Quotes About Calories

A purely ketogenic diet is one that derives 80 to 90 percent of calories from fat, and the rest from carbohydrate and protein.

fat cells much more than passive storage sites for excess calories. Fat cells take in or release calories only when instructed to do so by external signals—and the master control is insulin. Too much insulin causes weight gain, whereas too little causes weight loss. So if we think about obesity as a disorder involving fat cells, then a radically different view emerges: Overeating doesn't make us fat. The process of becoming fat makes us overeat.

the ideas presented in this book culminate a century of research questioning the calorie balance model of obesity, and represent a fundamentally different way to understand why we gain weight and what we can do about it.7

But are we really to believe that a cup of Coke would be as healthy as a large apple (both with about 100 calories), if we drank it with a serving of Metamucil and a multivitamin pill?

Cutting back on calories will cause weight loss for a while, which gives the illusion that we have conscious control of our weight over the long term. However, many bodily functions are within our temporary, but not permanent control. For example, many people can lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood for several minutes by breathing fast, but few can do so for much longer.

Conventional diets aim to shrink body fat by restricting calorie intake. But this approach is doomed to fail in the real world, because it targets the symptoms, not the root cause of the problem. After a few weeks of calorie restriction, the body fights back, and makes us feel hungry, tired, and deprived.

Why did basic scientists think one way about obesity and practicing clinicians another? Why did we disregard decades of research into the biological determinants of body weight when treating patients? And why were we using an approach to weight loss based on a "calories in, calories out" model that hadn't changed since the late 1800s, when bloodletting was still in vogue?

Despite consuming the same total calories on each diet, the participants burned about 325 calories a day more on the low-carbohydrate diet than on the low-fat diet, amounting to the energy expended in an hour of moderately vigorous physical activity. So the type of calories we eat can affect the number of calories we burn.

In a sense, the calorie balance view of obesity is like considering fever a problem of heat balance. It's technically not wrong, but also not very helpful.

Muscles require a constant source of energy just to maintain their mass, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn.

Respect the distance, take each breath purposefully, make every step count, calculate the surges, watch your heart rate, stay hydrated, maintain your calories. Do all of these things continuously while remaining incorruptibly patient. An ultramarathon moves slowly very quickly.

In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains.

The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. That leads to weakness, sluggishness, slow times. In girls, it can also result in cessation of menstrual periods, which in turn leads to loss of bone density and frequent stress fractures.

I wasn't drinking to get drunk. It's social drinking, so what's the point? It's empty calories, you're poisoning yourself.

Every pound of muscle burns approximately 50 calories every day, just doing nothing.

There is no point working off pounds with exercise, if you are going to eat them back on again.

I don't think meals have any business being deductible. I'm for separation of calories and corporations.

I'd be counting calories in my head while having conversations and doing crosswords.

Once you have to start counting calories, it takes away from the joy of eating.

I think, for me, I really looked at nutrition, talked to some people who knew a lot about nutrition, looked at different meal plans... calorie intake and what I was trying to do. I started slowly. I didn't start as a 'diet.' I started as a lifestyle change.

Hundreds of different hunter-gatherer cultures have been described, and all obtained a substantial proportion of their diet from meat, often half their calories or more.

However, among people who eat cooked diets, there is no difference in body weight between vegetarians and meat eaters: when our food is cooked we get as many calories from a vegetarian diet as from a typical American meat-rich diet. It is only when eating raw that we suffer poor weight gain.

Assessing the energy value of foods is a difficult technical problem. Nutritionists cannot calculate the value of foods directly because foods are too complicated in their composition and structure, and digestive systems treat different foods in different ways. So instead of making precise calculations of exactly the number of calories people can obtain from a given food, nutritionists make rough guesses.

a human being needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury.