When you sit to dine with a ruler, note well what is before you, and
put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony. Do not crave his delicacies for that food is
deceptive. Prov 23: 1-3 NIV
I was flicking through books in my library to which ones I
would give away and discovered a devotional on health that came from a while
ago, so I decided to browse through it.
The title caught my attention.
You can’t just cut your calories and expect to lose
weight. Here’s why: by nature, your body
is highly efficient in storing fat calories.
It uses only about 3% of the fat calories you eat to digest, transport,
and deposit fat into your body’s fat storage areas. That means you must exercise to vast majority
out of the body if you don’t want to gain weight.
In contrast your body metabolizers from excess protein, and
excretes the by products rapidly. You
can have problems with excess protein of course because it stresses your liver
and kidneys by forcing them to work overtime. But excess protein doesn’t usually add to
obesity. You have no efficient metabolic
pathway in your body by which you can turn protein into fat for storage.
Calories from CHO also rarely get stored as fat, because the
metabolic pathways that you body uses to convert extra CHO into fat then than
store them demand that you burn a lot of calories to do the job. It takes 24% of the calories in CHO to do
this – a highly inefficient use of the energy for CHOs.
In studies in which researchers put radioactive CHO markers in
food, they learned that the body converted and stored less than 1% of the CHO
load as fat. Even when people ate CHO
excessively, they generally burned them up in “wasteful” metabolic processes
that tended to increase the body’s metabolic rate, not reduce it – as happens
in calorie – restricted diets.
Another way to put this is that 1g of fat contains 9
calories, while 1g of protein or CHO has only 4 calories. The moral of the story is avoid fat calories
– they stick to your bones! There’s an interesting bit of advice in Proverbs
23:3 about overeating. It say’s don’t
crave a ruler’s delicacies, because that food is deceptive. How true!
Most rich food is filled with fat calories that may be tough to get rid
of.
Sin is deceptive, too.
It may look and taste good, but the consequences on indulging may be
harder to get rid of than fat calories.
Watch your moral diet, “for the wages of sin is death.” (Rom 6:23)
