Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." The calorie is too simple an explanation for weight gain. Because it's too simple, we get caught in a logic trap about calories. We mistakenly believe a calorie measures something about our food. In fact, it measures something about our wood stove. The two are quite different dontcha think?

Follow along with me for a thought experiment. Imagine you have a wood stove that acted more like your metabolism and less like a wood stove. You feed your special wood stove and you know to keep you house warm it needs 2,000 calories per day. So you happily keep your house warm enough for you, but you are worried that your grandmother, who is visiting the next day will be cold, so you start putting more wood on the fire. You up the calories to 2,500, but a funny thing happens. The house doesn't get any warmer. It seems the wood stove has a mind of it's own and has become less efficient. Sadly you offer you grandma a sweater and hat when she arrives. What happened? If you give the stove more calories, shouldn't it get warmer? Well, it would have if it acted like a wood stove and not our metabolism.

Our metabolism is dynamic and responds to external and internal stimuli including how much you eat. If you eat more, your body adapts and burns more. So you can begin to understand that the calorie is insufficient measure of this dynamic process. It's kind of like trying to steer your car using the speedometer! It turns out that independent of carbohydrates, calories really are not a main factor in our metabolism (burn me at the scientific stake.) The human metabolism is a duel fuel system. It burns fats and carbohydrates, and in emergencies it can burn protein as well. But these two fuels have completely different actions and require different maintenance.

In my house we have a duel fuel furnace that can burn wood and natural gas. The natural gas is like fat in the body, it burns cleanly, we don't have any ash left over building up in the furnace and no creosote lining the chimney. If we were to switch to wood (the carbohydrate equivalent) , we would periodically have to shut down the furnace (a fast so to speak) so that we could clean it out the accumulating ash and creosote.

To simply measure the BTU's in a cord of wood versus the natural gas is too simply an equation for maintaining our house. We also have to know how the fuel burns in our furnace so we maintain its efficiency and don't burn our house down. The same is true for calories, carbs and fats.