Day 4 – The Negative Calorie Myth

“If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck… it probably needs a little more time in the microwave.”

~ Lori Dowdy

231.6 lbs

So far my morning routine has been get up, use the loo, then weigh myself. Today is a little different as I’ve not yet been to bed. Sleep is important, and you continue to burn calories even as you rest your head on big pillows and dream or whatever; but cravings were keeping me up at night, so instead of slumber I settled for a few rounds of Call of Duty.

No idea what I’m going to eat yet today. I’ll probably catch a nap after posting this. But I’ve been getting some emails from people like Johnny Snow saying “dude – why not just eat negative calorie foods and speed up the process?”

Well because, you poser in a parka, there ain’t no such thang.

People like to believe there’s certain foods that, when eaten, take more energy to digest than the food contributes to your body. Online lists will show tasty things such as apples, cranberries, and pineapple alongside the old standby of this urban legend, celery.

Yeah, I hear you cracking your knuckles and getting ready to type a comment on how an apple takes 200 calories to burn, but only gives you 100 calories, or some other such nonsense. Here’s why it’s nonsense:

[SCIENCE ALERT]

Have you ever noticed that the nutrition labels on food products always read Calories, with a capital C? That’s because there are calories, then there are calories. One calorie (small C) is 4.184 joules of energy,  the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1°C. Yup – a calorie is just energy as heat.

Where the confusion comes in is how the calorie unit gets written down; or more to the point, how a kilocalorie, or 1,000 calories, is written down as a Calorie. Capital C. So those calories you read about on packages are actually kilocalories. And yes, it may take your body 200 calories of energy to digest an apple [source required to prove that's so] but the apple puts 100 Calories (notice the big C?), or 100,000 calories, into your system. You’re consuming 99,800 more calories than your body is burning by digesting that apple. The same holds true for figs, carrots, the prized celery, and all other so-called negative foods.

“But”, you may be saying to yourself, “if you stick to ‘negative calorie foods’ you’re still burning some energy to digest it, so that’s still good right?”

Yeah. Here, try something. Get up from the computer, go outside, and run 3 laps around your house. I’ll wait…

Did you do it?

Liar.

But let’s pretend you did. Now you’re breathing heavily and you can feel the exertion. That amount of activity equals maybe 25 Calories burned… and that’s if you have a big house. I mean mansion-big, not a double-wide. Do you think your body is working harder than that to digest a stick of celery? Wrongo in the Congo.

Bottom line: Robert Heinlein was right when he came up with TANSTAAFL. Negative calorie foods just don’t exist.