Why is it that every diet book ever written does not recommend you lose weight by simply stopping eating? If you want to lose weight, why not simply stop eating? Not only do all the diet books - from Atkin’s to Oprah - not only say to eat but to eat a minimum of 3 meals a day. While, superficially, this seems to be a paradox, when you dig deeper, "eating to lose weight" not only makes sense it is a weight loss imperative. You must eat in order to lose weight.

Why is this so important? Consider the human body as a furnace, not unlike what you have in your home. But let’s not think about this furnace as the new modern type that have thermostats and run pretty much on autopilot to keep our homes warm. Let’s think of the human body as an old coal-burning heater. The kind where your father had to go down into the basement, every few hours, and shovel coal into the furnace to keep the house warm. When someone felt the temperature in the house drop, someone - usually Dad - would go down to the basement, shovel a few shovels full of coal into the furnace and, shortly afterwards, the house warmed up.

For those of you too young to remember the coal burning furnace, think about a fireplace. I know you have seen one before. Back in the old frontier days, the fire in the fireplace was used for heating as well as cooking. And, in the winter, it was kept burning 24 hours a day. Dad and the kids would chop down the trees and split the wood and Mom would keep, as the old saying goes, "keep the home fire burning."

The human body is just like that fireplace. It always has a fire burning in it. The fire - which consists in the body of the parts of a cell called mitochondria - are burning energy 24hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for as long as you are alive. The energy from these mitochondrial "fires" is used to keep the heart pumping, the mind thinking, and all the other body’s’ tissues and cells functioning and alive.

In order to keep the body’s fires burning, the mitochondria require energy. The energy they burn is obviously not wood but is three "logs" that you should be very familiar with - carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. These are the three types of "wood" the body furnace can burn.

Now, think back to the old fireplaces in a log cabin. When, Mom gets ready to cook supper, she needs a hotter fire. What does she do to prime up those glowing embers in the fireplace? She throws some wood onto the fire. And what does the fire do? It starts burning the wood and the level of the flame - the heat of the fire - increases. Mom can boil water and cook the food. After the meal has been cooked and the family has eaten, 3-4 hours have passed by. What has the fire done? Well, as you might expect, the energy in the wood of the fireplace has mostly been burned up and the heat from the fire starts to die out. The heat released from the fireplace starts to diminish. The family is now ready for bed and wants the heat from the fire to heat the cabin during the night’s sleep, so Dad stokes up the fire and throws a few more logs on the fire to keep it burning throughout the night. In the morning, when Dad and Mom get up to start the day, one of the first things they do is repeat the same process to stir up the fire for the breakfast meal. They use an andiron to stir up the glowing embers left from the previous night’s fire, throw a new supply of wood in the fireplace, and get started preparing breakfast and warming the cabin up for the children.

Keep that picture of the fireplace in your mind. The energy released by the fireplace has 3 places to go. Most of the energy from the burning wood radiates out into the cabin and heats the family and the food cooked on it. Some of the energy is left as ash as the wood burns and has to be shoveled out, every day, to keep the fireplace clean. The final exit for the energy or heat released by the fireplace is up the chimney. Some of this heat energy is lost and does no real benefit to the cabin, other than keeping animals and cold air from coming down the chimney into the cabin.

We can now say several things about the fireplace:

Now, switch images to the fireplace of your body. I will tell you right now, that your body is almost exactly like a fireplace. All of the observations we made about the fireplace and the wood fuel applies point-by-point to the body and the fuel we put into it.

The fire in your body, just like the well-tended fireplace is burning - at least to some degree - 24 hours a day. In fact, the body burns about 60 percent of the energy it consumes just staying alive. This is called your "resting metabolic rate" or RMR. It is the amount of energy your body burns just staying alive. This is the fireplace at its lowest ebb with just the smoldering embers from the previous wood load. Those glowing embers are your heart beat, your breathing, your blood flow, and your cell repair and regeneration and this consumes 60 percent of all the energy your body burns. Another 30 percent of the energy the body burns in a day comes from that expended by physical activity.

When you eat a meal, your body’s embers - just like the those in the fireplace - burns brighter and with more warmth, literally. You body temperature actually rises with eating and for several hours later. This energy release is probably due to digestion of the food, absorption into the body, and assimilation of the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats into body tissue. And, just like the fireplace, the body is also not 100 percent efficient. About 10 percent of the energy you eat at a meal is lost and not used at all by the body. And every time you eat - every time the fire burns brightest after a meal - the more energy is lost and not used or stored by the body.

The energy - calories - lost with meals is called the "thermic effect of food" or TEF. If you do not eat, your body’s internal fire stays as embers and most of the energy released stays in the body. If it is not used by the RMR or with physical activity - it is stored as fat. Every time you eat a meal, you throw logs on the fire, the fire burns hotter, and more energy is lost out the chimney.

<>If you graph the energy the body is burning over the course of 24 hours, you will see that it is lowest during sleep and highest with physical activity. Regardless of what the body’s metabolism is at the time of a meal - just waking up in the morning (low) or 30 minutes after a 2 mile walk (high) eating will bump the metabolism up significantly to an even higher level. And this bump up in metabolism occurs every time you eat.

The effect on your metabolism varies depending on the type of "logs" - the food composition - you throw on the fire. It is highest with protein and lowest with fat. If you eat a grilled chicken breast, your metabolism will increase more than if you eat the equal amount of calories of a fried chicken breast. If you want to maximize the effect of food, you should eat protein, primarily, with some carbohydrate. Avoid fat, wherever possible.

Another reason is how much of the energy goes up the chimney and is not available to the body for use. Thirty to 40 percent of the energy in protein goes "up the chimney" and is not available to the body; only 5-10 percent of fat is lost to the body; 90 percent is stored, if not burned up.

Finally, the reason given by most diet books is still a good one: By eating throughout the day you cut down on the risk of overeating or bingeing when you get home at night. How many times have you skipped meals throughout the day only to get home, feeling starved, and start foraging through the kitchen in search of a "reward." Chips, ice cream, crackers - anything you can find is fair game. After all, haven't you been "good" all day? That is the worst time to be hungry and it is the worst time to eat: just before going to bed. Spread your daily calories out to 3,4 or even 6 smaller meals during the course of the day and you won't go "hog wild" when you get home to your "target rich" environment.


So, the message is as follows:

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Albright Bariatric Clinic