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CALORIES IN, CALORIES OUT IS BULLSHIT
    Back in the eighties, you couldn’t find a school, gym or church hall that didn’t have an aerobics class. Jane Fonda went from movie star to fitness expert overnight, and polyester got a new name. Spandex. They had to do something with it, the seventies were over and no one was buying leisure suits any more. I had to see for myself what this craze was all about, so I checked out an aerobics class.
    The instructor barked instructions over the sound of Abba’s Dancing Queen , which blared from the boombox. “Squeeze your buns! Feel the burn!” And, my favorite: “Breathe!” Just in case we’d forgotten to. “We’re burning calories!” she’d say. “Only twenty more calories and we can get rid of that cheesecake! Only ten more minutes of calorie burning and you can have a scoop of ice cream! There’s thirty-four hundred calories in a pound of fat!”
    She drove me crazy, in spite of how hot she was. She was a dancing calorie-counting abacus, even though she was making it all up as she went along. When the class was over, I decided to have some fun with her, along with trying to get a date.
    “That was a lot of great information you gave us,” I said. “But I do have a question. What’s a calorie?”
    You could almost see the question mark above her head as she puzzled through that.
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “Well, you had a lot to say about calories so I was just wondering … what’s a calorie?”
    “Oh. A calorie is a thing you eat.”
    “Really?” I said. “I thought that was called food.”
    She hemmed and hawed and I finally decided to let her off the hook. “A calorie,” I told her, “is a unit of heat. It’s the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.”
    She answered by offering me a piece of fitness gum, the kind that promised to get you into shape just by chewing it. I took the gum and realized I’d probably lost her at the word “heat.” The point is, we all talk about calories, but not many of us know exactly what they are. Actually, I could have just started by saying that, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to tell you that I hooked up with the aerobics instructor.
    Anyway. Even though not everyone is completely sure what a calorie is, it’s commonly accepted that too many of them makes us fat unless we get rid of them. This is usually known as the calorie in, calorie out concept. The idea, drummed into us year after year, is that to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you consume.
    The simplicity of this is part of its appeal. Does it work? Well, it can. If, over time, you take in fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight as long as your calories come mainly in the form of fat and protein. But if most of your calories come from carbohydrates, you will lose less weight. The idea that a “calorie is a calorie” is false, because your body reacts differently to different kinds of calories, but we’ll get into that later.
    The other problem with the calorie in, calorie out concept is that it’s based on trickery. We’re forcing ourselves to go against what our bodies naturally want us to do, which is eat, not starve. If you want to understand why calorie in, calorie out is flawed as a weight-loss strategy, look no further than your nearest triathlon.
    Let’s play a game.
    Picture in your mind the type of person that completes a triathlon. I’m guessing you’re visualizing a lean, muscular athlete. And, if you look at the top pros featured in the magazines, you’d think that everyone who completes a triathlon looks exactly like that.
    But let’s ignore them for a second. Let’s look at everyone else, the people who complete the triathlon but are not in the top third. Would you agree that anyone who can complete a triathlon is in prime physical shape? Remember, you have to train hard enough to be able to swim 2.2 miles in open water, immediately followed