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ExperienceLife.com / EXPERIENCE LIFE / 55
The
Calorie
Myth
Since the 1950s,
weve gotten the
same weight-loss
advice: Eat less,
exercise more.
New York Times
best-selling author
Jonathan Bailor
argues that we
should be doing
the opposite
sort of.
W
hen Jonathan
Bailor was
working as a
personal trainer back in
his college days, he was
frequently confronted by
clients who struggled to
lose weight on conventional
calorie-based programs
even when they ate very
little and exercised for
hours a day.
A slim person himself,
the Seattle-based Bailor
was convinced his clients
were simply not following
his instructions assidu-
ously enough. When youre
naturally thin, Bailor
says, its very easy to see
a heavy person failing to
drop weight and think,
Wow, whats their prob-
lem? Maybe they should
try harder.
But as more distraught
clients came forward,
Bailor started to question
the weight-loss advice
he and other weight-
loss practitioners had
been peddling.
Id have clients with
tears in their eyes saying,
Jonathan, I swear to God
Im eating less than 1,200
calories a day. I dont eat
breakfast, and I barely ever
eat lunch.
Bailor himself had been
consuming upward of
6,000 calories daily in an
effort to bulk up but it
wasnt happening.
I was faced with the
cold, hard fact that I was
not having any more
success managing my body
weight than these people
were, says Bailor. I was
eating way more than them
and exercising way less. I
wasnt getting any bigger,
and they werent getting
any smaller.
Bailor realized he
couldnt keep disserving
his clients with a failing
formula. I was like a physi-
cian who was consistently
making his patients worse,
he says. So he quit personal
training and started delv-
ing deep into the science of
weight loss.
What Bailor concluded is
that the weight-loss model
millions have been following
since the 1950s zealously
counting calories in and
calories out is bunk.
Depriving our bodies
of calories, it turns out,
only tends to slow down
our metabolism. Over time,
it causes us to gain more
unwanted weight.
In his New York Times
bestseller, The Calorie Myth:
How to Eat More, Exercise
Less, Lose Weight, and Live
Better, Bailor argues that
we need to forget the tired
maxim of eating less and
exercising more.
Instead, we need to eat
more of the right kinds of
foods and exercise less
(but more intelligently and
intensely) to balance our
hormones, burn fat, and
boost metabolism.
An engineer by train-
ing, Bailor spent 10 years
researching his book and
analyzed more than 1,200
peer-reviewed scientific
studies to come up with his
weight-loss program.
On the following pages,
weve assembled an
interview with Bailor,
plus excerpts adapted
from his book. For more
on Bailors work, see
www.SANEsolution.com.
The Editors

56 / EXPERIENCE LIFE / September 2014
Experience Life: You take on
many calorie myths in your book,
including the long-held idea that
weight loss is simply about restricting
and burning calories. Specifically, you
write that eating more does not make
you fat and exercising more does not
make you thin. What do you mean?
Jonathan Bailor: The focus on
calories is diabolical because you end
up believing that a 100-calorie snack
pack of cookies is healthy. Its not that
calories dont exist or that the calories
in, calories out equation doesnt apply.
To some extent, it does. It just doesnt
apply in the way weve been told.
You cant successfully manipulate
that equation by consciously restrict-
ing calories in or increasing calories
out. The body is a dynamic system,
and if you try to manipulate it with
that strategy, it will fight you. And
more than 95 percent of the time, you
will lose.
EL: You argue that the only way to
achieve long-term, sustainable weight
loss is to lower your set point. Can
you explain what the set point is and
how it works?
JB: Yes, and its important because
what I want people to understand is
that this isnt a willpower problem; its
a systemic problem.
The body works to try to maintain a
certain weight. Some people still report
this as the theory of the set point, but
this isnt a theory. Its been proven in
every study thats ever tested it.
If you consume too many calories,
does your body burn more calories
automatically and unconsciously?
Yes. Always.
If you eat fewer calories than
you need, does your body automati-
cally burn fewer calories? Yes.
That happens every time, in every
person, always.
This is just how your body works.
Biological organisms automatically try
to maintain homeostasis.
People often misunderstand this
and say, The idea that theres a set
point is clearly false because 70 per-
cent of the American population is
overweight, and that proves that if you
had a set point, then 70 percent of the
population wouldnt be overweight.
But the existence of overweight
people doesnt disprove that the
system exists. It proves that the
system can be overwhelmed and
broken down.
This is why food quality matters so
much because in any system its the
quality, not the quantity, of input that
changes the system itself.
For example, you will never clog
or damage a sink by putting too
much water into it. In contrast, if you
put little bits of paper towels or hair
into the sink, eventually it will clog
and overflow.
In the same way, when we eat low-
quality food, we become hormonally
and biochemically clogged. Our bod-
ies can no longer respond to signals
from our hormones and brains that
would otherwise enable us to burn
body fat automatically.
Thats why its common to see
postmenopausal women who are
consuming only 1,100 calories a day
and still gaining unwanted weight.
These women would normally require
far more calories just to maintain
their weight, but their system has
become so dysregulated that it has
figured out a way to gain weight on
that diet.
When we increase the quality of
our eating and exercise, we can heal
our hormones, unclog our systems,
lower our set points, and get our bod-
ies to burn fat instead of storing it.
EL: Eating less of a bad diet, you
write, is worse than doing nothing at
all to change that diet. Why is that?
JB: Lets say you take a low-quality
diet one that made you heavy and
diabetic and you simply consume
less of it. The reason that it is worse
for you than doing nothing is you
simply cant keep that up. You will not
tolerate the hunger, the lethargy, the
depression, the loss of sex drive, your
brain not working, and feeling cold
for the rest of your life.
Eventually youre going to stop
consuming less, and when you stop,
you will this is not debatable you
will gain back more fat than you lost,
because when you go back to eating
your previous quantity of bad food,
you are now putting it into a destroyed
metabolic system one with a
lowered base metabolic rate.
So, if you cannot starve yourself
forever (and none of us can), you are
better off never starving yourself in the
first place. Thats why eating less is
counterproductive.
So what happens when you instead
increase the quality of your eating?
Researchers call it a spontaneous
reduction of caloric intake.
When you heal your brain, your
hormones, and your gut, you start
Q
&
A
With
Jonathan
Bailor
(continued on page 58)
This is why food
quality matters so
much because
in any system its
the quality, not the
quantity, of input
that changes the
system itself.
ExperienceLife.com / EXPERIENCE LIFE / 57
So how do outdated theories of calorie counting stack up against a more
science-based philosophy of sustainable weight loss? Heres a quick overview.
Calorie Myths
vs. Smarter Science
While the old-fashioned eat less, exercise more approach can work, it doesnt
work for many. Studies show that, 95 percent of the time, counting calories does
not keep fat off over the long term. A better approach is to focus on higher-quality
calories or eating what I call a SANE diet [for more specifics, see page 59].
A 2006 study of 63 men and women ages 20 to 60 at Skidmore College
in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., compared a group of subjects following a traditional
calorie-counting eat less, exercise more program (well call them the
Conventional Group) with a group of subjects who observed a simpler eat
more, exercise less program (well call them the SANE Group).
The Conventional Group ate a typical Western diet while doing traditional
aerobic exercise for 40 minutes daily, six days per week.
The SANE Group ate a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet while
exercising only 60 percent as much, but with higher-quality workouts focused
on high-intensity cardio and resistance training.
Overall, the Conventional Group ate fewer calories and exercised 18 hours
more than the SANE Group. And yet, at the end of the 12-week study, the
researchers found that the SANE Groups results exceeded the Conventional
Groups in all ways:
The SANE Group had a 21 percent decrease in body fat and 16 percent
decrease in belly fat. The Conventional Group had a 10 and 8 percent
decrease, respectively.
The SANE Group posted a 9 percent increase in lean muscle, versus a
4 percent decrease for the Conventional Group.
The SANE Group showed a 21 percent decrease in LDL (bad) cholesterol
compared with a 9 percent decrease for the Conventional Group.
Given how poorly conventional calorie-focused strategies perform, its
astonishing how many weight-loss programs continue to recommend them.
A Better Way to
Exercise
Take the stairs. Walk 10,000 steps a
day. Go for a long bike ride. For general
health, this is all fine advice. But, if you
want to achieve long-term fat loss, you
have to exercise in a way that activates
your hormones.
The key is increasing exercise resistance
versus duration or frequency. You can
do this with targeted resistance training
requiring no more than 10 minutes, two times
a week.
I recommend a high-intensity-interval-
training (HIIT) program that includes
eccentric muscle contractions. It works
your muscles so deeply that you will be sore
for two to three days afterward.
Concentric weight-lifting moves (where
the muscle contracts) tend to get the most
attention, but research shows that lowering
weights (the eccentric action where the
muscle extends) enables us to generate more
force and activate more of our fat-burning
muscle fibers.
Thats why all my favorite exercises
involve eccentric moves leg presses,
seated rows, chest presses, and overhead
shoulder presses.
My own weekly exercise routine consists
of doing just one intensive set of eccentric
exercises for my legs, back, chest, shoulders,
and abdominals. I then do about 15 minutes
of yoga-inspired stretching.
Im all for moving your body however else
you like walking, hiking, dancing, biking.
Just dont rely on those activities to help you
burn fat.
Conventional cardio builds aerobic
conditioning but doesnt work well for long-
term fat loss because it does not engage the
hormone-shifting muscle fibers that help to
regulate whole-body metabolism.
New Way
Eat more, exercise smarter
Improves calorie quality to
optimize calorie metabolism
Lowers your set-point weight
Focuses on long-term fat loss
and health
Speeds up metabolism
Emphasizes hormones as key
factor in weight loss
Old Way
Eat less, exercise more
Focuses on calorie quantity
but ignores calorie quality
Fights your set-point weight
Focuses on short-term
weight loss
Slows down metabolism
Overlooks hormones as key
factor in weight loss
The sidebars here and on the
following pages are excerpted and
adapted from Jonathan Bailors
book, The Calorie Myth.
58 / EXPERIENCE LIFE / September 2014
spontaneously consuming and absorb-
ing the right number of calories for
your system. Your system also starts
automatically burning more calories.
So yes, technically, youre absorbing
fewer calories and burning more, but
this is a very, very different scenario
than the hypercontrolled calories-in-
calories-out story we all got sold on.
EL: You talk a lot about eating a
SANE diet (see The SANE Way to
Eat, next page), which includes lots
of protein. Why is protein so impor-
tant for weight loss and for lowering
your set point?
JB: Protein matters because of two
things: First, once you correct your
set point, youll be eating as many cal-
ories as youre burning except a big
portion of the calories youre burning
are going to be from stored body fat.
What you dont want is your body to
start burning muscle tissue for fuel
thats really, really bad for you. Eating
more protein helps prevent that.
Second, protein is uniquely satiat-
ing. It is unambiguous in the research
literature that calorie for calorie,
consuming 100 calories of protein will
keep you fuller longer than consum-
ing 100 calories of carbohydrate or fat.
EL: How much protein do we need?
JB: What I recommend and what the
research shows is that the amount of
protein you consume should be based
on activity level, age, and fitness
goals. Id say between 75 grams of
protein per day on the low end of the
spectrum and 200 grams of protein
per day on the high end.
An NFL linebacker who weight
trains all day, for example, might
need 200 grams per day. A 95-pound,
85-year-old woman wont need any-
where near that much.
EL: Another way to lower your
set point, you write, is to exercise
smarter. Rather than daily aerobic
exercise geared toward burning
calories, such as jogging, you
recommend doing high-intensity,
low-impact exercises just one to two
times a week for no more than 20
minutes. Why is this?
JB: Rather than focusing on
burning calories, the whole goal
of smart exercise is to upgrade the
calorie-burning system itself by
building metabolism and shifting
hormonal balance.
How do we do that? By recruiting
more muscle fibers through increased
intensity and resistance.
Most aerobic exercise (like jog-
ging) works primarily just one type of
muscle fiber (type 1, slow twitch). But
research shows that hormonal change
happens only when we activate our
other three types of fast-twitch muscle
fibers (2a, 2x, 2b) as well.
When we engage all four types of
muscle fibers, our bodies are forced
to produce clog-clearing hormones,
such as epinephrine, adrenaline,
noradrenaline, and growth hormone,
all of which free up energy currently
stored as body fat.
The only way to activate all those
different types of muscle fibers is to
produce a lot of force. And the only
way to do that is to exercise with
greater intensity (going harder, faster,
or working against greater resistance).
[For more on this, see A Better Way
to Exercise, page 57.]
Your muscle fibers strive to
conserve energetic resources; theyll
exert the least amount of effort
necessary to accomplish a given task.
If you try to lift something very heavy,
your body will progressively recruit
available muscle fibers as required,
until youve engaged all four types.
Common sense dictates that the
more muscle fibers youre activating,
the more quickly youre going to use
up energy (and trigger change), and
the less exercise you will be able to
do before youre exhausted.
So what Im arguing is not that
we should all exercise less because
its good to be lazy. Im arguing that
by exercising smarter, we can exert
ourselves more effectively in less
time, and get much better results.
A
great many weight-loss strategies
are based on simply eating smaller
or calorie-reduced versions of a conven-
tional Western diet. This typically leads
to a metabolism-killing yo-yo effect:
Our weight initially drops, but then rises
again, often higher than it was before.
This dynamic increases our risk of heart
attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, high blood
pressure, cancer, immune-system failure,
eating disorders, impaired cognitive func-
tion, chronic fatigue, and depression.
Worse, the more often we allow our
weight to yo-yo, the more susceptible we
become to future weight gain.
It is only the rate of weight regain, not
the fact of weight regain, that appears
open to debate, says David Garner, PhD,
founder of the River Centre Clinic in Ohio.
In a 1986 University of Pennsylvania
study, rats were put on repeated rounds of
yo-yo diets. The second time the rats lost
The Dreaded
Yo-Yo Diet
weight by eating less, they lost weight 100
percent slower and regained the weight
300 percent faster than the first time they
ate less. The study also found that during
their second round of yo-yo dieting, rats
stored body fat more efficiently than rats
who constantly ate a fattening diet.
The conclusion? Trying to lose weight
by reducing food quantity is not a winning
strategy. Improving your food quality is a
much better way to go.
(continued from page 56)
ExperienceLife.com / EXPERIENCE LIFE / 59
The SANE Way to Eat
The more SANE foods we eat,
the simpler it becomes to achieve
and maintain our ideal weight.
The more inSANE foods we
eat, the more our metabolism is
disrupted, and the more inclined we
are to overeat.
Foods with a low SANEity rating
provide few nutrients and are easily
converted into body fat. They trig-
ger the release of body-fat-storing
hormones, and they raise our set-
point weight.
Heres a look at my SANEity rat-
ings and serving recommendations
for various foods.
Youve heard that old dieting adage a calorie is a calorie. Youve probably also heard all foods are fine in moderation. But the
truth is, putting 2,000 calories of low-quality food into our metabolic system will have a radically different effect on our weight than
ingesting the same quantity of high-quality calories. And many highly processed foods can set us up for trouble even in moderation.
The quality of calories is determined by four factors: satiety, aggression, nutrition, and efficiency. A SANE approach to eating
considers them all.
Satiety refers to how
quickly calories satisfy our
appetites and hunger. Most of
us can easily consume copious
amounts of beer and pizza,
but if we tried to eat the same
amount of calories in another
form say, five cans of tuna
or 30 cups of broccoli wed
be uncomfortably full. Thats
satiety in action.
Aggression refers to
how likely calories are to be
stored as body fat. To keep
calories from being shuttled
into our fat cells, we dont
need to worry about eating
less food. We just need to eat
less aggressive food.
Body-fat storage is triggered
as a response to eating food
that causes us to have more
glucose in our bloodstream
than we can use at one time.
The more aggressive calo-
ries are, the faster they increase
the levels of blood glucose and
the more likely that our bodies
will lock up that glucose as
stored fat.
Nutrition refers to how
many macro- and micronutri-
ents (vitamins, minerals, es-
sential amino acids, essential
fatty acids, phytonutrients)
your calories provide.
Fewer nutrients per calorie
(as found in most starches,
sweets and fast foods) means
low nutrition quality.
Lots of nutrients per calo-
rie (as found in nonstarchy
vegetables, high-quality
proteins, low-sugar fruits, and
nuts and seeds) means high
nutrition quality.
Efficiency is how easily
calories are converted into
body fat. The more inefficiently
calories are stored as body fat,
the better.
Fiber, for example, is not
digested and therefore can
never be stored as body fat.
The body tries to digest fiber,
but after burning a bunch of
calories trying to break down
and absorb fiber, it gives up
and passes it through the
digestive system.
Refined sugars and
starches are quite efficiently
converted to body fat, while
protein is very inefficiently
converted. Fats are easily con-
verted but many have other
redeeming SANE characteris-
tics that make them desirable
(see below).
As much as you possibly can. Eat 10+
servings daily, ideally some of it raw.
Eat three to six 30- to 55-gram servings
daily, for a total of 100 to 200 grams.
Eat three to six servings daily, especially
seafood, coconut, avocado, macadamia
nuts, chia, and flaxseed.
Eat one to three servings daily of berries
and citrus.
As needed. Eat zero to two servings daily.
As little as possible.
As little as possible.
As little as possible.
As little as possible.
None.
None.
Nonstarchy vegetables
Nutrient-dense protein
Whole-food fats
Low-sugar fruits
Legumes
High-sugar dairy
High-sugar fruits
Other fats
Whole-grain starch
Processed starch
Sweeteners
How Much to Eat
SANEity
Rating
Food Group
*****
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