Is It Really Just About the Calories?
Are all calories created equal? Do calories even matter? Are calories ALL that matter? In this episode, Juna and Eddie talk to EC Synkowski, founder of Optimize Me Nutrition, about those little things we all love to hate: calories. What are they, and should we even be paying attention? Listen up, the answer may surprise you… You can find EC on Instagram and on her website!
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Guests
EC Synkowski is the founder of OptimizeMe Nutrition, #800GramChallenge and The Consistency Project podcast. Her mission is to help people improve their health, weight management and lifestyle through sustainable diet changes. Learn more about EC here below!
Podcast: The Consistency Project | OptimizeMe Nutrition | Ted Talk
Mark Haub is a professor of nutrition at Kansas State University, whose Twinkie Diet became famous for showing that consuming fewer calories than you burn, even on an unhealthy diet, contributes to weight loss.
The Twinkie Diet | Twitter | LinkedIn
Components of Total Daily Energy Expenditure (AKA “Metabolism”)
BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate - The amount of calories your body needs just to stay alive: keep lungs breathing, blood pumping etc.
NEAT - Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis - The calories you burn doing non-exercise tasks: walking, standing, going grocery shopping, cleaning, fidgeting, etc.
TEF - Thermic Effect of Food - The calories you burn digesting and absorbing food.
EAT - Exercise Activity Thermogenesis - The calories you burn during exercise.
REE - Resting Energy Expenditure - Calories burned at rest.
NREE - Non-Resting Energy Expenditure - Calories burned from activity.
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Juna: Food, We Need To Talk is funded by the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living. Oh my god, guys, it's been two years and we are finally back.
Eddie: Oh, thank God.
Juna: Eddie, are you happy to be back?
Eddie: I am so happy to be back in the studio.
Juna: What have you been doing for two years?
Eddie: I learned how to cook, but we'll get to that another time.
Juna: Oh, OK. OK, well, we are so excited to be back, guys. We've missed you so, so much. It's been only two years, but it's felt like 200. OK? I feel like I'm a million years older, but we're very excited. We are going to be back on a regular basis every two weeks. We have a new website. We have new podcast art. It's just a fresh new start guys, it's awesome. And today we're going to be talking about calories.
Eddie: Oh, calories. It's those little things that we love to hate.
Juna: Exactly. So calories, as you guys may know, are something that I have counted for many a year. OK, I spent a lot of time counting calories, and for a long time I thought it was all about the calories.
Eddie: And don't they just seemingly multiply every time you try to count them?
Juna: Literally, yes. As soon as you start counting them, it's like they're everywhere.
The Dr. Oz Show: I'm at 1780 right here. You know that if you're eating that amount of calories, you will lose weight.
News: Most health groups suggest reining in your calorie count to no more than 2000 a day.
The Dr. Oz Show: What are these cheese crackers?
Dr. Oz Show Guest:I have them as a snack. I have a two-year-old.
The Dr. Oz Show: So when you took it out, what happened?
Dr. Oz Show Guest: When I took it out, I lost over a pound in just a couple of days. Simple as that, that's it.
Eddie: Right, it makes sense: if you burn more than you eat, you're going to lose weight. If you burn less than you eat, well, you're going to gain weight.
Juna: While recently calorie counting has kind of been called into question.
News: Counting calories is out. Only 19 percent of people who are trying to lose weight say that they count calories, and only nine percent say it would be the easiest thing for them to do on a regular basis. [8.7s]
Youtube speaker: Are all calories equally fattening? And the answer is no. The calorie of brownies is not the same as a calorie of kale. It's just not. That's just common sense. [10.7s]
Juna: So are all calories created equal? And are calories the only things that matter? Do your calories matter at all? This and more is going to be investigated in today's episode. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna: And you're listening to Food, We Need To Talk, a podcast that has been scientifically proven to increase your calorie burn just by listening. So before we get into whether or not calories actually matter, maybe we should first talk about what a calorie is, besides the number on your treadmill or on the back of a package.
Eddie: Ooh, good call. If you ask the average person what they think a calorie is, what do you think they'd say?
Juna: Probably a measure of energy, at best, or something to be avoided at all costs, at worst.
Eddie: And if you think back to high school bio, which for me was like decades ago, do you remember how they defined calories?
Juna: Um, maybe a measure of heat or something, which personally never made sense to me because I was like, OK, this Apple is 100 calories, but it's like not hot. What's going on here? How does this make sense? So for this, I thought we would talk to EC.
Eddie: EC?
EC Synkowski: I'm EC Synkowski, and I'm the founder and owner of OptimizeMe Nutrition.
Juna: And the first question I had for her was, what is a calorie?
EC Synkowski: I think it's really confusing. When you read the definition for a calorie, it's the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water by one degree centigrade. And so you're like, what does raising water temperature have to do with what's on the back of my food label? And so really, a calorie is a measure of energy and energy can take on many different forms.
Juna: Forms like mechanical energy. This would be running, doing pull ups, et cetera; thermal energy, which would be heat; electrical energy, which is the energy that helps power your nervous system; and chemical energy.
EC Synkowski: So if you remember back to chemistry class when carbon attaches to carbon, there's energy there. And so when we eat food that contains these carbon to carbon bonds or other carbon to hydrogen bonds and they break down, this causes the release of energy, and we just measure it in terms of calories. And so calories is a reflection of the energy we get from breaking down the bonds in our food.
Eddie: So that's how we get from the heating water to the number on the back of your granola bar. So that's calories in. But since exercise is my specialty, let's talk about calories out.
Juna: OK, Eddie, you read my mind. That's exactly what we're going to be talking about next. Calories in, calories out, and the equation that balances the two, which is actually a physics equation.
Eddie: Wow. So we've done Bio.
Juna: Yeah.
Eddie: Chemistry.
Juna: Yeah.
Eddie: And now we're throwing in physics.
Juna: I know!
Eddie: Juna, we are nailing down the prerequisites to get into medical school.
Juna: Ok, you lost me. You lost me at the medical school part.
Eddie: It is not bad for a podcast about food, huh?
Juna: OK, so I promise it's going to be pretty quick and painless because I actually do not like physics. It was not my favorite topic in school. But today we're talking about a law of thermodynamics.
EC Synkowski: There's a couple laws of thermodynamics, but the one that is centered around calories is that there's this equation that calories in, minus calories out, is equal to the net change in energy.
Eddie: So to put this in plainer English, maybe take away some of the physics, which I also did not enjoy.
Juna: Yeah, OK.
Eddie: The law of conservation of energy simply means that energy cannot be spontaneously created or destroyed. When you intake a certain number of calories, they're not just going to magically disappear.
Juna: Damnit.
Eddie: The energy must be conserved, so they either have to get used or they have to get stored. There is no cream, there is no juice, no food or special herb that can just make them disappear.
Juna: You heard it here first, guys. So when it comes to our bodies, the energy, in part, is obviously the food, which can be broken down into carbohydrates, protein, and fat. And the energy out part is actually not just exercise. It can be broken up into four segments.
EC Synkowski: The first one is your basal metabolic rate, and the easiest way to explain this is just basic functions that you probably don't think about: having a heartbeat, having a core temperature, having basic cognitive function. And this actually accounts for about 60 percent of the total calories that we need any given day, assuming you're not a professional athlete.
Eddie: So over half of the calories you spend in a day are just spent keeping your body at baseline functioning. It's just keeping the lights on.
Juna: MmmHmm.
EC Synkowski: The next component is your thermic effect of food. This actually, you need to use energy to break down the food that you're about to get more energy from. So in the process of digestion, we actually spend energy. And this is about 10 percent of the calories that we need any given day.
Eddie: Juna, it's like a sale is going on here.
Juna: I know.
Eddie: A 10 percent discount on your calories. You eat 100 calories and it takes an additional 10 calories just to burn that fuel. Unfortunately, the math is not going to work out well.
Juna: I think we just talked to the owner and get a bigger discount on this. So, so far, we've had BMR and TEF, and there are two components to go.
EC Synkowski: The next component is the non exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT. This is all of the movement we do in a day that's not a specific workout, per se. So the steps per day, but it also could just be the fidgeting that we do in our chair or blinking or tapping our foot. And then finally, we have exercise activity thermogenesis, and this is our true quote workout sessions.
Juna: So would you believe it, Eddie, for most people, their calories from exercise are actually zero because most people do not exercise. But even for those that do exercise, the calories you burn are so small that it's only about five to 10 percent of your daily energy expenditure. OK. That's basically nothing.
Eddie: Juna I have made a career promoting the benefits of exercise.
Juna: Yes, you have.
Eddie: But being a good calorie burner was never one of them.
Juna: OK, maybe you haven't said exercise is a good calorie burner, but I feel like that's definitely how it was sold to me growing up. You know what I'm saying? But anyways, we're going to move on. We're going to do a little terminology recap here. So if you're eating less calories than you're burning, we call that,
Eddie: A calorie deficit, and your body will have to start burning fat for fuel.
Juna: Exactly. If you're eating more calories than you're burning we call that,
Eddie: Well, then you're in a calorie surplus and your body is going to start storing the excess energy as fat.
Juna: OK, and if you're eating exactly as many calories as you're burning,
Eddie: We'll call that maintenance.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: So it's important to say here that this maintenance thing isn't exactly the same. So let's say you need 2000 calories a day. You're not always getting in 2000 and putting out 2000. The days vary. Some days you eat a little more. You ever have one of those?
Juna: Yeah.
Eddie: Some days you eat a little less. Some days you exercise a little bit more.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: But if your weight's staying about the same, it means that your body is regulating hunger, movement and metabolic rate. All of those factors keep you on average burning about the amount that you're eating. It's amazing.
Juna: So if all fat loss comes down to calories, then the most simple diets, like the most bare bones weight loss method would be the good old, boring calorie count. But how many diets today do you actually see asking you to count calories?
Eddie: Well, not many. The most popular diets are the ones that actually restrict or promote certain types of food.
Juna: Exactly. And yet all these diets still say that they cause weight loss, and for a lot of people, they do cause weight loss. So have you seen this in your practice?
Eddie: Oh yeah, I've had lots of patients who report losing weight on all sorts of diets.
Juna: So we know that one of the fundamental laws of the universe is that in order for you to lose weight, you need to be eating less than you're burning, meaning you need to be in a calorie deficit. But we also know that most diets don't even mention calories. So how are these diets causing people to lose weight?
Eddie: Well, here's the thing just because a diet isn't telling you to count calories doesn't mean that it's not causing you to actually eat fewer calories.
Juna: Can you explain?
Eddie: Oh, I will, but not until we take a quick break.
Juna: And we're back.
Eddie: So pick any diet, low carb, low fat, keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, Whole30. For any given diet, it's basically placing some rule about the foods you can and you can't eat. Assuming that you're eating a lot of these foods before, that's going to cut out a lot of your calories.
Juna: You know, this makes a lot of sense because the most commonly targeted things in diets are carbs, sugar, and fat, and sometimes ultra processed food. And if you look at the standard American diet, or as we so fondly call it, SAD, the average person is eating mostly ultra processed foods, which are high in fat and sugar.
EC Synkowski: Basically, all signs point to we're overeating processed foods, and so any food rules that get us to cut out those foods will also drop calories. So when we have weight loss, we have in fact reduced our calories, but you don't have to count calories to have weight loss.
Juna: So this means that any diet that is causing weight loss is doing so with the same underlying mechanism. AKA, it's cutting out a bunch of the calories that you eat. In fact, to prove this, Mark Haub who is a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate a diet entirely made up of Twinkies, Oreos and Doritos. He did this for 10 weeks, and he lost 27 pounds just because the amount of food he was eating was less than the calories he needed.
Mark Haub: The majority of my calories are now coming from these delectable little snack cakes. Am I concerned about my health? No. Whatever happens, happens. I see this as an experiment.
Juna: Yeah, pretty nasty.
Eddie: OK, OK. That may be true just when it comes to the strict math of weight loss, but that shouldn't be the only thing you think about. 100 calories of ice cream is just not the same as 100 calories of broccoli or a chicken breast.
Juna: OK, so what else should we be talking about here?
Eddie: Well, think about this. There's a lot more that's different about ice cream and broccoli, besides the carbs, the fat, and the protein ratios. There's also micronutrients, all of the vitamins and minerals. And you know what micronutrients are for?
Juna: No, what?
EC Synkowski: I mean everything. Bone health, immune function, eyes, cell growth and differentiation. If there is a function going on in the body, we're going to need some micronutrients involved. And that's why they're essential. You know, there's no getting around the fact that we need these essential nutrients.
Juna: Plus, there's actually other properties in food besides even calories and micronutrients that actually impact your eating behavior.
EC Synkowski: There's also differences about the food quality, the things that we might actually feel more full on, make our stomach feel full and so we don't eat as long. And maybe even something like the chicken breast with the protein might be affecting hunger signaling. So we certainly don't want to reduce food down to just calories because there are so many other characteristics about it which will affect our eating behavior.
Eddie: Speaking of affecting our eating behaviors, one of the biggest reasons why EC specifically calls out ultra processed foods is because they have a lot less micronutrients, and they're extremely calorically dense, meaning that they have more calories for a smaller volume of food.
Juna: I mean, some of the discrepancies in calories between ultra processed food and things like vegetables is insane guys, OK. A pint of Ben and Jerry's could be like 1500 calories, sometimes up to 2000 calories if you're getting the ones with the fudge core. Not that I would know from personal experience. And an entire head of broccoli is something like 150 calories. And who is eating an entire head of broccoli? OK. Meanwhile, I may or may not know someone who could potentially put down an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
EC Synkowski: This is what's really hard is with these processed foods, they're are so high in calories that you don't have to be having, you know, two dozen donuts a day and a bag of chips and another pint of ice cream. Like you don't have to be eating quote "that poorly" to be getting a ton of calories that way.
Juna: Yikes. So that means if you eat one pint of ice cream, you could basically be spending three fourths or even your entire caloric budget on something that's not even good for your body.
Eddie: Exactly. And think about this, how full do you feel after maybe a 200 calorie cookie?
Juna: Since when are you eating one cookie?
Eddie: Versus a head of broccoli?
Juna: I don't even think that could fit in my stomach honestly.
EC Synkowski: When we eat things that are low caloric density like fruits and vegetables, we're actually filling up a lot of water. So we feel very full and we haven't eaten a lot of calories. And then conversely, if we eat this slice of pound cake, we don't feel like we ate that much, but we actually ate more in terms of calories.
Eddie: So basically, ultra processed foods are calorically dense, nutrient poor, and they just don't really fill you up. Whereas something like vegetables are lower calorie, nutrient rich, and very filling. What the vegetables bring to the table...
Juna: Guys, he's back with the dad jokes. He's back.
Eddie: Is fiber. And we are always trying to balance all of these things. Keeping our quantity or calories in check, raising the quality and nutrients in our food, and also feeling satiated both taste wise and the volume of food in our stomachs. That's where fiber comes in. It makes you feel full.
Juna: So EC does this awesome thing that she calls the 800 gram challenge, where she basically asked people to add 800 grams in weight of fruits and vegetables to their day. And when you have to eat that many plants, there's just not a lot of room in your stomach for all the other stuff.
Eddie: Juna, I did the math. It's almost two pounds of fruits and vegetables.
Juna: Oh my god.
Eddie: But I love this, and here's why. Instead of telling people to cut things out that aren't good for them, we can now tell people to add stuff in. I think it's a much better way to think about it.
Juna: Yeah, me too.
Eddie: If we were all getting in all of our servings of fruits and vegetables every day, we wouldn't need to focus on restricting because we would just be more full.
Juna: OK, so let's talk about some of the reasons why people say that calories don't work. Firstly, this is a trap that I myself fell into a lot growing up, and that is that you think that someone else's calories for weight loss are the calories that you need to eat for weight loss, and that's just not true.
Eddie: Well, remember back to when we talked about energy expenditure and how most of your energy goes into just keeping your body alive.
Juna: Yes.
Eddie: Well, that part of your metabolism, your BMR, that could depend on so many factors like your age, your gender, your muscle mass, your genetics.
Juna: Right. And guys, by the way, if these terms are getting confusing, feel free to go to our snazzy new website because we do have a graph up there of all these parts of energy expenditure.
Eddie: So even just that metric makes every single person unique in terms of how many calories their body burns. That's not to mention that everybody, everyBODY is moving different amounts throughout the day.
Juna: So we're going to do a deep dove into metabolism and energy expenditure in next week's episode. But suffice to say, your metabolism is completely different than your mom's metabolism, your friend's metabolisms, the fitness model you saw on Instagram's metabolism. One person could lose weight on one number of calories and another person could gain weight on the exact same number of calories.
Eddie: I mean, think about this Juna. At the most basic level, a smaller person is almost always going to burn less calories than a bigger person simply because they're smaller and they have less tissues, fewer cells, less lean body mass to upkeep. This is a big reason why men, who tend to be larger on average, can eat so much more food than women.
Juna: So a lot of people say things like, "Oh my god, I counted my calories and I didn't lose any weight. I guess calories don't work." Well, if you eat a certain number of calories and you didn't lose weight by definition, you are not eating in a calorie deficit. So that amount of calories is not a deficit for you, for your body, for your specific energy needs.
Eddie: Another reason EC says that people often think calories don't work is that we're just not very good at knowing what food we eat and how much we're eating.
EC Synkowski: We'll eyeball staff will think we know we understood the portion size and we didn't. We thought our wine was only five ounces, it ended up being three five ounce glasses. There's also just forgetting and it's not to be, you know, a lie or anything. We just forgot about the snack we had at the office. And then there is also shame around food. This is a big one. That people don't actually want to face the music with what they're consuming. And that's tied into the psychology of kind of diet and nutrition, which is very hard.
Juna: So in studies where people's exact food intake is measured, scientists have found that people underreport their food intake by 20 percent on average. OK, that's one fifth of your food. And people who claim to be weight loss resistant or have obesity or are overweight actually underestimate by even more than 20 percent. And it's not because anyone is out here trying to lie to the scientists coming to the lab being like, "Ha, I'm not going to tell them about that Snickers bar I eat." It's actually just because we don't really know what we're eating a lot of the time.
Eddie: I mean, think about all the snacks that were around.
Juna: I'd rather not think about that.
Eddie: I find myself snacking while I'm cooking.
Juna: Mm hmm.
Eddie: And think about all the stuff that people bring in to work. I mean, it's no wonder we don't remember half the stuff we eat.
Juna: And finally, EC says that one of the classic problems when it comes to calorie counting is something that she calls the caloric swing.
EC Synkowski: And so that would be where somebody, let's say, is doing this diet. They are counting calories, they're sticking to it Monday to Friday. They're doing really well and they get to Friday. They're five days into this thing and they're like, "Oh gosh, I am sick of this diet heck with it." And then they go out with their friends on Friday night and they end up having three hours of fun and they set themselves back thousands of calories. What's really hard about this is you can adhere to a diet for more hours than not or more days than not. And it doesn't matter.
Juna: Hmm. Definitely not something I'm familiar with at all. So, Eddie, I get here, we are supposed to stay within our caloric budget, and we're also supposed to try to focus on eating good quality foods. But I just personally don't want to spend my whole life counting calories, you know what I'm saying?
Eddie: And that's where the practice comes in. All of us are constantly learning what's the right amount of food for our bodies. You don't necessarily need to count the calories, what you need to find is a way to eat the right amount of high quality foods while still feeling full and satiated. No one should be living a life of calorie counting forever. But at the same time, if you never pay attention to the quantity of your food choices, well, we live in a world where it's just really, really easy to accidentally overeat.
Juna: Don't we know it. We should also mention here that for a lot of people, calorie counting can just not be helpful.
EC Synkowski: While calories certainly matter, there's plenty of scenarios where I would not actually coach a person to count calories. I have worked with people with eating disorders, for example. Like people who have a true eating disorder, bulimia or anorexia, their weight comes down to calories in, calories out. But I'm not going to sit down with that person and start in with the calories lecture, right? Because that's not the issue at hand. Same thing, it doesn't have to be an eating disorder, but it could be just stress eating. If somebody is overly stressed and they're eating to compensate for that, we're not going to sit them down and be like, OK, well, calories, there's carbon molecules, you know. Like, we have to figure out why they're stressed and why that's driving their eating behavior. Remember calories in, calories out, are just explaining where the molecules are. They're not explaining all of the influences of why those went into your mouth or did not go into your mouth.
Eddie: So in some ways, yes, it still comes down to the calories. But in some much more important ways, calories are not the thing that's making you eat the way you eat. So be aware, but don't get too obsessive about it. And even if the calories are important, you should still be trying to eat foods that are good for you.
Juna: Wow, Eddie, you are so wise. OK, guys, that is going to be the end of this week's episode. Next week we are doing a deep dive into a topic that we introduced today, metabolism. Can slow down? Can it speed up? What happens to it as you age? Everything you need to know. Until then, you can find all our show notes at foodweneedtotalk.com. You can find us on Instagram @foodweneedtotalk. You can find me on Instagram @theofficialjuna spelled with a J. And on TikTok and YouTube @JunaGjata. And you can find Eddie at his bike desk, in his office, or in Vermont apparently. He's always in Vermont nowadays at his nice new house. And guys, EC has her own podcast called The Consistency Project. It's really, really awesome. It's how I found her. It has some great information and you can subscribe on any podcast platform. And she's also at optimizemenutrition.com and OptimizeMeNutrition on all social media. Until then, we will see you next time. Well, not exactly see you, but you know what I mean.
Juna: Food, We Need To Talk is a production of PRX.
Eddie: Our producer is Morgan Flannery.
Juna: Claire Carlander is our associate producer and Tommy Bazarian is our mixing engineer.
Eddie: Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna: Food, We Need To Talk was co-created by Kari Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips, and me. To find out more, you can go to foodweneedtotalk.com, and thanks for listening.
Eddie: Food, We Need To Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health. The home of Full Plate Living. Full Plate Living helps you add more whole, plant-based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples, beans, strawberries, and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full Plate Living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers, and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at fullplateliving.org.
