"Just cut calories blah blah blah"

“Just cut calories.”

Are you tired of hearing this? “Use a little willpower. Push away from the table. Eat fewer calories or get on that treadmill.”

Wrong. If it was that easy, about the only fat people in the world would be sumo wrestlers. There are lots of overweight people with great willpower. Exercise generally won’t result in a weight loss. Fewer calories won’t necessarily either. (Actually, you can increase your willpower, as Mark explains. But that won’t help unless you use it the right way to live primally. Anyway, why use up your willpower pushing away from the table when the Primal Blueprint can make healthy living easy. OK, mostly easy.)

Researchers recently compared the total energy expenditure of patients on four-week isocaloric low-fat, low-glycemic, and low-carb diets. Although activity levels and caloric intake remained the same across all groups, the low-carb group burned 300 more calories per day than the low-fat group. More

Increasing your exercise beyond what the Blueprint recommends will have very little effect on your weight. For one thing, studies have shown that you probably will eat more. Even if you don’t, you will do more harm to yourself than good. If you haven’t done so, read Mark’s Case Against Cardio. And you would have to do a huge amount of cardio to lose much fat.

Furthermore, it is not simply calories in, fat on your waist. For example,

“Researchers found that mice exposed to a relatively dim light at night over eight weeks had a body mass gain that was about 50 percent more than other mice that lived in a standard light-dark cycle.”

“Although there were no differences in activity levels or daily consumption of food, the mice that lived with light at night were getting fatter than the others, . . .” Ohio State University (2010, October 12). Too much light at night at night may lead to obesity, study finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 18, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/10/101011173249.htm

OK, they were mice not humans. I don’t think it matters in this case. See also Gorillas Go Green. Zoo gorillas eat twice as many calories and lose weigh on Big Assed Salads (that’s a technical primal term).

How do you lose weight? The short answer to losing weight is “follow the Primal Blueprint.” The much longer answer is found in Mark’s The Context of Calories.

Here is a brilliant analysis of the “just eat fewer calories” idea.