"Why can't you just post how many calories to eat and to burn?" - a poster wrote today. Let me offer a radical response. The calorie is merely a historically-contextual theory, born out of the Industrial Age; most countries don't even use "calorie" in favor of the SI "joule". This calories assumes that a unit of heat in surplus stores as fat in your body; therefore, you should eat less and exercise more to use your stored surplus (burn fat.) It doesn't matter what you eat as much as how much you eat; nor does it matter how you well you move to exercise, only that you burn a sufficient amount of energy.

This is not a universally accepted theory. You are not a machine. The metaphor of an industrial machine fails to address that a machine does not repair itself with fuel. It cannot self-assess its condition, cannot direct resources to repair poor state, and does not adapt to increased demands with increased efficiency.

If you eat less quantity fo

od, you cannot self-assess, you cannot repair, and you cannot adapt. If you exercise hard without quality movement, you will break down and adapt to the excessive stress by increasing pain, injuries, illness and disease.

Therefore, a better (though still insufficient) metaphor for the human body is a biological computer. The quality of what you eat and how well you move holds greater significance than how much you eat and how hard you exercise. Your quality of food and movement determines how clearly and quickly you self-assess, how well, rapidly and comprehensively you repair yourself, and how expediently and sustainably you adapt with greater efficiency while remaining pain, injury, illness and disease free.

The calorie is not the currency of healthy fitness. Consciousness is.

Very respectfully,
Scott Sonnon