TwiZtah said:
Is there any other way to change your body mass? If i eat more calories than what I use in a day, I will gain weight, if I eat less, I will lose weight. Are you contradicting this?
Yes, I am absolutely saying that that is, if not totally incorrect, only a very small and not very important part of the process.
Fat storage is largely hormone driven. The hormone that largely drives this process is insulin. Insulin is what signals the muscle tissue to burn glucose, and it will store any excess as fat if glucose is too high for us to burn effectively since high blood glucose is dangerous and we don't burn it very fast.
So what actually happens for most people when they store fat is that they eat something which greatly spikes blood glucose like sugar or wheat, or to a lesser extent, starches, forces the pancreas to produce more insulin. The insulin directs the muscle tissue to burn the glucose, but since it doesn't burn it very quickly, if blood glucose went through a large spike, excess needs to be stored as fat to get it out of the blood stream. Making matters worse, if these glucose spikes happen frequently over long periods of time, the tissues of the body become resistant to insulin, meaning even more needs to be produced to burn any, and more will be stored as fat instead.
If you want to get the body to stop storing fat, you need to remove the foods which cause the fat storage in the first place so that the body isn't constantly storing glucose as fat. Keeping glucose levels managed also let's the body actually tap into those fat stores better when it actually needs the energy.
Moreover, calories in minus calories out is usually bad because when you cut back on calories and increase activity, the body will frequently respond by slowing it's metabolism, meaning that you burn even less than usual. The fact that calories in minus calories out doesn't work bears itself out frequently in clinical studies. There's a reason that any time calories are held constant among test subjects but people on low carb diets invariably lose more weight than people on low fat diets (which are necessarily high in carbs and thereby have a greater impact on blood glucose). And often people in these studies who are put on low carb diets lose more than the calories in minus calories out formula says they would, while the people on higher carb diets frequently fall below predicted weight loss.
If the formula had any real value it wouldn't be vastly different from the actual results a lot of the time, and a lot more people who try to lose weight wouldn't fail miserably following the advice of people who push this idea.
I understand why that formula has become popular: it seems logical and it's based on the common knowledge idea of how people get fat, ie: they eat too much and they're lazy. And I won't say that eating a lot of food won't make it difficult to lose weight. Even protein, despite having less of an impact on glucose than carbs, will have a negative impact on body weight in high enough quantities. And eating too much food too often means the body doesn't need to tap it's stored fat for energy. But for most people, it's not a simple matter of eating too much that causes weight gain. Glucose control is the actual driver of everything. Hell, glucose spikes also heavily drive appetite as anytime someone has a large spike, they'll almost inevitably have their blood sugar crash two hours later when the insulin has done it's job and then they're hungry all over again. That kind of blood sugar crash does not happen if someone eats a diet which keeps glucose levels at steady and reasonable levels.
They're between .1% and 8% efficient at capturing solar energy to fix carbon.
