Jonathan: Hey everybody. Jonathan Bailor, thrilled to be back on The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show. And friends it is such an honor, such an honor to be guest-hosting Jimmy Moore’s brilliant show here because not many people know this, but I got into podcasting because of Jimmy. Truly any success that I have had, and I have been so honored to see that The Calorie Myth and Smarter Science of Slim show has been well-received, and I thank you all for that because I know many of Jimmy’s listeners also listen to our show. But, truly, I am standing on the shoulders of a giant in Jimmy Moore, and I know everyone listening to this knows and loves Jimmy, but I just want to take a second to share my personal experience with Jimmy. That was about at this point may be two years ago when my first book The Smarter Science of Slim came out. Jimmy was, I think, the very first podcast I was ever on and Jimmy reached out because Tom Naughton, his friend and the amazing creator of the Fat Head documentary, reached out to Jimmy and said he – Tom had read my first book – reached out to Jimmy and said, “Jimmy, you need to check this out.” Jimmy checked it out and invited me onto his show, and I had never been on a show before. I had so much fun and then I – I am a geek. I am senior program manager at Microsoft, so all I do is research and work, so I hadn’t really listened to podcast at all before. I started listening to Jimmy’s podcast, loved it and thought to myself man, I really like this. I wonder if I could do it. So, I called Jimmy, which again Jimmy has got a million things going on, and he was kind enough to take my call, and he said, “Jonathan, absolutely man, do this. I, Jimmy Moore, I had no formal training in this, but I just went out and did it because I am passionate about it and I am passionate about helping people to live better.” This is evidenced by his amazing show, and he lit that fire under me. He told me how to get started, he gave me the confidence to do it, and you can see now why I say.

In many ways everything that I have in terms of podcast or broadcast success is because of the man who created this amazing show that I am so honored to be guest-hosting today, and that is Jimmy Moore. So, let’s all just together celebrate the awesomeness that is Jimmy because truly it’s hard to find someone who is more caring and empowering than Jimmy Moore. So, Jimmy sir, I salute you, we all salute you, and I so thank you for setting us all on a path to better health and giving me the honor of guest-hosting your show today. And listeners, what I want to cover today, and I am going to get a little bit amped up, is calorie myths. So as you have hopefully heard about my second book, The Calorie Myth, launched on New Year’s eve, and it’s been really well-received which is awesome, but it has also been challenged by some people, which we should expect. Right?

The great thinker Arthur Schopenhauer once said that truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident. We have actually seen Jimmy’s awesome story go through those same three phases. Right? At first people were like oh it’s Jimmy Moore. They kind of ridiculed him, and then there were even some people recently, we know from this past year, who got a little angry and attacked and who violently opposed him. And now it’s pretty much accepted, as evidenced by Jimmy’s awesome books, that this is just science he is communicating and it works and it’s brilliant. So, we are seeing the same thing with calories where Jimmy has helped people to overcome their fear of fat and that is truth; it’s not the mainstream, so there are people with vested interest who are going to oppose him, but it’s truth and the truth wins out in the long-term.

So, with The Calorie Myth, we are trying to do the same thing with calories and it’s not saying that calories don’t exist or that calories don’t count. It’s saying that calories are not a relevant measure for long-term fat loss and health. It’s a bit like measuring intelligence with height. If you just look at a small child and then you look at an adult, you are like oh, yeah, the adults are generally smarter than children, so therefore the taller you are, the smarter you are. And you know like that is not relevant, and we see the same kind of thing with calories. It’s just not a relevant measure, and in fact, if we do use calories as the be all, end all, we end up in a very sick and twisted world, in fact a world just like the world we live in today. Right?

If calories were simply the wrong measure, what we would expect is if you take a world and you tell that world calories are all you need to worry about and they are really the arbiter of everything. So all things food-related become irrelevant except for calorie counts, and all things exercise-related become irrelevant except for how many calories you burn. What would happen in that world? Well, that’s what has happened in our world, and what has happened? We’ve all gotten worse. We’ve tried harder and gotten worse. Truly, think about this for a second.

Nobody knew what a calorie was, let alone count them, prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics; therefore, how can counting calories be required to avoid obesity and diabetes. It can’t, it simply can’t. In fact, the introduction of calories into the food and exercise arena has led us to epidemic levels of these things like that is – if you go to a doctor’s office and she writes you a prescription and you get worse, very, very much worse and all of your friends and family take the same prescription and they get worse, you are not at fault. What’s at fault is the guidance you’ve been given. We’ve been given guidance that’s predicated on calories being the great common denominator, and that’s just wrong.

Again, I am not saying, and the science isn’t saying because frankly what I think is irrelevant, what is relevant is the proven science is not that calories don’t exist or that if you eat 10,000 calories in a day that you wouldn’t gain fat. What I am saying and what the science says is that you can’t need to consciously count calories, you can’t. It cannot be true that that is required and here are three common sense reasons why that is an indisputable fact.

First. Again, the premise here is not that calories don’t count; they do. The premise is that you can’t have to consciously balance them and that the body is designed to balance you out automatically just like it does for say blood sugar. Right? Your blood sugar goes up, your body takes steps to bring it back down. Your blood sugar goes down, your body takes steps to bring it back up. And the existence of diabetes doesn’t disprove that the body tries to automatically regulate blood sugar; it shows that the system designed to automatically regulate blood sugar can be broken down if we eat the wrong quality of food. Diabetes is not caused by consuming too many calories. It’s caused by consuming the wrong types of foods, and it doesn’t disprove that the body works to automatically balance blood sugar; it proves that that system can be broken down.

Similarly, obesity does not disprove that the body tries to balance us out calorically automatically. What it shows is that that system can be broken down if we eat the wrong quality of food. So, we cannot be required to consciously count calories. Reason number one, nobody knew what a calorie was. Right? Even the scientific community didn’t know what a calorie was until the 1800s. So, how did any human in any culture that ever lived avoid obesity – because remember the historic obesity rates were sub 3 percent, less than 3 percent. And the historic diabetes rates as of 100 years ago were 100,000 percent lower than they were today. So, how did all of those people who ever lived in every culture avoid obesity and diabetes without trying? They didn’t think about it. They weren’t like oh, let’s go to the medieval gym and count the calories in this turkey leg that we are being served. No, no, no. They didn’t do that. They just ate and lived and they didn’t become obese or diabetic. They didn’t know what a calorie was. Yet, somehow they miraculously did that. Therefore, counting calories cannot be required. It cannot be required because nobody could do it prior to us having these problems. So, that’s reason number one.

Reason number two: If we need to consciously regulate calories, then we can’t just say – anyone who makes that argument can’t just say, oh you just need to consciously count calories. What they are actually arguing is that we need to consciously regulate mission critical bodily functions, but you can’t just say, oh just calories, because what about vitamins and minerals? We need those, we need essential amino acids, we need essential fatty acids. So what about vitamin C? Do we need to consciously regulate the amount of vitamin C we consume and the amount of vitamin C we excrete out either through our sweat or our urine or just that we use? Do we need to do that? What about vitamin E? How about vitamins A or D or K? What about riboflavin, thiamine, magnesium, zinc? What about all, every other essential component? What about leucine, the amino acid leucine, do we need to consciously regulate the amount of leucine that we consume and the amount of leucine our body uses so that we stay in leucine balance? Of course not. Why? Because if we had to spend our conscious energy manually regulating mission critical functions, we could not survive as a species.

When you drink more water, you don’t have to say, oh, remember, remember I have to go to the bathroom more frequently, otherwise I am going to retain excess water. You don’t need to do that. Your body takes care of that for you. If you don’t sleep enough, you become more tired. If you put your body in a cold room, you get goose bumps. Your body takes steps to maintain your body temperature. Every other thing you consume, nobody says we need to manually regulate. No one is like, you got to understand how much vitamin C you are excreting in your urine because if you don’t, you may end up over- or under-consuming vitamin C. That doesn’t mean vitamin C isn’t important, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go out of our way to eat foods that are high in vitamin C, but it means that this kindergarten logic of “you ought to consciously regulate in and out” doesn’t work, because if it was true, it would apply to more than just calories, and it clearly doesn’t. That’s the second reason; we can’t have to consciously regulate calories. We can’t have to consciously regulate calories because if we did then we would have to do that for more than just calories. It’s not like the body would say, “You know, we will take care of breaths in and breaths out, we will take care of blood sugar, we will take care of blood in and out of your heart, we will take care of your blinking rate, we will take care of water levels, we will take care of amino acid levels, we will take care of electrolyte levels, we will take care of blood pressure, we will take care of everything else except energy balance.” You guys need to think about that one, right? It’s ridiculous. It’s not true. Our hypothalamus, our brain, regulates these mission critical functions, and we just need to keep our brain, our body and our gut from breaking down so that it can keep us at a healthy level of body fat, just like it tries to keep us at a healthy level of blood pressure and a healthy level of blood sugar. It makes clear sense.

Now hold on a second. The third reason. The third reason, it cannot be required, calorie counting that is. The third reason calorie counting cannot – it cannot be required – so it is either required or it isn’t. And if it’s required, the reason it is required is because we need to precisely balance calories – precisely, because the average person eats about a million calories in a year. So, even if we were off by 10 percent, that’s 100,000 calories per year, which I can’t do the math off the top of my head, but if you divide 100,000 calories by 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, I think that’s somewhere around 20 to 30 pounds. So, if we are off by just 10 percent. Let’s say we accidentally under-ate by 10 percent per year, then we would conceptually, according to this mythical metabolic math, lose 20 to 30 pounds a year until we weighed nothing which is, of course, ridiculous, and that’s because the body balances itself. But the point is calorie counting is either required or it’s not, and if it is required, the reason it’s required is because we have to precisely do this because if we don’t, the body just sits back and does nothing. So, the body is either involved, which is truth, or the body is not involved, then we need to precisely balance calories. Now “precisely” is the key word here, and it’s the third reason this can’t possibly be true. When I say this, again, it’s the premise that you need to count calories and, frankly, that you need to think about calories at all is simply a distraction. If we forgot about calories completely, we would be better off as evidenced by every single person who ever lived prior to the advent of the concept of the calorie, which is the vast majority of humanity. Anyway, I digress. The point is, if you need to count calories, the reason you need to do it is you need to do it precisely. That is impossible. Fact. It is a fact that it is impossible to precisely count calories. Here is why.

First of all, from a calories-in perspective, even if you only ate foods that have those little nutrition facts on the side, which is the most precise way to get calorie counts because none of us are going to keep bomb calorimeters in our purses or in our backpacks to precisely calculate the calories we take in at all moments. First, if you only ate foods with nutrition facts on them, which in and of itself is a bad idea because most real foods don’t have nutrition facts on them. If you just go buy vegetables and meat and nuts and low sugar fruits, they just come like they exist in nature, and there are no labels, and we don’t need the labels because they are clearly food. And if you need to label something, that might be a sign that it might not be food; it might not be something we need to eat. But I digress.

Let’s say you only eat things that have nutrition labels on them. Even in that world, which nobody will do, but even in that world you could still have a 10 percent margin of error because studies have shown that those nutrition facts are only 90 percent accurate; 90 percent accurate. Again that seems good, but remember that 10 percent margin of error. That’s 100,000 calories per year. So, even in this fictional world where we do everything a person possibly could do to count calories, we still can’t do it precisely from a calories-in perspective, but it’s even more impossible. Reason for this, again, different calories do different things in our body. Right? So, if you are eating calories from protein and you count 100 calories of protein as equivalent to 100 calories of sugar, your calorie count is off – it’s off. It’s a fact because protein to be utilized as energy for your body is very inefficient. It’s not an energy source. It’s a structural component for your body. So, if we were to try to precisely count calories and we were to say, oh, I ate 100 calories of protein; okay, add 100 calories. And I ate 100 calories of starch; okay, add 100 calories. The math is already wrong, and it’s horribly wrong because the protein calories are way different within your body just in terms of the actual energy load they can provide for you than the carbohydrate or fat calories you consume.

Then there is more, there is more absurdity to calories-in, but one of my favorites is calories-out because that is easily, easily the hardest to calculate and the one which we are led to believe is the simplest to calculate as evidenced by all of these products – all these products. Buy this product, wear this product, and we will tell you how many calories out you are burning. That’s wrong and it’s worse. Someone’s like, oh, but it’s helpful. Giving someone bad data is wrong than giving someone no data. It’s not as if, oh just take a medication, any medication will do, any medication is better than no medication. False. The wrong medication will make you worse. The wrong data will make you worse because data influences your decisions, and if the data is wrong, your decisions can be wrong. So, again that’s what we’ve got to get away from using calories because it’s just a wrong thing. They do exist, but they are not the key arbiter; they are a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. We covered why you can’t calculate calories in. Let’s cover why you can’t calculate calories out.

First, calories-out is not fixed. This is a fundamental problem with this calorie myth, and that’s if you just eat 500 fewer calories, you now have a 500-calorie deficit and you will burn 500 calories of fat. This is wrong for so many reasons which you can learn about in The Calorie Myth book, but let’s identify one key reason. If you eat 500 fewer calories, calories-out changes. So, if you change calories-in, you will – this is a fact – you will change calories-out. This has been demonstrated in every single scientific study that has measured it because again the body tries to balance itself out. If you cut 500 calories out of your diet, calories-out changes. It will go down. Your body will start to run slower. So, let’s say that you are trying to calculate calories out; you are trying to count calories. So, you do your calorie math and then you cut calories-in by 500 calories. There is no way for you to know what calories-out just did in response to that. In fact, researchers, for example Dr. Keesey from the University of Wisconsin, tells us that there are disproportionately large declines in resting metabolism in food-deprived men or women, but his study looked at only men. In other words, if you consciously cut calories-in, the body negates that by unconsciously counting calories-out. So, it’s like, yeah, we’ve got out calories-out number, and then we go and we cut calories-in. No, the calories-out number is now irrelevant because the body will change it for us.

Now, that calorie-out number that we thought we had calculated but becomes wrong and irrelevant when we cut calories-in because the body adapts, that number wasn’t right in the first place, and that’s because we cannot calculate calories-out. We can’t. Up to 70 percent of the calories we burn over the course of the day have nothing to do with physical movements. So, any and every measurement tool that tells you these are the calories you burned doing physical activity is giving you like a sliver, a tiny sliver of your total calories out, and it’s horribly inaccurate anyway. There are all kinds of giant consumers of calories that we cannot measure. When I say we, I mean people living in the real world. If you live in a metabolic world and you are going through a study, certainly we can get better measures, but that’s not a viable scenario for us living 24×7, 365 normal lives.

If we wanted to calculate calories-out, we would have to understand things like how many calories we burn through muscle protein synthesis or just synthesizing new tissue that the human body, when given sufficient doses of high-quality protein, can create up to 250 g of new you – literally new tissue – per day. And researchers estimate that that activity building new you can take up to 20-30 percent of the total calories you burn in a given day. We can’t measure that. We also can’t measure things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis. These are calories burned via involuntary movements, just by standing or walking or fidgeting and this is a huge source of caloric burn. In fact, when people eat more calories, their body offsets them most often by increasing this number. So, when you eat more calories, you just get more energy, and you move more even if you don’t realize it. You move more, and your muscles move less efficiently, meaning they move and they use more calories to move and we can’t know that. We also can’t know, for example, the number of calories we burn during digestion. This is called diet-induced thermogenesis or DIT, and in a normal person, about 10 percent of calories eaten in the course of a day are burned simply turning those foods into usable energy in the body. No device you wear on your wrist is going to tell you how many calories you burned that way and even when we exercise.

If we do smart exercise or higher-quality, higher-intensity safer exercise, there is this thing called post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, which consists of the calories that are burned when we recover from intense exercise. So, for example, refilling the glycogen stores in our muscles and just rebuilding our muscles because we broke them down in a healthy way, you cannot know calories-out accurately. You cannot know calories-in accurately and even if you could, less calories in or more calories out does not require us to burn body fat. This is that thermodynamic argument that is just wrong. And most people who make this, the law of thermodynamics proves that if you eat less or exercise more, you have to burn body fat are usually well-intended, but they are wrong, and it’s very wrong. It’s so wrong, first of all there is no law of thermodynamics, there’s four. The two that matter when it comes to body weight and fat have to do with the fact that you cannot create or destroy energy; it can only change forms. So, the logic that the mainstream uses is that if you eat less or exercise more, you create a caloric deficit, and your body has to burn fat to make up for that because energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change forms.

Now hold on a second. What the applicable laws of thermodynamics do tell us is that if we do create a state of caloric deficit, and remember that’s not guaranteed, if you just eat less and exercise more, it is not guaranteed that you will be in a state of caloric deficit because the body could just slow down. If you eat 200 fewer calories, and the number of calories you burn throughout the course of the day goes down by 200 because your body is adapting to fewer calories in, you are not in a caloric deficit. You are in energy balance. So remember, just eating fewer calories, as we talked about earlier, often results in the disproportionate decline in calories out. So, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that if you eat less and exercise more, you will be in a state of caloric deficit. But let’s say you are.

If you are in a state of caloric deficit, what these mainstream individuals are arguing is that the applicable laws of thermodynamics say you have to burn body fat. That’s false, that is patently false. What the applicable laws of thermodynamics do prove, and they do prove something, is that if – and that’s a big if – if we are in a state of caloric deficit, these laws prove that our body has to do something. That is what they prove. In the field of thermodynamics, what is proven is that if we don’t have enough energy coming into our body, our body has to do something. What that something is, that has nothing to do with thermodynamics. That has to do with biology. Right?

We’ve got a system. Thermodynamic laws tell us that the system has to respond to a shortage of energy, but thermodynamic law does not show us what biologically the body has to do. That is an assumption and it is a flawed assumption. The assumption is that the way the body reacts is by burning fat. That is false; that is absolutely false. The way the body responds is by slowing down and burning muscle tissue, and then it may burn some fat, but once you have slowed down your body and burned off your muscle tissue, you are pretty much in a bad state for the rest of your life because if you ever stop starving yourself, you will now experience what researchers call fat super-accumulation or a dramatic increase in fat stores because you are not overeating, you are just eating a normal amount, but now your body is running slower and you have less muscle tissue to burn off those calories in the first place. So, of course in surplus of energy, you are going to store some body fat. So, these laws of thermodynamics are thrown around, but it’s just not applicable. It’s just not applicable at all.

The real question is how do we get our body to burn fat, not how do we get our body to slow down, burn muscle tissue, and maybe burn some fat. And that’s what eating less and exercising more does, and that’s why it has been proven this is a fact. It has been proven to fail in the long-term 95.4 percent of the time. To be clear, that is a lower success rate than the success rate of quitting smoking cold turkey, and nicotine is the third most addictive substance in the world trailing only heroin and cocaine. So, these oh, just eat less and exercise more it’s so simple – except that it fails 95.4 percent of the time. And the reason it fails is because it doesn’t address the underlying issue which is the body’s inability to burn fat in the first place. Think about this for a second. If an individual has excess fat on their body, a significant amount, say 50 pounds of excess fat on their body, why do they ever get hungry? We get hungry because our body needs energy. But if we have 50 pounds of fat on our body, we have whatever 50 times 3,500 calories, we’ve got lots, hundreds of thousands of calories just chilling out on our body. Why would our body, more specifically our brain, tell us to consume more calories when we already have a surplus of calories on our body? The reason is because that body cannot readily use fat as energy. If it could, you wouldn’t be hungry all the time if you had excess fat on your body. Because just because food isn’t coming through your lips, doesn’t mean food can’t be coming off your hips.

The difference between eating some food and burning some stored energy, from the body’s perspective, is it just needs energy – just needs energy. So, the question is not how can you more effectively starve yourself. The question is why isn’t the body burning fat in the first place and Jimmy, for example, the brilliant man, will tell you firsthand that when you adapt your body to burning fat, you will be hungry dramatically less than you were before. Why? Because your body is feeding itself on your stored body fat. Again, are you in caloric excess surplus blah-blah-blah? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Ninety plus percent of the population eats when they are hungry and stops when they are full. So, the question is not how did 70 percent of the American population spontaneously become lazy gluttons which is what the mainstream leads us to believe which is ridiculous. Seventy percent of the American population did not spontaneously become lazy and stupid; that’s dumb and that’s lazy and stupid thinking. And the people who are advocating that, they are the ones being lazy and stupid and degrading and mean for that point.

The real question is why is it that some people eat when they are full and stop and they don’t get fat, and some people eat when they are full and stop and do get fat because that’s what most people do. And that’s the real question. And the answer is that the quality of food being consumed changes the way the body works, and it screws up our satiety signals. So we think we are hungry when we are not, and we don’t correctly know when to stop eating because these satiety signals don’t go to our brain, and our body loses its ability to readily burn calories. It’s all kinds of nonsense going on in the body, and it’s consistent across anyone who struggles with these problems, just like the underlying physiology of diabetes is consistent across all diabetic patients. The fundamental metabolic dysregulation in an obese individual is consistent across all obese individuals. There is inflammation in their brain, there is dysregulation of their hormones, and their gut bacteria is consistently different and different in the negative way than the human gut bacteria is supposed to be. So, it is a disease, it is a consistent disease across those who all have it. It is caused by the consumption of improper things, edible products, AKA processed starches and sweets and trans fats, which we are led to believe are okay. We are led to believe that a calorie is a calorie, and calories are all that matter, so it really doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you don’t eat too much of it, and it really doesn’t matter especially because then you can just go for a jog and burn it all off, which of course every single step in that logic is flawed.

We know for example, diabetes is not caused by an over-consumption of calories; it’s consumed by the wrong quality of food. Obesity is the exact same thing. So, people can continue to have these calorie-based arguments all they want, but then they need to answer, hey, you know, this isn’t working and people are dying, dying en masse, millions of people are dying. The economic burden of just type 2 diabetes in the United States now exceeds the economic burden of tobacco by 50 million dollars. Why are people still arguing about oh, this conventional approach that we’ve been preaching for the past 40 years is true. No, it’s not working. It’s not. And it’s wrong. And the science is quite clear that it’s wrong, so you can debate how right you are all day while people die, it seems socially irresponsible to me especially when you’ve got people like Jimmy out there, you’ve got people like the Paleo movement, you’ve got every successful lifestyle when it comes to food even if we personally don’t agree with all of them. But think about – think about the ones that actually people stick with and have health outcomes which are better than the mainstream diet. So, we’ve got low-carb lifestyle, we’ve got Paleo, we’ve got veganism, vegetarianism, we’ve got low-glycemic, Mediterranean, Kosher, Halal, all of those, every single one of them. Again, we might not agree with all of them, but they are certainly all better than a conventional American diet – all of them. All of them change food quality.

Vegans aren’t counting calories. Kosher people are not counting calories. Paleo practitioners are not counting calories. Low-carb lifestyle livers are not counting calories. They are saying we are going to eat these things and not these other things. They are manipulating food quality instead of futzing with calorie quantity, and that’s why they work. Futzing consciously with calorie quantity cannot work. It cannot work long-term, and I am going to define work as it’s sustainable, it’s enjoyable, it heals you. It doesn’t kill you slowly, it helps your health, and it helps you to burn fat rather than just slowing down and burning muscle tissue.

Starvation, AKA manipulating calorie quantity with no regard for food quality, cannot work for one simple reason. Hunger isn’t sustainable. Bottom line. Your body will make you feel like crap if it believes you are starving, and if all you do is cut calories, you will feel like you are starving, and then you will feel like crap. We’ve all experienced this. Our body slows down, our brain becomes foggy, we are in a bad mood. Why? Because we are starving. It’s like trying to not go to the bathroom. Could you imagine the next fad diet is like just don’t go to the bathroom as often, or just don’t sleep as much, or just don’t blink as much.

Eating is a baseline function. If we try to fight our body’s desire to eat, we will not – we will not – live an enjoyable life long-term. So, the only – the only way, as proven by science, as proven by common sense, as proven by the entirety of human history, and as proven by every successful dietary lifestyle out there – is through the manipulation of food quality, not calorie quantity, but food quality. That’s not saying that calories don’t exist and that there is a unicorn and it has got calories because it is some fictional like leprechaun. No, no, no. Calories exist. It’s just not the right measure. It is a myth, and it is a myth that has caused the obesity and diabetes epidemics because it’s the wrong measure, and giving people bad data is worse than giving people no data. Frankly, we shouldn’t need data in the first place because if we needed data – how does any animal ever not become obese or diabetic because frankly, we are the only animal that can do anything with data. If you give a cat data, it doesn’t know what to do. Yet, somehow cats, left to their own devices, don’t become obese or diabetic. Are we to believe that we are less capable than a cat? False. What is true is that we are brilliant. We are not some way inadequate and need conscious intervention because we are just weak and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. That is weak logic, and it’s wrong logic, and it’s killing us, and the sooner we can let go of calorie quantity and embrace food quality, we will do a couple of things.

First, we will automatically eat the correct number of calories, as evidenced by the fact that every single person who ever lived across any culture ever did not struggle with obesity or diabetes nearly as much as we do today and they didn’t think about it. All they did was eat things you can find in nature. They ate higher-quality diets, and, therefore, they experienced higher-quality health. The second thing that will happen is we will reduce the neurological inflammation at the heart of obesity, we will reduce the biological dysregulation at the heart of obesity, and we will heal our gut bacteria and when we do that, you will be shocked to find out that the body again restores its ability to unconsciously balance us out around a healthy body composition. We will also flood our body with nutrients, cutting calories. Taking a nutritionally vapid standard American diet and just eating less of it, takes a diet that is already nutritionally deficient and makes it even more nutritionally deficient because you are now eating even less of it. So these vitamins and minerals that we must have, you get even fewer of them. Whereas when you increase the quantity of food you are eating and increasing the quality of that food, first, you wouldn’t overeat because it’s impossible to overeat if you eat the right quality of food. Second, you will do all the healing we just talked about. And third, you will have an abundance of nutrition not a shortage, and if you have a broken metabolic system, which is what happens in the state of obesity and diabetes, you know what a great way to heal that system is? Provide your body with an abundance of the things it needs to heal itself.

If you break your ankle, there is no magic dance we need do for ankle to heal, we just need to get out of the body’s way and let the body heal our ankle; the broken metabolism works the same way. There are things we can do to help. Just like with your ankle, you put in a cast, you can elevate it, you can ice it, same thing here. When we eat an abundance of healthy, high-quality food, we flood our body with nutrition, we help it to heal itself, we re-regulate our hormones, our gut bacteria and our hypothalamic activity, and we naturally, just like every other person and every other species on the planet does, automatically and unconsciously eat the proper number of calories and burn the required number of calories to stay at a healthy body fat percentage. That is how the body actually works. This is why people, like the great Jimmy Moore and all of you amazing listeners, have experienced such wonderful benefits without being hungry simply by changing the quality of foods you are eating. The end of obesity and end of diabetes will come easily the day the mainstream stops preaching the disproven theories of calorie quantity which I call the calorie myths and start embracing the proven science of food quality. The latter is true, and it celebrates the innate brilliance of our bodies and brains. The former, the calorie myths, is false and is degrading to humans, and we need to throw it out the window. And I am so thankful to have people like Jimmy Moore preaching this message and living this message, and I am so thrilled that all of you are doing so as well. And I’ve got to make the one plug here, of course. If you like what you’ve heard today, there is a lot more science as well as practical how-to’s that literally re-write the book on calories and food and weight in the new book The Calorie Myth, which is not my opinion. It’s not just like another one of these diet books. It’s the culmination of over 13 years of research with top researchers around the world. We are talking Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, over 1,300 studies; talking about the neurobiology and gastroenterology and endocrinology that underlies body weight regulation and it literally – it literally – dismantles point by point these calorie myths, provides you with the proven alternative, and the steps by which you can live a simple lifestyle of eating whenever you want as much as you want as long as you eat the right quality of food.

Thank you again so much for tuning in to The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show for your continued support of Jimmy, because he is awesome, and we should all support him. And if you wouldn’t mind, I would so appreciate your popping over to CalorieMythBook.com. Again, that’s CalorieMythBook.com. Grab a copy of the book. On Kindle, it’s like 13 bucks. If you want a hardback, it’s less than 20 bucks, and there is no better. There is no more economical source of 1,300 studies worth of science simplified and applied than you will find in The Calorie Myth book. Thank you so much for sharing your time and attention with me today, and again, please free yourself from these calorie myths. Eat as much as you want, whenever you want, just focus on food quality rather than calorie quantity, and if you need any help with that, please pick up a copy of The Calorie Myth book. It will absolutely help you to live your best life through proven science rather than disproven theories. My name is Jonathan Bailor. This is The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show. Remember this week and every week after; eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. Chat with you soon.