Fuel Partitioning 101: Willpower (Addendum)

We have a little unfinished business to tackle from last time. Before Captain Obvious kicks me out of the force, I’d like to clarify a few things about discipline and willpower. I didn’t mean to imply that D&W are figments of our collective imaginations, or that they’re not required to at least some degree in order to get healthy and lose excess body fat. For sure, they are part of the puzzle, but the whole thing only comes together nicely when all the other puzzle pieces are in the right place, too.

Where I work at my festering open wound of a soul-suck non-nutrition day job, there’s a never-ending stream of treats coming in. Someone’s always coming or going, retiring, having a baby or a birthday, or maybe just decided to bake a bunch of cookies or whip up a batch of fudge over the weekend. The result is, hardly a day goes by that there isn’t some kind of yummy, sugary, vegetable oily, floury thing on the front desk, mere inches from my dungeon cubicle. And as I have made clear on this blog, I’m not 100% refined sugar free. I’m not 100% gluten free. I may even, on occasion, ingest a molecule of canola oil via restaurant salad dressing or somesuch. (And now I’ve probably lost the four loyal readers I had.) My point is, once in a while, I’ll help myself to a little bit of whatever these treats are. However, more often than not, I take a look, and then walk right past.

I’ve been known to refuse ice cream cake, cupcakes, cookies, and the like. My coworkers often say I must have a lot of willpower. I usually reply with something along the lines of needing to set a good example, or needing to “look the part” of someone capable of helping others with nutrition.

But the truth is, I don’t have a lot of willpower. 

Fuel Partitioning 101: Discipline and "Willpower"

Fat people are so lazy, aren’t they?

So weak-willed and undisciplined.

Such greedy sloths.

I mean, really. Eat less, move more. It’s not that hard. They’ve been saying it for decades. All the experts: doctors, personal trainers, dietitians and nutritionists, and all the bigwig MDs, PhDs, and politicos behind the USDA, FDA, American Heart Association, and American Diabetes Association. In order to lose weight, all you have to do is eat less and move more. That’s it. Two steps. Take fewer calories into your body, make sure more get expended via exercise, and you’ll lose weight. Done. Period. End of story. If it wasn’t true—or at least, wasn’t the whole truth—surely someone would have said something by now, right?

Seriously. Obviously everyone struggling to lose excess body fat eats too much and moves too little. That’s really all there is to it. Put down the Fritos and get up off the couch, fatties. Problem solved.

Um, not exactly.

Book Review: Food Politics

Here I go with my book learnin’ again! I reviewed Dr. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics for the spring 2014 issue of Wise Traditions, the journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can read it here, or feel free to hop on over to their site and read it there. (I recommend staying here, though. I think they edited it a tiny bit. Plus, their site doesn't have the nifty links I’ve included.)

Before we get into it, let me just say that I am probably the only person on the planet who’s read this book for fun. (Well, maybe not for fun, but not for school, either. Let’s chalk it up to personal education.) This book is probably required reading in many university nutrition and dietetics programs. I’m glad I wasn’t forced to read it, because that would have made this dense tome that much more of a struggle to get through. It was difficult enough doing it for my own reasons. That being said, it was educational. I learned a lot about the devious back-door deals that are what ultimately drive the U.S. government's national dietary recommendations. (I assure you, they have almost nothing to do with actual human physiology and biochemistry.) And I also learned that even the most impressively-credentialed professional (i.e., the author of this book) can completely ignore scientific facts in favor of the political games and sweeping generalizations she claims to abhor.

If my review hadn’t been intended for the WAPF journal, there would have been lots of sarcasm and possibly a few swear words scattered throughout it. Where the book is good, it’s great, but where it’s bad, it sucks the big one. Frankly, at times I just wanted to shove Dr. Nestle’s face in a biochem textbook. (Note: she has no relation to the mega-huge food corporation of the same spelling. Her name rhymes with trestle, like train trestle, not like the Crunch candy bar or Toll House cookies.)

And with that, on with the show!

Fat Tuesday: The Big Fat Surprise Preview

I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to recommend a book I haven’t even read yet. The reason I feel confident recommending this book is because it has received out-freaking standing reviews from several people whose opinions I highly respect and trust when it comes to nutrition. And not just “nutrition” with a little n, but rather the big, bad, mamma-jamma, capital-N, Nutrition. The kind of nutrition that isn’t only about what we should and shouldn’t eat, but that also includes the politics and economics behind how and why the U.S. government (and, by proxy—and to their great detriment—many other governments of the “industrialized world”) and our most respected medical and dietetics organizations came to recommend diets that are low in cholesterol, total fat, and saturated fat in particular, while encouraging everyone, across the board—whether young or old, healthy or chronically ill, active or sedentary, insulin resistant or not—to consume the majority of their total calories from grains and other starchy carbohydrates. And what little, teeny tiny, scant bits of fat we do allow ourselves should come from vegetable and seed oils. (Remember what I said about those? It wasn't positive. Check out here and here for a refresher.)

When a book is called The Big Fat Surprise, and has the subtitle Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, you know this is a book I've gotta read.

And when the following three people say something, I sit up and take notice.

Fuel Partitioning 101: Hormones

Recall from the previous post in this series on fuel partitioning that we were talking about three things that determine which types of fuel our bodies use: 1) The type of activity being fueled; 2) The type of cells/tissue performing the activity; and 3) The hormonal milieu under which the activity is occurring.

We covered the first two last time, and because the post was getting long (shocker…), I decided to have mercy on people’s attention spans and save the third for a separate post. Well, here we are.

The hormonal milieu under which the activity is occurring

As I emphasized previously, this fuel stuff isn’t an all-or-nothing scenario. Thanks to the wonderful, elegant, infuriating, and fascinating complexity of the human body, we use a few different types of fuel concurrently. That being said, depending on what’s going on with our hormones, different biochemical pathways will predominate and others will take a backseat. (Kind of like how hormones made math homework take a backseat to the magazines you found in your father’s nightstand when you were 16…)

Fuel Partitioning 101: Not a Binary System

Yikes. Heck of a post title, huh? Partitioning and binary. That’s two scary-ish words and we haven’t even gotten started yet. If I’m not careful, someone’s going to think I actually know something about science and/or the human body. (Some days I’m not so sure, to be honest with ya.)

Aaaaanyhow, welcome back to the series on fuel partitioning. Recall from the last couple of posts that we’re thinking about the human body as a hybrid car. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s suiting us fairly well so far. Two posts ago, we did a little bit of math and determined that, gram for gram, molecule for molecule, fats seem like a more efficient fuel than carbohydrates. Last time, we talked about how the body “runs on” different types of fuel, and we went right to the gas tank, to see what kind of fuel the body stores the most of—that is, which fuel the gas tank seems to prefer to hold in reserve. Here again, it seems like fat trumps carbs. (Remember that nifty chart? The one that showed the human body doesn’t keep a lot of carbohydrate on hand, but it’ll tuck away fat like a champ?)

Now that we’ve had that little refresher, we’ve got important ground to cover today, so let’s get going. (Kind of scary that I could compress two long blog posts into one paragraph. I’ve said it before: brevity was never my strong suit. In fact, my strong suit is at the cleaner’s right now. *Ba-dump-tsch!*)

Fuel Partitioning 101: The Hybrid Car's Gas Tank

Hey kids!

Recall from the previous post in this series that we’re attempting to unravel the mysteries of fuel partitioning, appetite regulation, fat loss, and metabolism, and we kicked things off by thinking of the human body as a hybrid car. Using this as a guiding idea, we established that, just as a hybrid car can run on gasoline or electricity, our bodies can run on different types of fuel.

Last time, we looked at the major sources of calories we eat or drink, in order to determine which one(s) make the most sense to use as fuel: fat, carbohydrate, protein, and alcohol. (I haven’t forgotten about my beloved ketones, but we’ve got to put those on hold for now.) We said that protein is too valuable for other purposes to let it be used as our primary fuel source. And unless you can stay gainfully employed and safely operate your motor vehicle under the influence of copious amounts of alcohol, alcohol isn’t the fuel we want as our go-to either. So that leaves fat and carbohydrate.

We compared carbohydrate and fat to quick-burning kindling and long, steady-burning logs, respectively, and determined that fat is a more efficient fuel. (Remember the 4mpg and 9mpg gasoline analogy?)

But let’s not stop there. In order to answer this question and really convince ourselves which type of fuel it’s most sensible to have our bodies run on, let’s take a look at the gas tank. In terms of fuel efficiency, so far, it looks like fat is a better choice than carbohydrate. But which of these is the gas tank, itself, designed to hold?