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THE OBESITY CODE COOKBOOK

not eating. If your body doesn’t count calories, why should you? A calo-

rie is purely a unit of energy borrowed from physics. The field of obesity

medicine, desperate for some simple measure of food energy, completely

ignored human physiology and turned to physics instead.

“A calorie is a calorie” soon became the statement du jour. It also gave

rise to a question: Are all calories of food energy equally fattening? The

answer to that is an emphatic no. One hundred calories of kale salad are

not as fattening as one hundred calories of candy. One hundred calories

of beans are not as fattening as one hundred calories of white bread and

jam. But for the last forty years, we have believed that all calories are

equally fattening.

And that’s why I wrote The Obesity Code. In that book, I drew on what

I learned over ten years of helping thousands of patients lose weight

through my Intensive Dietary Management program. Nutrition is the

key to metabolism, the process of breaking down food molecules to

provide energy (calories) for the body and using that energy to build,

maintain, and repair body tissues and allow the body to function effi-

ciently. To answer the all-important question—what are the underlying

causes of weight gain?—I started at the beginning, unraveled the calories

model, and explained what’s really going on: Obesity is a hormonal, not

a caloric, imbalance. And what we eat and when we eat are two major

influences on our ability to manage weight gain and weight loss.

Insulin

In our body, nothing happens by accident. Every single physiological

process is a tight orchestration of hormonal signals. Whether our heart

beats faster or slower is tightly controlled by hormones. Whether we

urinate a lot or a little is tightly controlled by hormones. Whether the

calories we eat are burned as energy or stored as body fat is also tightly

controlled by hormones. So, the main problem in terms of obesity is not

the number of calories we eat, but how they are spent. And the main

hormone we need to know about is insulin.