Posted on 01/22/2024 2:30:04 AM PST by Recovering_Democrat
Concur. BMI made sense 100 years ago, before people started lifting weights. In the eighties, I used to go to an old Jewish tailor to adjust my uniforms. How old? He showed me his concentration camp tattoo. We got into a discussion on body shapes. He told me that athletic men in the 1980s would have been considered the muscle men on the 1950s. Yes, as a group Americans are much fatter, but those stay in shape are much more muscular than in the days of old, which the BMI does not take into account.
Are 1500 calories of ice cream the same as 1500 calories of steak?
Of course not. It’s what your body DOES with those calories that make the difference.
Ice cream will raise the blood sugar and insulin, so the liver will try to get the reading back to normal by converting it to fat and storing it. When insulin is above a (very low) threshold, the body can only burn sugar. No fat can be used for fuel or come out of storage for use as a fuel.
The steak will also raise the blood sugar and insulin, but not nearly as much. And there is a caloric cost to break down and digest the meat, of about 25%. Meat supplies nutrients to build and repair body parts and muscle. At night, when insulin is low, the liver process the fat in the blood into fatty acids and ketones to fuel the body.
There was a lady in Australia who took Ozempic because she wanted to lose weight before her daughter’s wedding, and it killed her.
All that is true. However it is inescapable that calories in vs calories out is subject to the laws of physics. You cannot create units of energy (calories) from nothing.
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