Michael Eades' new weightloss paradigm

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #1

Michael Eads proposes a new way to look at fat loss: Instead of looking at energy in vs. energy out, we should be looking at mass in vs. mass out. Fascinating!

Prepare to have your mind blown:

#2

I watched that and found it interesting. Not sure where I saw this, but there is some opposition to his theory, of course. :grinning:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #3

It’s a very different way of looking at things. I would expect objections from both the CICO crowd and the keto crowd. I know it’s certainly messing with my head, lol!

(Robin) #4

Thanks for this. I don’t have enough basic knowledge of the science to have my mind blown, but loved the part about breathing and the balloon. I’m now sitting here trying to breathe more deeply.

( I did get a kick out of the fact that the one skeptic who challenged him had a huge gut. LOLOL)

(Bob M) #5

Anything that messes with the CICO crowd makes me happy.

#6

Yes, Paul, it kind of messed with my head as well! But I like it. :smiley: At least until I hear something disproving the theory, which I hope won’t happen.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

That will be as it will be, I guess. But I share your hope. Anyway, I thought the thought experiment with the cannister of hot water was an important point; heat doesn’t weigh anything.

I guess the assumption has been that a molecule of fat, when metabolised, turns into heat. We forget that what really happens is that it gets turned into carbon dioxide and water, which are then breathed out. Though heat does get released in the process, it’s secondary.

The really fascinating idea, for me, was the notion of heavy calories and light calories. I’d never thought of it that way, but he’s right. A calorie’s worth of fat weighs less than half the weight of a calorie’s worth of carbohydrate or protein.

#8

Yes! I found this fascinating as well!

(Bob M) #9

I haven’t watched it yet, but I am trying a targeted keto diet. I eat some carbs the meal after body weight training. I do this twice a week. I use white rice noodles, as these don’t affect me. (I’ve tried things like sweet potatoes, but those affect my digestion.)

But when you look at how small of an amount of noodles you eat for a lot of calories, it’s stunning.

I’ll have to watch, though, as I if it’s solely by weight, I’m not sure that would work for high protein.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #10

Well, I’m sure it’s more complicated than solely by weight, but it’s a different perspecitve from which to view the problem, that’s for sure.

Looking at things in terms of mass per calorie doesn’t negate what the body does with that mass, but on first glance it does seem to eliminate a lot of the complications the CICO and CIM people have thrown into their hypotheses as they’ve battled one another. Perhaps a new perspective will bring new insights.

(Joey) #11

@PaulL Well worth the viewing. Thanks for the link. Love the balloon illustration. And very much in keeping with current global events.

(Bob M) #12

It could go a ways to explaining things. Butter, for instance. While I still like and use butter, often it adds no volume whatsoever, just calories. (I’m ignoring those people who actually just eat butter; I’m thinking about adding butter to something, so all you get is a film on it.)

And I wonder about fat, the fat that’s actually on an animal. I’ve been eating some fatty pork lately, and I can’t see that if I’m eating say 100 grams of fat, that that’s 100x9 = 900 calories. Because the “fat” that’s on an animal has to be some type of matrix of fat, water, collagen, who knows what else. Especially compared to carbs, fat from an animal has to be a lot fewer calories per volume.

It’s just hard to wrap my mind around volume as a metric.

(Michael) #13

This is the TEDTalk from 2013 explaining this same thing with a more interesting presentation

(Robin) #14

Thanks! You’re right, more entertaining and not so fast that I had to struggle to keep up.
Eades talks like me… fast and rambling. Lol

(GINA ) #15

This is interesting. I seems to me that the ideas are more applicable to the food you are currently consuming, rather than stored fat. The trick with stored fat is pulling it out of storage and breaking the bonds so it can be exhaled.

Eades and Meerman both said kind of quickly near the ends of their talks some version of, “But you have to break the bond first” when talking about stored fat. Meerman said specifically by being in a calorie deficit- either eating less or moving more. To me, that is the real $64,000 question… How do you get the fat to come out of storage and the bonds to break? Do I really care where it goes after that?

Having said that, I have a long history of weight loss efforts by varying means over the past 40ish years and I have noticed I can get results by eating ‘lightly’ and not really getting full. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to matter the make up of the meal as long as it is small. I have gone through periods where I have lost weight by eating small meals of ‘bad’ foods that aren’t low calorie or low carb. I have also noticed I will gain (or at least not lose) with large meals, even if they are low carb or low calorie. No, I don’t have records or graphs or charts, but it has happened often enough that I know it is true for me.

I read once that there is a hormonal release (of some kind, I have forgotten the details) tied to the fullness of the stomach and always figured that had something to do with it, but maybe it is more about the actual mass of the food being eaten.

I have also never had long term success with small (1-3 hour) daily eating windows. Maybe it is the mass of eating that amount of food in a small time frame. I don’t think I am alone there either. The last advice I heard coming out of the Dr. Fung fasting camp is that OMAD won’t work for long term weight loss for most people. They say because it is too predictable, but maybe it is the mass of the food being too much to handle at once so it gets shuttled off into fat storage.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #16

And we know the answer to this one: as long as insulin is high, we can’t, because elevated insulin inhibits the action of hormone-sensitive lipase, thereby trapping triglycerides inside adipocytes.

But, as I understand it, the focus of Dr. Eades’s talk is not on precisely where the molecules go, but on the fact that to reduce our weight, they need to leave our body, however that happens. I also get the impression, from the questions and answers afterward, that this was not a fully-fleshed-out idea on Dr. Eades’s part, but an intriguiing first pass at a possible new way of looking at things.

(Bob M) #17

Here is the website with all the citations:

I’m going to read this one at “lunch”:

(Bob M) #18

Yikes! This paper must have been the paper Dr. Eades said was mathematical, because it is – very.

They are basing everything off of mass, but using the normal rules of carbs, protein = 4 calories/gram, fat = 9 calories/gram. So, if you invert this, you get less weight per calorie for fat, which means for the same calories and higher fat, you physically eat less weight of food.

This is one of their figures, where EBT = energy balance theory:

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Basically, when you eat a low fat diet (LFD), even though it is isocaloric (meaning calories in = calories out), you’re gaining weight because you’re eating more weight in food.

And they end with this, which must cause CICO folks’ heads to explode:

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Edit. The CICO model requires a change in energy to cause a change in mass (up or down). Here’s their figure 1, which shows two times when mass does not change, but energy does. On the left, you add heat. Work is done (the piston moves up by gas expansion), but the mass is the same. Energy went in, but mass was unchanged. On the right, they add cold water, which lowers energy. But the mass in the tank is exactly the same. Again, energy changed, but mass did not.

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Edit 2: I’m using “mass” and “weight” interchangeably, although there’s a technical difference (mass = what you get in a vacuum with no gravity, if I remember correctly; weight = what you get on Earth). It doesn’t make a difference to their argument, and I find the term “weight” easier to understand most times.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #19

For daily use, it makes no difference, but the way I like to think of it is that mass is what you get on a balance scale, whereas weight is what you get on a spring scale. Thus, our weight varies with altitude (the farther we are from the earth’s center, the less we press against the scale) or with the planet we are on, but our mass is constant, wherever we are.

#20

A fairly simplistic approach. Unfortunately, the human body is much more complicated. I have seen some research from Europe that talks about how the body after losing fat, sees fat loss as an injury. They make the claim that the body has two options to repair the injury from shrinking fat cells. 1). Is to refill your fat cells with fat (a survival mechanism activated by fat loss) rebounding weight gain. Or 2). Reshape, or remodel the extracellular matrix. He also notes that after fat loss, lower levels of leptin were also found in all subjects. This was one of many mechanisms he has described in his view of fat loss as an injury. Fascinating stuff. I will try and find his name and references and will post later.