OSF028: Interview with Jonathan Bailor, Author of "The Calorie Myth"

Our society’s methods for losing weight are bonkers. Starvation diets, low-fat diets — none of them really work on an extended basis, and some of them could be making us sicker.

Our guest today, Jonathan Bailor, spent 10 years doing intensively researching the diets we try and why they tend not to work.

“We’ve all been schooled in the paradigm that quantity matters, and that it’s all about the calories, but calories tell us little to nothing. It’s really about the quality of the foods we’re eating,” he told us.

According to Jonathan, we should be eating foods that are high in water, fiber and nutrients. Anything that grows in the ground = good. Anything else = potentially bad.

Bailor worked as a personal trainer before he became an engineer at Microsoft and it was through his experiences as a trainer that he came to his realizations.

“I’d put people on 1,200 calorie diets and strenuous exercise regimes and they wouldn’t get thinner, they’d just get sick and sad,” he told us. “I decided to retire and find out why the calorie math wasn’t working.”

Through his studies, he learned a lot about what happens to your body when you’re overweight.

“Obesity is like a metabolic fever, he said. “Starvation puts your metabolism in an ice bath and you may lose weight but what we really need to do is cure that metabolic fever.”

“Eating more sane foods and getting less but higher quality exercise can reverse inflammation in your brain, heal your gut and re-regulate your hormones.”

A good strategy is to eat so much sane food — like vegetables and high-quality meats and seafood — that you have no appetite for insane foods like processed carbs.

But it's not about willpower and starving yourself. “Naturally thin people show that the human body can automatically burn calories when they’re on the right diet.”

LINKS:

sanesolution.com

twitter.com/jonathanbailor

facebook.com/jonathanbailor