Random WOE: Tracking Calories Burned at the Gym

When people find out what I do for a living, they’ll slam me with a barrage of comments designed to let me know they’re “on it,” as though the mere act of being within a ten-foot radius of me compels them to tell me all about their diet and exercise habits. I love this. My favorite of these is when they’re acutely aware of the number of calories they burn at the gym. They’ll use the BodyBugg, or some other biometric device that gives them this information, and they’re very proud of this number: 200…500…1000.

“Oh, for f–k’s sake,” I’ll think, debating whether to burst their bubble or not by telling them these numbers are completely useless. It’s the perpetual plight of everyone who falls for all these types of gimmicks: the dreaded and all-too-common Waste Of Effort (WOE).

I’ve attacked the calories-in-calories-out concept enough times to choke a donkey, so I don’t want to go into it again here—nor do I feel I need to. When I make these arguments, however, I focus on the different burning efficiencies of fuels we eat, along with the body’s ability to auto-regulate energy expenditure by becoming more efficient, thereby obeying the first and second laws of thermodynamics (which all physical objects must obey).

A new study takes this argument a step further, showing that as human beings, a universal metabolic rate is hardwired into each of us. In other words, no matter what kind of physical activity we perform, our bodies expend energy at a universal rate regardless of race, environment, or lifestyle[1].

You can read the study[2], but I’ll give you a brief synopsis.

Through creative use of isotope tracking from atmospheric sources (and this is the same method that was used to make the discovery that fat cells take 10 years to die), researcher Herman Pontzer and his team found that a hunter-gatherer population—the Hadza of Tanzania—have the same total energy expenditure as Westerners, despite their radically different lifestyles. The Hadza, for example, trek miles every day in search of food—either hunting or gathering—often carrying heavy, annoying loads consisting of firewood and children. When was the last time you saw a coworker walk more than five steps to a vending machine or ten feet to the copier without complaining? Despite the disparities between our lazy-ass lifestyle and the Hadza’s laborious day, both populations expend the same amount of energy.

So, not only is “a calorie is not a calorie” false, but “calories in, calories out,” as we think about it for fat loss, is almost total crap. This may seem counterintuitive, but we’ve become so focused on the idea that fat people must be lazy that we all but ignore the fact that every cell in our bodies—down to the mitochondrial machinery that burns calories—consumes energy. This study demonstrates that in order to maintain a consistent energy output—which is evidently hardwired into our genetic code as humans—every cell in our bodies will decrease energy output to make up for the energy expended during exercise. The digestive tract of your system uses a ton of energy, your brain and nervous system use a ton more, and these systems can simply become more efficient.

We have, however, found ways to make the body more inefficient by manipulating when and how we eat, as illustrated by the thermogenic inefficiency that cycling carbohydrates in various ways can produce[3-9]. These methods need to be studied in order to verify the hypothesis on which I base Carb Back-Loading™ and Carb Nite®—the same hypothesis that backs Dr. DiPasquale’s The Anabolic Diet and John Meadows’ Mountain Dog Diet. The idea is to find the real answer for how these diets work, allowing us to refine their efficacy, because they obviously are highly effective[10-11]

You won’t hear about this study in the news, nor will you hear about it from health professionals. And you sure as hell won’t hear about it from your personal trainer, because it makes that job look laughable. I discussed this with Mark Bell last night, and he said something very interesting. Mark said there are really only two things you can do in the gym: you can either get jacked, or get strong, and not much else. To me, Mark dropped a little pearl of knowledge here that, for some reason, the established fitness “intelligentsia” can’t fathom.

Stop your daily WOE, and forget about tracking calorie expenditure on the treadmill. It’s fooling you into believing you can eat more because you’ve done more—something that’s constantly proven wrong by science.

NOTE: This information pretty much makes every magazine article with titles like “The 30-minute, 10-Billion-Calorie-Burning Workout” look very stupid, and it may tarnish the G-Flux hypothesis.

FINAL NOTE: I’ll admit that it may be possible to circumvent this paradigm of a hardwired metabolic output, as the G-Flux theory implies, but at what cost? To explore this question, we have to examine professional and Olympic athletes who train for the majority of their days—so if you have 8-10 hours every day to spend training, you might get some answers. Other than that, you’re probably out of luck.

 

Featured Image by: DarckBMW 

 

References (click to expand)