An excellent article in 1843 Magazine, entitled Death Of The Calorie, puts a lot of nails in the metaphorical coffin of the calorie counting diet strategy. They discuss the problems with accurately assessing the caloric content of individual food items. They go into the differences in how people digest and absorb calories (not everyone’s intestines are the same length!). They mention the fact that foods affect the body in more ways than just total energy content. All are good points that everyone should be aware of. However, there is a bigger, deeper, more universally true reason why all diet strategies—and health and wellness strategies at large—often fail to produce the results we want.
A Lot Of Life Happens On A Bell Curve
A well known quote goes: “Always remember that you are unique. Just like everybody else.” This joke is reminding us that groups of like things, such as people, look more similar the wider the lens that you use. Human beings, from afar, are all very similar to one another. Every human breaths air and eats food. Once you get closer though, to the level of the individual, uniqueness stands out more readily. Not every human has the same color hair, the same amount of facial hair, or likes baseball.
This idea—that large samples of things can be used to reveal commonalities—is called the normal distribution, better known as the bell curve. Bell curves, in math speak, say that random variables, independently gathered from independent distributions converge toward the normal.1 For those of us who are not great at math that basically means that if you take a large sample of something like people, you will find the most common traits are represented by the most people. Most American men, for example, fall within a few inches of five-feet-nine-inches tall. The farther from that height you get in either direction, the fewer you find.
So what does all of this have to do with health and wellness, diets and exercise routines? Everything. The fitness world tries to find formulas that will work—even for you!—if you just adopt the strategy. But trying to find a formula comes back around to trying to fit everyone into the same box—or bell, if you will. By doing that, we create guidelines and expectations that may look right at a macro level, but which fall apart on an individual level.
Why Body Fat Readers Don’t Read Your Body Fat
Here is an example of how the concept of the bell curve is converted into a fitness tool that appears useful, but which actually muddies the waters as much as it helps. These days, many digital bathroom scales will give you a body fat measurement along with your weight. Or, if you prefer not to have a scale, you can also buy a handheld body fat measuring device. What you probably don’t know is that when you use a body fat measurement device, it in fact does not detect how much fat is in your body. That’s right, it does not detect fat in your body. What it measures is resistance, which is essentially defined as how easily a current will pass through a material—the same resistance that we talk about with electricity and the reason we use copper for wires instead of iron. Since water is a relatively good conductor and human tissue such as muscle, bones, and fat have different concentrations of water, we can make calculations about the body by measuring total resistance. BUT—and this is the kicker—because we are not directly measuring any of those tissues we have to make use of statistics, namely the bell curve, to help us out. So, how does this work?
If you’ve used one of these devices, you know that you have to enter personal information like age, height, weight, and gender. This is the tip off that we are going to make use of statistics in order to do our calculation. Human beings all share certain characteristics and those characteristics, on average, deviate in certain predictable ways depending on your demographics. For example, one of the things the device does is convert your body into cylinders so that standard equations can be used for calculating things like volume. Statistically speaking, the proportions of the cylinders representing your trunk, arms, legs, and torso differ between men and women in predictable ways—men usually have broader upper bodies and limbs with larger cross sectional areas than women do. By entering your gender, the device can make adjustments to its algorithms based on these patterns. Another example is age. Older people tend to have more fat and less muscle, generally speaking. Again, by entering your age the machine can adjust its algorithms to reflect the overall statistic. 2
There are many other examples, but we need not go through them all. The important point here is what this all means about the calculation we are doing when we measure body fat. What’s really going on is that the device is getting a result in the form of a specific resistance and then, using statistical generalizations, is working backwards to reconstruct a picture of what kind of body would give us that resistance. If you are this height, this weight, this age, and this gender and you have x resistance, then your body is most likely built in such and such a way. It is an extrapolation, not a measurement. The process works reasonably well but, if you’ve been alive for a while you already know where the weakness lies. Just because men and women usually differ in certain ways doesn’t mean that they always do. Some women are bigger and more muscular than some men. Some older people are more muscular than younger ones. Some people have super long torsos and short legs while others are the reverse. Extrapolating out from the answer by assuming that your subject conforms to certain rules is, really, educated guessing.
Why That Great New Diet Didn’t Work For You
So how does this relate to our article in 1843 Magazine on calorie counting? The article tells the story of one man who, after suffering from violence, gained so much weight that his doctors feared he would die if he didn’t lose it. Spurred into action, the man began exercising and cutting back his calorie intake but the process didn’t work. The weight stayed on. This becomes the jumping off point in the article for dissecting the merits of the calorie counting approach, and indeed, calorie counting has a lot of problems. The man finds this out of course and learns that instead of relying on calories, he needs to focus on what he is eating. By making changes to the composition of his diet, the weight comes off and the reader is thus lead to believe that calorie counting is a failure and that changing what you eat is the key to success.
Unfortunately, that’s a premature assumption and analyzing the situation solely on the merits of calorie counting misses the mark a bit. The real heart of the matter isn’t just flaws in the diet. It’s the fact that when it comes to health and wellness, in spite of our best intentions, we continually try to fit everyone into the same box. We do what the body fat machine does—we make assumptions about people based on the fact that they are usually true and then try to extrapolate from there. In the case of this story, we assume that because calorie counting proved to be inferior for this man, it must be inferior by nature, i.e. inferior for everyone.
That’s a mistake that is being born out of our many assumptions about weight and weight loss. In the case of calorie counting we assume, for example, that most people handle foods in more or less the same manner. If most people metabolize protein, fats, and carbs similarly, then we can make a blanket statement such as reducing calories will cause anyone to lose weight. Again, this is a statement that is probably broadly true when you plot it on the bell curve. However, once you get onto the individual level, it becomes more complicated. The fact is different bodies react in different ways to proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and that matters when it comes to body fat. It means that two people can reduce their calories but, depending on what else is true about what types of foods they are eating and how their bodies process those foods, one person might lose weight while the other doesn’t.
We could continue on with more examples but the main point is simply this: you can’t expect a pile of statistical assumptions to give you a prefect answer on an individual level. This is how we get ourselves into trouble with health and fitness advice. We are all on the lookout for a formula to follow, but any such formula will have to be based on generalizations gleaned from wide-lense observations about the very complicated phenomenon which is the human body. The fact is, every individual will have different requirements for maintaining optimal health. For some people calorie counting will work. For others, the paleo diet will be the ticket. Some will have a lot of success with cardiovascular training while others will need more resistance training. This is why the man’s story in 1843 Magazine unfolds as it does. It is telling us less about what diets are better and more about the fact that people’s bodies don’t all behave the same way. That is the nature of fitness, and this is why it can feel frustratingly complicated. The truth though, is that we are only making it complicated. Once we give up the notion that there is a magic formula for all, we can focus our efforts towards finding what works for us.