-
If someone is simply trying to lose weight, should they care about the distinction between “calories from fat” versus “calories not from fat”. I figure that calories from fat are only worse because fat is bad for you. But in terms of losing weight, a calorie is a calorie? Am I right or wrong?
-
If I eat a 1 oz. bag of chips, the most weight that I can possibly gain as a result of eating the bag is 1 oz. Regardless of how much fat or calories are in that bag, I can’t see how it would cause me to gain any more than 1 oz. Am I right or wrong?
A Calorie is a Calorie, so you are right. Note that what we refer to as “Calories” are actually kilocalories, and by capitalizing it we can distinguish it from a calorie. 3500 Calories = one pound. One ounce would be 1/16th of 3500. (You do the math.) One ounce of any food would never be that many Calories.
You’re right, with the caveat that sodium retains water easily, so if the chips are high in sodium, you’ll retain more water and weigh more than if you ate 1 oz. of a low sodium food. The difference is not significant for that small an amount of food, but it does add up.
But what else are you eating besides that 1 oz. of chips?
Simplistically–your body prefers to burn glucose before fat (fatty acids) for fuel. Fat, in an evolutionary sense, is a luxury–and fat/gram contains many more calories/gram than sugar and even more than protein. Glucose (sugar) is easily metabolizable by your body–in fact, it preferred.
A calorie is a calorie (or a Calorie is a Calorie). But your body wants to deposit fat and will turn sugar un-used into fat if the daily expenditure of energy is less than dietary intake. Fat is a great storage ‘molecule’ for energy and if you don’t metabolize your daily dietary caloric intake–it will be stored as fat.
So with regard to the OP, if you are trying to lose weight, calories from fat are not bad per se, and I suspect you actually need a good percentage of fat in your diet (higher than some best-selling diets might recommend, and for endocrine reasons invovling leptin, insulin, glugagon, and neuropeptide Y, to name a few), but you’re probably better off comsuming calories from more readily metabolizeable sources of food instead of ‘junk food’ like chips.
Your body is probably only able to take in and metabolize only some many ‘fat’ calories a day (I’m not an expert in this field and I’ll bet the “experts” have their own agendas, and point out my flaws, please, I’m here to learn), and the rest of the dietary fat will probably be stored as body fat.
I might be wrong with the metabolic stuff, but the only real way to lose weight is to burn off more calories than you take in. Bottom line. There is no “magic diet”. Anybody who wants you to sell you a weight loss diet that requires no effort on your part besides eating healthy in general–and means simple stuff like “drink water instead of soda” is probably looking to make money off you.
Eat healthy–yeah–don’t eat high-calorie junk food/drink water instead of soda–the secret of the Hollywood stars!!!. Shhhh! Don’t tell! There’s money to be made!
And even if you like high calorie food like chips and pizza, exercise afterwards–there is no free lunch or magic pill.