Hello and welcome to Zoey Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Calories. They've been at the heart of dieting advice for decades. Eat fewer, burn more, lose weight. Simple, right? Except it's not that simple. Calories only tell us a fraction of the story. To really understand what's going on, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Helping us take this step is biologist Giles Yeo. He'll explain why obsessing over the numbers doesn't work and how we can change the way we approach weight loss. Everybody knows that you need to count your calories. There's a certain number of calories that you're supposed to eat and as long as you eat less than that, you'll lose weight and if you eat like one calorie more than that, you'll put on weight and we're living in this world where counting calories is the way that we understand what happens and the calorie number is what determines our weight. It's not correct if you deal with it the way we do today. In order to lose weight, you need to eat less. Let's just even want to debunk anything because that's got to be true. You need an energy deficit in your food if you want to lose weight and there is no if, ands and buts about that because it's a function of physics. In other words, if you now have a meal, let's call it a balanced meal, whatever you might actually look at and if you then suddenly took that meal and says, well, instead of eating all of it, I'm going to eat two thirds of it or half of it in a balanced way in which I'm going to have the carrots and half the steak and half the potatoes and actually eat that, then ultimately, yes, you will lose weight. If you calorie count in a perfectly balanced way, yeah. You can actually, you can and you will lose weight. The issue is that is not the way life functions and people begin to sort of take it to extremes and sort of worship the calorie and use the calorie as the only piece of information there because ultimately, I think in order to lose weight, you need to continue eating a balanced diet but eat less of it. The problem with calorie counting is it takes away the nuance of it and you start to just count the calorie and a calorie does tell you how much food that is there but that is all it tells you. It is completely nutrient blind. It doesn't tell you how much fat is in there. It doesn't tell you about sugar content, about fiber, about salt, about anything, anything about that either makes the food taste good or bad or is good for you or not so good for you. The calorie cannot tell you any of that information. I think we need to, I guess my point here is that the calorie is one-dimensional, literally is one-dimensional when you're referring to a meal. What's the reality that happens then for people who are following calorie counting? Because I think again, a lot of people are listening to that, well, surely if you do follow calorie counting, then you will lose weight and the only reason it doesn't work is because you've got poor willpower and you can't stick with it and therefore it's all your own fault and that was definitely what I grew up with. Does counting calories work? Imagine if you were saying that you want some diet, whatever the diet is, and this particular diet prescribes that you only have 300 calories for lunch. Just as an example, these diets exist. If you therefore walk into a store because you're working or what have you and you purely look at that, well then in theory you could buy 300 calories of a chocolate bar or 300 calories of a salad or 300 calories of a ready meal or whatever or 300 calories of soda. If you do that and think about it, well then it does make a difference what you're eating and the calorie counting is just a really not a very smart thing to do because you can say, well, I did have 300 calories, I just consumed it all as soda, which is slightly extreme but not that extreme because people do decide that that's the amount of calories I'm eating, particularly if you're plugging it into your app. In that sense, it is not very useful because you could have been having more calories but eating something different, carrots, steak, something else compared to drinking 300 calories of a soda and it makes a big difference. I think because of the one dimensionality of the calorie, it is not very useful and if you're focused just on one number and you're looking at the back and you're seeing that number then that's all you're focused on. It's easier, I grant you but I would argue that is very meaningless. I think what we want to do is improve the quality of our food even as we eat less, we need to eat less, yes, but actually eat less but probably eat better quality food. The calories are completely useless number. And Jals, is this just like your opinion or is there any actual science behind what you're talking about? There is science behind it. I didn't make this up. I didn't invent it and called it the yo diet or anything like that. It is true because people say yeah but all calories are equal. They are once they're in you as a little poof of energy. And I think ultimately we have to remember the mantra, let's go with the mantra. This mantra you can say is from me. We eat food, we do not eat calories. And depending on what we eat, our body has to work harder or less hard to extract the calories from the food. Sweet corn is an example where clearly we can eat 100 calories of sweet corn but we don't absorb anywhere close to 100 calories of sweet corn. Then our body extracts the calories from the food and depending what you eat, you can extract differing amounts of energy from the foods we actually eat. So I think you're saying something that I've heard often on this podcast from others that the body weight is not as simple as just sort of calories in versus energy out. And maybe it would be if we were like some sort of simple machine but we're not. We're human beings. Our system is a lot more complex. What are the key things to know about how our body manages weight? And I think a lot of people listening to this will be immediately thinking about appetite because of course there's been all of this noise in the last couple of years about these new drugs that have this amazing impact on appetite that seem to have nothing to do with calorie counting and seem to be achieving outcomes that seem sort of impossible I would say until a couple of years ago. So what's actually going on inside us, Giles? And how do we know that? Let me just stress again, we do need to go into energy deficit to lose weight. And that's because it's physics as a function of physics. How you get there really depends on who you are. Clearly there is an energy balance equation and that is true. The complexity is not in the physics of it. The complexity is because that's how you get to where you are. The complexity in terms of weight loss, weight maintenance is in no why. So why do some people eat more than others, for example? Or why do some people appear to be more efficient with their food in terms of burning versus storage versus how fast you would actually burn the food? Let me give you an example. Why do some people stop eating when they're stressed? Like work stress or what have you? Whereas other people start eating when they're stressed. So for example, I'm a comfort eater. If I'm stressed, suddenly my face is in a bowl of noodles. I don't want to back myself into a stereotype, but that's what I do. My wife, however, is someone who the moment she's stressed, my work or something like that, she's going, I have no appetite. It's literally diametrically opposite, but it's the same hormone that goes up. The stress hormone cortisol goes up, but yet we behave entirely differently. That is just one behavior and the world is split into those who eat after stress and those who don't eat after stress. So that's an example of the why. Other people, why do some people appear to be hungrier than others all the time? And you know, or how come some people take more to get full? And these are not imagined behaviors. They're just not. Okay. Where, yes, clearly they're going to be cultural sociological underpinnings about why, where, how much and what we eat clearly. But there are also huge biological underpinnings driving our appetite, driving what we eat, driving who we like to eat with, driving, you know, where, when, all these things. And all of that integrates eventually into some form of energy access or energy deficit. And so you either gain weight or lose weight, depending on these innate drives, marry out of different reasons about why you end up eating more or eating, or eating less. That's really interesting. I never thought about the idea that, you know, some people might be a comfort eater and some people might turn off. I think if I'm really stressed, I often want to eat less actually. Exactly. You just say, dude, don't even talk about food. Whereas I do eat. I'll sit there and it comforts me. And so I know, I know that I do it and you try and, you know, organize your life so you don't do it, but sometimes you just do it. Could you tell us a bit about the science of appetite? Because one of the things that I'm really struck, you know, with my journey with Zoe over the last eight years is that I ate a completely typical like British or American diet eight years ago. And one of the interesting things, you know, having followed sort of my diet now for quite a few years is that it feels as though my appetite has changed a lot and that I don't have the same level of, I don't quite know how to even describe it, like sudden hunger burst in the same way. But what's going on there, Gels? So appetite is an interesting term because it's actually quite a, we sort of understand it, we talk about appetite, but it's actually quite a complex concept because it's an integrated concept. What I mean by this? In my head, I simplify appetite into sort of a triangle, okay, of which there are three points. One is hunger. So how hungry do you feel? I think we understand what that means. One is how full are you? Now that is not the same thing. Okay. How hungry you and how full you are are different circuits within the brain and the reward elements of food. How nice or lovely does the food taste to you? Okay. Now those three all speak to each other. They're not mutually exclusive and they involve different parts of the brain. And if you tug on one side of the triangle, the shape of the triangle changes, correct? And so in other words, if you are more hungry, for example, you're going to take more food to get filled up. And if you're more hungry, the food has to be less rewarding for you to enjoy the food. If you're really, really, really starving, you, a bit of bread, a bit of cheese, a bit of rice, okay? It's like the simplest foods are the best. If you are not hungry, suddenly the rewarding element of the food has to be really, really big for you to continue eating. It is the concept of the dessert tummy, where why after a full meal, you're never going to order another steak after a meal or whatever it is you're eating, but chocolate comes and you eat it. My son has explained that he's got a separate, you know, ice cream stomach for the last decade. And he's right. He's right. He thinks it's in his legs, or at least when he was six he did. I think now, I mean he's 16, I think. He probably doesn't know. Where is his dessert stomach and how does that work? So the dessert stomach is this integrated concept where the fuller you are, okay, the more rewarding the food has to be. So let me give you an example from an evolutionary perspective, okay? Take the grizzly bear. Okay, Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington area, hitting the salmon run, preparing fiber nation. And George, just to be clear, the salmon run isn't like a running race or a ski race. The salmon run is... Is when the salmon are swimming up the river in order to dis mourning their spawning grounds and the grizzlies know this. And so they kind of park themselves in between the spawning ground and where the salmon are coming and eat the salmon. At the beginning of the salmon run, the bear eats the whole salmon down to the bone, okay? Just eats it and you can see it's just a whole pile of bones, okay? But as the bear gets fuller and fuller and fatter and fatter because he's trying to gain fat, the bear only eats the skin of the salmon and the fat underneath the skin of the salmon. Why? Because this is calorically wise, calorie wise, or even though they don't count, is the densest part of the fish. And you can do this. And this is what the bear does because he is trying to make sure that he can continue stuffing he or she. He's trying to continue to stuff as many calories into his body as possible, even when he's now completely full of salmon. So he's eating the really fatty bits because that doesn't take up as much space with your calories you were talking about before. Exactly. So it's like bear chocolate. It's bear chocolate. Now clearly, desserts are a human specific cultural underpinning. So the bear is not having dessert. But this concept of which the fuller we become, the more dense the food we want to eat before we actually will bother doing it, before it tickles the reward parts of it, is a conserved thing. So this is not a human, your dessert tummy is not a human specific thing. It is a conserved behavior. So it's got to be high in energy density. And so what are foods that are naturally, so in other words, that for every given gram of food you eat, you get more energy in it. So what are those? Those are going to be foods that are high in sugar, free sugars, or high in fat. What are foods that are high in sugar and fat, their desserts? And so that primarily is the big driver. So fatty foods or sugary foods, 50,000 years ago on the Savannah, we're not going to be eating a tart or citron and a muscat, but it might be honey. It could be really ripe fruit. It could be making sure you eat the fat bit of your steak or bison or venison or whatever it is you're actually eating. Today, it's a tart or citron. OK, but the whole thing is you're looking for something high in fat and high in sugar so that you can continue stuffing food into all the nooks and crannies even after you've eaten 2,000 calories with a venison. At Zoe, we never stopped being curious about how people respond to food. So we recently asked thousands of people about their breakfast, what they eat and how they feel about it. Their answers may surprise you. Over 70% told us that their breakfast is balanced, yet only 6% get enough fiber. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that's not enough to be balanced. And it's no wonder that only 16% felt energetic after eating. Clearly, breakfast is broken. But what if you could get a breakfast that actually supports your energy and gut health? Meet Daily30, our 30 plant gut supplement. That's out to fix breakfast one scoop at a time. 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