How does someone’s metabolism impact the calories consumed vs calories burned equation?
In: Biology
The biggest problem with any dietary studies, especially weight gain and weight loss is that there are so many factors to disentangle
* First, conducting long therm statistically significant studies on people in a closed environment is prohibitively expensive. It also pays to follow who is paying for that study.
* Self reporting is wildly innacurate. People lie on these things, or misremember
* Your base metabolic rate: how fast you burn calories doing basically nothing is dependant on
* Gender
* Age
* Genetics
* Muscle mass
* SO many other factors.
* Absorbance of calories is also related to those same factors, as well as your gut microbiome. Experiments with mice have shown that giving a fat mouse a ‘fecal transplant’ from a more skinny mouse drasticly reduced the fat mouse’s weight. The bacteria adapt to what you eat, but also, they influence you to want the food they need.
* The kind of food you eat also determines if it is pushed into your fat cells or made available for burning more easily
* Also, the body will adapt to most dietary regimes eventually, in a process called Homeostasis. The body will do anything to stay the same. It’s why you regain so fast after breaking a diet.
* Evolutionarily speaking storing fat was an advantage
* Calorie expenditure is also very person dependant when active.
Long story short: Food and calories are complicated, and anyone reducing it to calories in calories out is not seeing the whole picture.
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