a pair of 21-day self-experiments conducted in May 2013 and then again in September 2013, Sam decided to consume a 5000+ calorie/day diet to see what would happen to his weight and measurements. Below you will see the final weigh-in results of each of these experiments to see a direct comparison of what happened:

SAM'S LCHF EXPERIMENT IN MAY 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvFf6WnveqM

SAM'S HIGH-CARB EXPERIMENT IN SEPTEMBER 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9evDnk7eU0

Listen in as Jimmy and Sam talk about his work in the UK to educate the public there about fitness and nutrition, his concerns over the fallacies of the calorie hypothesis, why he decided to take it upon himself to test this theory on his naturally lean body, a comparison of the kind of foods he consumed during both of his experiments, the weight comparison following his isocaloric LCHF experiment and CARB experiment, whether he experienced any withdrawal symptoms after eating 5,000+ calories a day of sugary carbage, the conclusions he has drawn so far about calories after his first two experiments, his upcoming January 2014 experiment testing Dr. John McDougall's starch-based diet, and so much more! If you're still one of those people who thinks weight loss is all about the calories, then you gotta hear from this man who is showing us all just how bogus that really is.

LINKS MENTIONED IN EPISODE 739
- SUPPORT OUR SPONSOR: Register for Sean Croxton's "Real Food Con"
- SUPPORT OUR SPONSOR: Get grass-fed beef, pastured pork, pastured chicken and pastured turkey from Tendergrass Farms
- Sam Feltham bio
- Smash The Fat Fitness & Fat Loss
- Sam's low-carb, high-fat experiment: "Why I Didn’t Get Fat From Eating 5,000 Calories A Day"
- Sam's low-fat, high-carb experiment: "My 21 Day 5,000 Calorie CARB Challenge"
- Sam's Huffington Post columns
- Sam's "Smash The Fat" YouTube channel
- Sam on Twitter
- Sam on Facebook
- RELATED PODCAST: Low-Carb Conversations #68: Sam Feltham And Jennifer Courtney Question Coke’s Anti-Obesity Ads