A disclaimer...of sorts

While a lot of what I talk about I express as fact, I'm aware that it's unsupported. It's not that I haven't read the research, but I'm not interested in trying to prove theories by citing internet articles. If people are interested in details, I'm happy to help point to things they can read which may help and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of sources. After all, as a scientist I have to be able to fit all observations to my theory. But people are generally far too inconsistent in how they apply scientific research to make their decisions and I don't want to contribute to that with a half-assed job. So I won't.

I'm not here to prove anything or sell anything. If I express something that triggers a though or more research of your own, I'd be glad, and if it provides a basis for initiating discussion so much the better.

Running: the technical part

Few things catch me off guard as much as the ongoing debate about footwear and running form. While I don't intend to try to provide comprehensive guides or repeat work presented better elsewhere on the internet, it is in keeping with my basic principles that there be a simple, accessible approach if something is considered natural. So how does fixing running form tie in to our basic animal nature? Remove your shoes. Given time, you should be able to develop a robust, efficient and effective running style. But that would make for a short post, so let's talk a little more.

Heel-striking. The balance of discussion is certainly shifting, but even those with some experience are hesitant to commit fully to arguing against it, and all the technical papers and biomechanical analysis make little impact because even when scientists can draw conclusions with high certainty they are not invested in mass marketing. And this confusion then allows new runners to be misled. There should be no debate. Heel striking was an artificial invention by a man who thought he saw an opportunity to make some money. It may look like running but it really isn't the same thing. It's only possible by designing heavily padded shoes. And the same trend has progressed to 'fix' a litany of problems, orthotics, stability control, coil springs in the soles. The answer has always been more technology. This is the guy who founded Nike. Similarly people have since benefited from this trend by selling machines such as ellipticals, which are intended to mimic aspects of running while fixing issues that didn't exist. Heel striking is not a natural activity. All the benefits and discussions on the utility of running are thrown out the window if someone insists on heel striking. It's like using a Smith machine to squat. It may look like squatting but it's really not the same and when it comes to injury prevention all bets are off. In fact it's like doing squat mornings on the Smith machine with the pussy pad on a bosu ball.

The studies are there, the more expensive and 'advanced' your running shoe, the more likely you are to get injured. 80% of runners get injured every year as it is. And somehow we have a generation who accepts this as normal and still believes and trusts capitalism to provide the solution if only they pay enough money and put in enough technology and expertise. Are entire body has evolved to be able to run. This is why we stand upright. This is why we have big glutes. This is why we have fantastically complicated feet full of bones and tendons. Take a look at our progress so far at re-engineering this with running bipedal robots. There's no contest.

Ok, so if going barefoot is self-correcting, what can we do to merge this with the real world? Well still nothing is as instructive as doing it yourself, even if it's not all the time your body can learn a lot from its own feedback mechanisms, and you can learn how it feels to run short distances barefoot - and if it's on concrete you'll learn quickly! The basics of form follow fairly naturally. Compared to the cushioned jogger, there will be higher foot turnover, you'll land around the midfoot, pronate naturally as the foot and leg absorbs the impact directly beneath your body. Any lengthening of the stride comes from the legs stretching behind you rather than stretching in front, but it's not efficient to do so at the cost of fewer steps. Compare the effort of pressing 100lb overhead 50 times or an empty barbell 100 times. For sprints, sure, use the strength and push harder, but otherwise it's an endurance game, and if you keep your feet moving it's very hard to go wrong. Take the time to build the strength, and your ankles, arches, achilles, calves, quads, hamstrings, glutes, hips, abs arms and neck and more will all develop to do their job of keeping you on your feet. Go on uneven, varied terrain and the return will be increased exponentially. You may not be going as fast, but you'll be able to keep going, and that's the aim. To keep going, not get injured, and be able to tackle anything that comes at you after a long run.

Running: the rambling part

Running. It holds a strange place in the national psyche. It's generally perceived as the entry-level exercise. Taking a brisk walk every day is a good start, but for those who decide they really want to improve their fitness and lose weight I'd bet more take up jogging than anything else. But it's usually a hate-hate relationship. People struggle their way through uncomfortable and sweaty sessions, slogging their wheezing bodies round the block before collapsing back home to nurse their blisters. It can be a high barrier to entry - while many believe this is the price they must pay and continue to put themselves through it, others move on to 'more advanced' fitness activities or abandon their hopes altogether. After all, if they can't even hack going for a little jog what business do they have running at all?

Yet still there are people lacing up their shoes every day and hitting the road, with varying degrees of success. Something drives them, some basic belief that running is good for you. It can be surprising how negative non-runners can be about the activity, until you realise that most of these people are actually failed runners. Whatever arguments or reasons they throw out against the utility of running, you can be pretty sure they still tried it at some point and weren't happy with the results. The flipside of this most natural form of exercise is that people expect it to come naturally. You are either a runner or you're not. People resist the idea that it is something they should have to learn. And our society reinforces that, one way or another. Whether it's acceptance of a sedentary life (which is slowly changing) or the belief that 'cardio' and fitness are mutually exclusive, there are plenty of facilitators out there who will let you slink away and take the shortcut on that cross-country run.

I was there. Nothing was as bad for my asthma as trying to run through the mud in winter as we circled the school, and nothing as embarrassing as the showers afterwards. Through my teenage years I'd wheeze and rattle over short distances, and stop before my legs literally burned to nothing. Shin splints were most common ailment, even through that period at university where I tried committing to jogging regularly. And oh the chafing. Once a week was all I did because that's how long it took to recover. There would be occasional bright spots. When the sun came out and I could bounce along and feel ready to take on the world, but by the time I rounded the next corner and saw how much farther I still had to go my spirit would dip and my legs would grow heavy. It was boring, it was uncomfortable, it left me struggling to walk one time in three and it didn't seem to be having a magnificent impact on my waistline.

Even later, after I'd overcome my asthmatic tendencies, gotten stronger, healthier, fitter, I still struggled. That last summer of my PhD, when I cycled, walked or ran to campus 5 miles away 3 days of the week and swam the other days. When I could play badminton or frisbee for hours on end, darting about the court or field, when I could hike in the mountains all day. I don't think I ran that whole 5 miles once. I would manage a mile or two then need to walk, my legs and my lungs conspiring against me. And through all this not once did it occur to me that I didn't know how to run. I was willing to accept my physical limitations. I thought that if I kept trying I would find it easier, it's not as if I never enjoyed it after all. But those moments of pleasure were rare. Too often all I got was the satisfaction of having made the effort. I figured that would have to be enough. 10 years of voluntarily, albeit sporadically, exercising to become fitter and healthier still left me uncomfortable running much more than 400m. I never got seriously injured, but I would credit that to never having been so committed as to put in the mileage many novice runners do in their attempts to improve.

So where am I now, barely a year after I read a book that changed my perception of running so entirely as to blow away all those years as a failed runner, all the excuses and half-truths I'd whispered to myself? In some ways I had been lucky, I'd stumbled on to discussions about correct running form 2 years ago and could finally see that technique isn't something that only matters in separating elite sprinters by hundredths of a second. Whatever level you're at, technique matters. I can only suppose I'd blinded myself up until this point as I was well aware that I had had to learn some things about how to walk if I was going to cover 25 steep miles without joints seizing up, why should running come any more naturally? So I had begun the work of actively trying to correct the physical and postural problems inflicted by our manmade environment. I still felt that there was no need to run any great distances. Short sprints were fine, there was always time to catch your breath in sport and so many other things to do. And besides, running properly required commitment, training, its own rest days and recovery right? You couldn't expect to go out every day, especially not if you were doing other physical activities.

Well that all depends on what's important to you. Of course you can go run every day, if you choose to do it right. You can deadlift without breaking your back or squat without ruining your knees, if you take the time to learn how and to build the strength, stability and mobility you once had as a child and lost as you graduated to the desk. There is no greater functional movement, and it is a shame to see the misinformation that holds people back, just as it is to see the litany of excuses from people who are otherwise well educated about fitness and equipped to perform well. As my previous posts have explained, fitness to me is not judged in a single moment or on a single action. If you can't drop everything and run at a moment's notice, and more specifically if you don't know your body well enough to know how to do it safely, what speed is maintainable, how to surge past obstacles or recharge your batteries all while on the move, then while I may be impressed by your dedication, strength or skill at a particular activity don't expect me to be impressed by your fitness. For me it's still a work in progress, but in that year I've gone from being that person who needed a week or more of recovery after pushing to run more than half a mile to being able to stroll out the door with no intention other than to enjoy the outdoors and end up going 7 miles and wondering later that day if I wouldn't like to go out and play some more. It is natural. There's a reason why people keep trying to do it. There's also a reason why so many fail, and we'll get to that in the next post.

What is fitness?

So, let's talk fitness. Most of my posts seems to start with some sort of caveat and this will be no different as fitness is a somewhat nebulous concept.

(yup, random pictures are back to hold your attention)

So here I'm just looking at the outputs, the final expression of being fit. Which for now means physical activity. Different people will have different priorities: strength, speed, agility, stamina... For a long time after I started making the effort, I considered myself relatively fit. I could hike all day, every day for a week over mountainous terrain. I could run endless sprints in an Ultimate tournament for 5-6 hours and come back the next day and do it again. I'd even been able to throw in respectable numbers of pushups - at least I kept them strict! But as far as basic measures of physical accomplishment go I had always struggled with the fact I couldn't even begin to do a pull-up. Strength gains can seem an open-ended goal, but while I prefer to focus on 'functional' activities there are undeniably some basic minimum levels I think a fit person should be able to achieve.

I think fit people should be able to get about. To support their own weight, pull themselves up, be able to lift and carry a 'reasonable' weight, to be able to get up and down from the ground or a chair, to sprint short distances, to run 10k and all of this on the spur of the moment without special preparation or warming up, and achievable into old age. Some of these are hard to achieve with a typical lifestyle, sat at a desk all day, driving from place to place etc. While this concept of fitness stems from our animal selves the reality is that we have to try and marry that innate heritage with all the other aspects of our life that seem to demand time and energy.

There are lots of ways to approach training with different levels of efficiency and efficacy to get in a physically fit state, and there are elements of technique or skill that need to be learned to be able to safely move around without injury - in truth these are aspects that should become so deeply ingrained that you don't have to think about it. But the hidden depths here go to maintaining a strong, healthy environment where you don't suffer in your efforts from exhaustion, hunger, injury, stress or weakness. Being fit isn't about breaking records. It's not what you can achieve on your best day, it's who you are on your worst.

The Manifesto

When I try to decide what to write next, I keep ending up looking for a higher level of abstraction. I can't talk about meals until I've talked about diet. I can't talk about exercise until I've talked about fitness. I can't talk about fitness until I've defined health. It's difficult even to talk about what's normal any more. In the US at least, being overweight is 'normal'. Looking to the general population to determine what is typical doesn't seem too smart to me. There is a distinction that is gaining traction between surviving and thriving. I seek to thrive. So what 'truths' do I hold to be self-evident?

• We need not become crippled as we age
• Illness is minor or rare
• You can lose weight and not be hungry
• You can build strength and not be sore
• You can always walk
• You can run for hours every day without injury
• The only things you need for sure are sun, sleep and water
• Performance need not be coupled with eating
• You can lift things every day, and recover rapidly from extreme effort
• You can maintain a calm, balanced mood
• You can find a way to include any vice
• Being healthy means being able to cope with occasional adversity
• Life is variable and multi-objective, there are no definitive optima
• Early-afternoon fatigue is not inevitable, nor any fatigue
• Most weather doesn't need to be avoided
• You don't have to crash or hit the wall when being active

I'm sure I can (and will) add more, but this seems the best way to get started on what I consider to be normal for me, and what I think is achievable by the vast majority of people. I also think, taken as a whole, the benefits of such a lifestyle often fulfil the deepest desires of many, while making a mockery of the excuses employed to avoid change. I know there are different challenges for different people, but I don't like to see people affirm their own helplessness for lack of information. So many messages are pervasive in our culture to the point where they aren't even questioned, but you can gain without pain, you can make a difference, you can have your cake and eat it. And if any of these things aren't true for you, that's your choice.

Framework for fitness

Ok, this is the big one, the unified theory of everything, 42, a thousand monkeys doing Shakespeare...no, wait. What this is is an attempt to identify what my overarching framework for fitness decisions is.

Why does this matter? Well, scientifically speaking, fitness, exercise, nutrition are all new and immature. There's no consensus on what the governing context is to make sense of all the disparate bits of research going on. And I'd wager that's the case with most practitioners too. Part of the reason why it's so easy to bounce from one diet or gym routine to another is because people don't have a strong guiding principle to follow. Likely they have a dozen partial ideas they have picked up with aren't internally consistent and they hedge their bets by trying to do a bit of everything.

The closest I've seen recently (and it's spreading with remarkable speed) is the fairly vague "do what works for you". If this isn't an admission of failure from the industry I don't know what is. All approaches are equally valid,  no-one's opinion is wrong, you are the best judge of your own health and progress. As a blanket statement, it could be worse, but it's certainly not reflecting some underlying truth. It's so closely related to the democratic model that that is probably sufficient reason for some people to support it so staunchly. It's the worst of all systems except those we've tried. As far as science goes though, we ought to be able to look at this through a less idealogical lens.

And even so, even if we embrace our individualism and make this a question of morality, we all subscribe (at some level or another) to existing value systems. And while the details can vary from person to person, there are some values that most people consider should be universal. So I don't think it's unreasonable to search for what I think may be a universal framework for health and fitness - even if the details vary in the implementation.

Genetically we are all incredibly similar, interact with our environment in similar ways and are subject to the same basic biological processes. But this is often not how we see ourselves. Even if we have realistic ideas of our own limits, we tend to trust those around us more than is justified. And with good reason - our survival is inextricably linked to that sense of optimism. But it leaves us open to manipulation, whether intentional or not. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives.


Having expended so much time building up to it, I think I'll leave discussion of the consequences to another post, but any good guiding principle should be able to be expressed concisely, so here it is. I think the key is to embrace our place as part of the ecosphere. This is a seemingly trite statement, but for me it extends to acknowledging our evolutionary past, the forces that have shaped our environment, the (uncomfortable for some) reality that we are only human, more than that we are only animals. We're not above acting on instinct. We may be masters of our destiny but most of our actions are in fact run on autopilot. Our minds are not encumbered by physical frailties but rather are fundamentally entwined with them. This is the context within which I try to fit my decisions and beliefs. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I'd hope you might take a minute to think what you would replace it with, and how that philosophy explains the choices you make day to day.

Blame, responsibility and accountability

This shouldn't be a long post, but I believe it is a necessary one. Social interactions are complex. We have an endless list of written and unwritten rules for how to act and behave. People are brought up within a certain culture with shared values and understandings to minimise conflict and maximise potential. But it's not perfect. And I'm not an anthropologist.

My point is that, even for the individual, concepts such as self-responsibility are derived from social judgements and while there may be good reasons for their existence they are not always what they appear.  Or, to be more concise, just because someone is at fault doesn't mean it's their fault.

This is a concept I have held for quite a long time. From memory it started to crystallise for me when I spent time as a counsellor. People are not as able to control their environment as we like to believe. And self-image is not formed in a vacuum. These ideas led to me to increasingly identify cases where people were blamed, or blamed themselves, for problems in their lives. More often than not the problems appeared to me more an inevitable consequence of the environment they grew up in. Societal attitudes,  saturation advertising, explicit education - our beliefs and opinions are rarely our own, and to blame yourself for that seems foolish.

Note that this isn't an argument to abandon everything to fate. I believe it is possible to make a distinction between not accepting blame, but still taking responsibility to try and effect change. So while I may often disagree with what someone else thinks or believes, I very rarely blame them personally. I can understand and empathise with their position, and even accept that they may not be equipped at that moment in time to hold themselves accountable. This is the reality I accept, and when I talk about ways to approach self-improvement it is integral to the discussion.  Saying that a certain theory is valid...except for all the ways people fail - that is not a valid approach for me.  Imagining people to be an ideal mechanistic system has never worked. Context matters, environment matters, flawed perceptions and judgements matter. We don't need a scientific reduction of the fallibility of the human mind to accept its reality.

Calorie Counting

Life is complicated. My first post was meant to simply be a slightly expanded biography, a way to put some of my beliefs and behaviours into context in a way that is never possible through a few lines of text. I had no intention of making this an on-going blog. It wasn't that I had nothing else to say, but rather too much. Even staying broadly on the topic of fitness, trying to expound further on who I am is a daunting prospect that would likely prove doomed. I can tell you what I've done, what I've read, the basic mechanics of how I got from A to B. People are drawn to a narrative, we understand change, movement, growth. Trying to describe something in isolation, without comparisons, shared references, taking everything from first principles is a much more challenging proposition. There are entire websites trying to explain principles of building certain lifestyles, with thousands of pages of discussion on points that aren't explicit. Gaining knowledge is a process in itself, it takes time. Sharing knowledge is the same and is incredibly difficult to do impersonally.

So it is with low expectations that I begin the attempt to communicate my current point of view on subjects that I think others could benefit from. As much as this is an exercise in ordering my own thoughts I nonetheless hope that some part of it could help someone somewhere. For many people it may not matter at the end of the day, but I believe that it's important to have a correct understanding of things if you possibly can. So I'm starting with nutrition and, specifically, the Calorie Paradigm. This is likely to be by turn tedious and controversial, and not nearly as pretty as my first post. So let's kick things off with a pretty waterfall to distract you:

Fun fact, this place in South Africa claims to be the inspiration for much of Middle Earth.

So, before we get bogged down in the inevitable semantics, let me try to explain what I mean by the Calorie Paradigm. Readers will likely be familiar with the idea that Calories are something found in food. Some kinds of food have more of them than others, like the octane rating of gas. Food is what makes us go. Depending on how you're built and what your level of performance is, the rate at which you use these Calories - your mileage - varies. When your fuel levels get low, you need to eat more to fill up the tank (stomach) so you can keep moving. When it comes to body weight the maths is simple. If you don't put enough Calories in to the tank for the rate at which you use them your gross weight will drop. And if you add more fuel then you're using? Well, you know why they have those warnings not to pull the trigger again once the auto-stop has kicked in on the pump? That's right, obesity.

This is the first point to make, analogies suck. They're an imperfect way to try to convey a foreign idea with familiar concepts, and if you get carried away they break down. Suffice to say the Calorie Paradigm is often shorthanded as calories in/calories out, eat less move more, calories matter etc. It says the the biological processes governing body composition are dominated by calorie balance. And any alternative approach to diet selection (and by diet I merely mean what someone eats, not specifically eating for losing weight) is successful because at root it obeys the governing principles of calorie balance. That's quite a bold claim, but people have that kind of confidence in it because they think it truly is a physical law. On a par with the constancy of the speed of light (though less immutable as calorie balance is eternal). Let's examine that shall we?

So what is the supposed key to healthy eating? The First Law of Thermodynamics:

"For a closed system, in any arbitrary process of interest that takes it from an initial to a final state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium, the change of internal energy is the same as that for a reference adiabatic work process that links those two states. This is so regardless of the path of the process of interest, and regardless of whether it is an adiabatic or a non-adiabatic process."

In vague terms this is thought of as conservation of energy. So if we assume that Calories are simply a unit of energy, then any change in body mass is due to a difference between the energy in and out of the body, because we've all read Einstein's work we are comfortable with the equivalence of energy and mass. To be honest though we don't need go further than the first clause. A closed system means mass cannot pass the boundaries of the system. Every breath you take violates this - and this is not a trivial point. The heat exchange that occurs in breathing is a critical biological feature. People are not closed systems. Thermodynamic Laws are not applicable. And a good job too - otherwise our very existence would be a violation of the Second Law.

But surely there must be some truth to it somewhere? I mean, can't we pretend we're a closed system and apply conservation of energy anyway? Well, ok, we can do some approximations and see what happens, so long as we don't forget that we no longer have the Laws of the Universe backing us up. Let's try expressing this equation in a more complete way. We want to say that:

 (energy in to the body) - (energy out of the body) = change of internal energy of the body

Easy enough to figure out what goes in right? We have incident radiation, hot drinks, trips in elevators, food, punches in the face etc. Excellent. Some of these we can deal with easily enough - it's reasonable to assume that over the course of a day you end up at the same elevation at which you started for example. But others, like the weather, the temperature of what you consume, and the food itself are likely to be variable. So let's just ignore everything except food. Which we'll come back to later.

As for the energy out? Well, aside from the sweating, panting, and heat lost from any number of other bodily fluids, we've got running, jumping, lifting things, standing up, sitting down. There's probably a lot of factors to all that, not least climate, but let's approximate it all as a single number. Then just for kicks, let's simplify changes of internal energy as being equivalent to stored fat. This may seem like a slash-and-burn approach to approximating physical equations, but it's done with a very good reason. It's hard work to try and work out any of those other variables, so the only practical approach is to ignore them and hope they go away. It's not as if the original equation applies anyway (remember? you promised you wouldn't forget).

So let's clear some more of this deadwood out the way and recognise that food is not a unit of energy. It's all the same though right? E=mc² as we brushed against earlier. Well that's not going to get us anywhere. We're not actually capable of converting a sandwich into pure energy. So let's instead use the energy released when you burn the food, and let's use marshmallows instead of sandwiches for our mental image because they genuinely burn. Hell, this is mental enough already, let's have at reality:

 Ok, so we'll convert what we eat into Calories. We don't actually have a belly full of charcoal but it's an approximation right? To be honest, we're too far from the original equations to call this a simplification any more. I'd more properly call this an engineering model. The difference being that engineering models don't claim to be derived from real physical laws. They have their own set of rules which aren't physical, but which through experimentation have been found to give similar results to reality. An analogy if you will. I'm hoping that I've spent enough time now that when I say:

Calories in - Calories out = Change in bodyweight

This is not actually the First Law of Thermodynamics, it's something that looks similar providing we make a lot of assumptions and ignore a lot of other variables. It does not have to be obeyed, and it's only useful in as far as it helps us make predictions about what happens in reality. In fact, a more accurate approximation would have been to stick with conservation of mass:

Atoms in - Atoms out = Change in bodyweight

Here we can just talk about mass, we can justifiably ignore relativity effects and have something more meaningful but less practical. So let's see how practical the Calorie model is.

I should just note here that we made the assumption that the caloric change in bodyweight is represented by stored fat. Of course, there are many instances of people trying to apply this equation to muscle gain. I don't really know why, the maths doesn't even remotely begin to stack up. I'm going to try and keep it simple for now. Which means the first thing we want to calculate is "Calories In". We've already reduced our definition here by specifying that we're counting in Calories. Now let's idealise the situation further and look at this as if willpower were not an issue and people have and are able to exercise full control over what they eat. It's a big assumption, but it could be true for some people so let's give it a chance. We'll even disregard the coupled nature of the equation (the fact that calories expended AND changes in bodyweight are both factors in determining Calories eaten in the typical individual). We should be able to nail down this number right?

Well, if we make a few more assumptions maybe we can. First up, let's assume the packaging is accurate. This is a poor assumption, some foods can be 100% out on their advertised Calorie contents, but we can't really do the maths without it. So take the numbers on the box at face value. Of course, these numbers aren't actually the heat released when the food is burned. They reduce the food to its constituent molecules (approximately) and use standardised numbers you're probably familiar with. 4 Calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate, 9 Calories per gram of fat. These aren't the numbers you get from burning these molecules either, but this time it's a good thing, because they've been adjusted to account for digestion and metabolism! So these numbers are actually an estimate of the energy available to the body from these molecules when they are eaten. Except of course once you combine these molecules with each other, and a bunch of other stuff, and carry out various processing operations, and hell even if you just cook your food before eating it, you end up with differences in how the food is digested and metabolised. And that's just from the food's point of view. These numbers are trying to account for the calories lost directly at the other end of the gut, those 'stolen' by gut bacteria, yet more that is digested but not metabolised and is lost through urine. And if you think these variables don't change from person to person and indeed from day to day depending on health and environment etc. then I'd suggest that's an optimistic view. So those numbers on the box (even if they've been calculated correctly) are an entertaining guess of what the average amount of energy available from a food would be if it were metabolised as such. But there are definitely margins of error. Big honking ones.

So even the most conscientious acolyte would struggle to get a very accurate count of how many Calories they were actually getting in. And as just alluded to, even then this is assuming that all the Calorie-containing molecules are used for energy or stored as such. Of course this isn't true either, the body has many uses for proteins and fats which mean they're not metabolised for energy and so shouldn't really be counted in this equation. I wouldn't blame you for ignoring that either though, it's not as if we have been rigorous up til this point. Let's be exceedingly generous and say there's a 10% error in our intake (though 50%-200% would be quite easy to argue in some cases). Can we do better with working out what our "Calories out" is?

Thanks to the diet industry, we all have a good idea of this one right? Basal metabolic rate (the energy required to stay alive) + thermogenesis (extra energy released as you go about your day actually doing things) + exercise (ok, it's still thermogenesis, but it can be useful to separate out deliberate activity). BMR is the easy one, it doesn't change much day to day. It's also by far the biggest part of where your Calories are spent. As you might expect it's dependent on factors such as body temperature, body composition, size, diet, thyroid function, age, genetics, physical development, drug use and so on. Sound like time for some simplifying assumptions again? Well first let's note that diet cropped up again - Calories in is going to affect Calories out. You can't simply change one without changing the other. But let's ignore that. It turns out that there is remarkable consistency in metabolic rates. Most of us our within 10% of each other, even without doing any maths. That's handy. Not terribly precise, but if we correct for mass and age at least we can probably get a bit closer, probably within 200 Calories.

This is a good time for a side note. An extremely common suggestion for people wanting to lose weight is to gain muscle, as more muscle means higher BMR. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying that if you spend a year losing 25lb of fat (quite feasible) and gaining 25lb of muscle (quite challenging) then you've boosted your metabolism around about a whopping 100 Calories. 

So, have much variation is there in thermogenesis? Well, depending on your level of activity the calculators will suggest anything from 10% to 100% increase on your BMR. Even if we all burned Calories as efficiently as each other, in all our varied definitions of activity, this is still highly dependent on self-reporting. And this is where the diet factor will really kick in. If you have energy to burn, you're likely going to burn it. If you don't have as much available, you can sweat at the gym all you like, but when you get home you're more likely to sink into the couch as your BMR ratchets down to keep things on an even keel. It think it's doing you a favour. This again actually works for us, it reduces the variation between people so it's easier to guess what the total energy cost is. Because it's surprisingly consistent within and between cultures. Even so, believing that you know better than within 10% accuracy what your daily energy expenditure is would be a bold statement. The estimates are good because statistically there's not much variation, not because the calculators really mean anything.

Let's try and use our equation now to lose bodyfat. Everyone knows a pound of fat contains 3500 calories. Sure, why not. So if we want to lose a pound of fat, we just need to plug in our "Calories out" and it's easy to then see how much we need to try and eat. Except it doesn't work like that. Barely anyone will try and persuade you it's that simple any more. You can only lose so much at a time. Why? The Calorie model doesn't say, we're just adding an additional caveat, changing the rules, which is fine since we made the rules up in the first place - it's our model remember? Not the Universe's. Empirically then we can say losing a pound of fat takes about a week. So we want to carefully balance out a 500 Calorie deficit. We might as well just make that the rule. If you want to lose bodyfat, calculate a 500 Calorie deficit. It's not as if we expect the model to hold up for weight gain at this point, not without additional empirically-derived caveats. Let's suppose a typical metabolism of 2000 Calories. It's on the low side, but we should probably include kids in our averages these days right? Now taking our optimistic tools, we think we can achieve a deficit of 150-850 calories. We can't really know any more accurately than that. At least we've guaranteed a deficit with our model, though you may be disappointed to be stuck at a third of the rate of progress you'd hoped. At this point it would probably be best to monitor your bodyfat, and if you're not losing enough then try and eat less, and if it's dropping too fast eat more.

I'll be honest, my atom balance equation isn't looking such a bad idea any more. Give me half an hour, or decades of research and experiments, I could probably suggest a mass-based intake that would get you in the ballpark and then have it self-correct by adding or reducing the amount of mass you consumed depending on the results. And without all this tedious framing of everything in Calories. Not that I'd recommend it as a strategy, because it still fails to address most of the issues that cause people to fail to adhere to a diet in the first place. I'm just saying that the whole Calorie paradigm is no more meaningful than trying to eat a specific weight of food a day. We could use any other property of food as well with decent effect. Ok, not all grams are the same, we should probably specify that it will work far better if you eat certain kinds of foods. Eating your allotment in paper every day is not going to work well, whether you measure it kilograms, Calories or candelas.

(thanks google, that's exactly what I was looking for...)

So if I think the model is fairly flawed (and I do by the way), why does it seem to work? Well, it works sometimes, but then it would because some people who are trying to lose weight will eat the right things and do the right things. And in fairness the underlying reality may have a strong correlation to mass of food consumed (and if you try to reduce calories, you will likely reduce total mass eaten - you'll also spend less time eating, and eat less of all macronutrients). It's not too much of a stretch to say that obesity may be linked to overconsumption in some aspect or other, so anything that reduces intake across the board has a chance of working. But that doesn't mean there's anything special about Calories. And before we get sidetracked again into Calories representing a fundamental energy balance, may I refer you to the bulk of this post above?

More significantly, simply the act of tracking something would have improved the diet. You can assume any explanation you like here, whether it's being more mindful of your eating, making better choices, becoming more educated about what's actually in your food. Tracking has been seen to work with nothing more advanced than plotting your weight daily against an arbitrarily determined slope. Without obsessing over any behaviours at all. So if you start digging up information and writing down every constituent of everything you put in your mouth, you'll probably lose weight if you want to lose weight, and gain if you want to gain. Unless you're trying to hit a certain number of course - and that number ends up being wrong. So it's probably lower risk to skip the calculators altogether.

There's a bunch of additional caveats these days to try and make the model work of course, some of which address the problems of adherence (hunger etc.) while others try to cover for the errors inherent in the calculations. Some do both. As an example, the Calorie model will often now include a rider to the effect of increasing protein consumption. Often to twice the amount or more than would appear to be required by any scientific study. This wouldn't be included unless it helped right? Or if there was a lot of money at stake in supplementing protein I guess, but what are the odds of that? So protein is quite satiating. Getting protein Calories will make you less hungry than cupcake Calories. What happens if we forgo the Calorie Paradigm and try phrasing that differently. Protein will make you less hungry than cupcakes. Hmm, seems to work, and we can probably explain it with some kind of biological explanation that has nothing to do with thermodynamics. Cool. Is excess protein a handy recommendation in other ways? Well, yes. As noted previously, protein isn't really a fuel at all, most of those Calories ordinarily wouldn't count to any energy balance. What happens if we double the amount of protein? Well, if you're desperately short of energy it can be metabolised, but if not it can just be broken down and the nitrogen excreted along with the rest of the waste. It's insurance if you like. You're eating Calories, but the amount you actually use depends on whether you need them or not. It's almost as if your body doesn't need you to get out your lab equipment and micromanage your meals. So long as you follow some simple rules it can balance itself out. Those rules are probably a subject for another time, but they probably won't need to justify everything through the use of Calories. In fact we could probably avoid a whole load of question and misunderstandings and stress if we didn't mention them at all. Just a hunch.