03 Jul Real Talk | The Definition of a Calorie
Doc discusses the true definition of a calorie and what that means when it comes to weight loss.
Here is the truth. We have to know what it is we’re talking about. You go to your family doctor and they sit there and say, I’ll push back from the table and get some more exercise. That’s the advice you’re going to give me doc, really? I mean, yeah, okay, I could have figured that one out myself. I don’t really need your opinion. What you need to know is what is a calorie. Look it up for yourselves, but I’m going to tell you what it is. It’s 15 ounces of water heated up one degree Fahrenheit. Anytime you have to heat up 15 ounces of water, that takes one calorie of energy. Where it gets interesting is if you take in 15, 16 ounces of water, throw it in your hot water heater at the house. I don’t care what the temperature is, but the burners have to come on and heat it up. To heat up 15 ounces, 16 ounces of water in your hot water heater at the house, one degree Fahrenheit, it’s roughly four BTUs. Four BTUs is roughly one calorie. So all I’m doing is exchanging thermal energy. Where it gets interesting is how can we use this against ourselves? Well, if we look at somebody that’s 200 pounds, this cowboy right here, well, I’m going to go jump in a dehydrator and suck all the fluid out of my body. I’m sure that’ll make a lot of people in the world happy, not seeing me around and we all dehydrated up, shriveled up like an old prune. It grows old Dr. Murphy, old prune doctor there. They will get 140 pounds of water out of me at 98 degrees. I’m a 140 pound hot water heater at 98 degrees. Anything I do to lower my temperature takes energy to heat it up. So if I take in 15 ounces of water at 60 degrees, and I can do that using crushed ice, that will hit my stomach at 60 degrees. But I’m the hot water heater at 98. Therefore, my burners have to come on and burn 40 calories heating this water to 98. The opposite is also true. If I go and get a glass of hot tea without sugar, without honey, but just hot tea at 110 degrees, and I were to drink that, I’m adding energy to my body. I am shutting down my hot water heater. I no longer need that many calories to heat it up. Okay, so where can we see this in real life application? Well, we can Google a map of obesity of the United States and you will find they’re not just fat. They are humongous people that live in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, where it’s hot. It’s 98 degrees in this room, which is, thank God you turned the temperature up. It was freezing in here, but I think it’s about 70 degrees right now. I’m burning about 10 calories an hour trying to keep my body at 98 degrees. If you turn this up to 98 degrees, I’m burning zero. This environment is keeping me at 98 degrees. Just like the temperature in the southern states where it’s 98 degrees sitting on the beach, you’re burning 5-10 calories an hour. Sun’s keeping you warm. We start traveling north. People are getting thinner. You go to Chicago and see, look at the people in Chicago. You don’t see a lot of overweight people in Chicago. Chicago style pizza, that’s not locale. But that’s what they’re eating in Chicago and they’re not overweight because they’re breathing the cold air. They’re using so much more energy to stay warm than the people in Mississippi, which don’t use any. Even in this area, farmers and ranchers in Missouri, we have to grain our livestock, our horses, our cattle in the wintertime to keep weight on. They don’t grain cattle in Texas. It doesn’t get cold. But it’s really an interesting phenomena. But cold is everything when it comes to weight. You don’t have an idea how much energy is utilized trying to maintain body temperature. But if you sit there and study it enough, it’ll be phenomenal. So when we say frozen grape, all right. Grape has two calories. When I consume it, it’s 25 degrees when it hits my stomach. My body’s got to burn about two calories to heat that thing up. Well, gosh, if the outside temperature is 60 degrees, I’m breathing 60 degree air. Now all of a sudden I got to burn an extra two calories. I’m really cranking out the calories. And that brings up another important point. Breathing cold air. If I’m sitting on the beach at 98 degrees, I am literally burning nothing. But the colder I become, even breathing colder air at a higher altitude, 10,000 feet, like Colorado, thinnest state in the nation, not the coldest state, thinnest state in the nation, it’s the altitude. A lot of people don’t understand the surface area, the inside of your lungs. Most people think, well, it’s just a couple of two liter Pepsi bottles in my lungs, right all around. That’s where the air goes in, the air comes out. Well, I’m speaking of surface area. If I were to take your lungs out and open up all the nooks and crannies and spread them out over a surface area, you will see that is the equivalent of a half a tennis court. You have a half a tennis court folded up, exchanging gas with the environment. That is what the inside of your body is exposed to. A half a tennis court, two cells thick, exchanging gas. That is how much cold you’re losing off a half a tennis court. That’s interesting. That’s why elevation and cold temperature means more than just cold temperature. So North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, colder than Colorado, but they don’t have the elevation component. When you start breathing air twice as fast over a half a tennis court, you’ll begin to understand why you’ll lose a lot more body temperature doing that. So, exerting yourself in the cold, you will burn and lose more weight. So I see a lot of people that don’t want to go outside and walk when it’s cold outside. I’m like, my God, that’s the best time to be outside walking when it is 30 degrees outside going for a brisk walk. Then summer comes when it’s 90 degrees outside. Well, I want to go outside and do some walking now. No, no, actually, I wish you’d stay inside and drink crushed ice water. It gives you, it’ll burn more calories than you will walking down the street. You’ll actually not be doing much at all. And it’s quite true.
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