Okay so imagine one pound of your own fatty flesh so if you burn that amount of flesh that sounds kind of you know weird but if you were to convert that into energy you would get about 3 500 calories which is quite a lot of energy that’s me talking with dry Carson ciao admit trained physicist and mathematician and he’s explaining to me why we should care how much energy fat has uh in order for you to live and function you need to burn energy to like keep your heart

also to move around but energy doesn’t come for free so if you’re not consuming enough calories you’re going to burn that energy with your own fat and so a lot of diet books like to teach people this rule but the problem is it’s wrong and here’s why let’s say I eat 500calories less a day so after one week it would be 3500 calories and I would lose a pound right because I’d have to burn it yeah and if I stayed on this diet for a year I would burn through 52 pounds be great if you keep taking this thing well

10 years I’d lose 500 pounds you know so obviously at some point this rule is going to break down it will actually break down before you get to a year soot understand the real math behind losing weight dry chow wanted me to imagine a leaky bucket you have some water in the bucket and that’s the amount of body fat or tissue in your body and the leak represents the rate at which you’re burning energy well in reality what you’re doing is you’re adding water at the top that’s like

state the amount of water you add at the top exactly balances the amount of water you lose at the bottom if you’re pouring in more water than it’s leaking then you’re going to gain weight now if you think about the physics of a leaky bucket the more water that you pour into the bucket the faster it’s going to leak so your leak rate scales with how big you are and this is a well-known fact that the larger you are the more energy you burn you’re going to burn more energy because it takes more energy just

tissue and just to keep that tissue going it takes more energy congratulations you have a new steady state but let’s say you don’t want to stay this large person that you’ve become well the opposite is true as well you could pour in a lot less water than you’re leaking but as you start to lose weight you start to get smaller and you burn less energy you start to metabolically adapt to your new diet and so you’re never going to lose weight at

curve from one steady state down to another which means when you go on a diet the 3500 calorie rule is the wrong rule there’s a new rule wait for it the new rule is for every 10 calories you eat less you will lose a pound but it will take you about three years or more to see that the full effect of your diet which is still pretty good you just all you have to do is eat 100 calories less you lose 10 pounds that’s like a can of coke so you should expect the

right but nobody wants a slow diet we all want to lose 20 pounds for this summer what’s wrong with just focusing on losing weight rapidly the problem is once they’re down at that new weight they must be vigilant for the rest of their life because losing weight is slow gaining weight is also slow but it’s slowly creep up and then two three years later bang hit something they’re back to where they were so the mathematically approved rule for weight loss for every10 calories I don’t eat a day I’ll

one full pound which means changing your steady state is a marathon and not a sprint hey guys this is Todd thanks so much for watching uh if you want to have life-changing epiphanies like this one delivered automatically every single week make sure you subscribe also through Facebook twitter and google plus we ask you what you would advise people who are trying to take the slow path to losing weight and here’s what some of you said

if you have any additional thoughts or comments make sure you leave them in the comments section below and make sure you join us next week we’re going to talk about the differences between white bread and sugar or are there actually any differences we’ll find out see you next week