Dr. Steele’s Low Bull Diet – Part II

This is the second in an occasional series about obesity and weight control.

In my last column I introduced Dr. Steele’s Low Bull Diet, on which you can eat anything you want and still lose weight, as long as you eat fewer calories than you burn off.

That column only began to explore the wonders of my Low Bull Diet. It has another miraculous feature: You can lose weight on this diet without ever exercising! I call this approach the Low Bull Diet – Couch Tuber Variant.

Of course, there is a little catch to the Couch Tuber Variant of the Low Bull Diet, which is this: You can’t eat squat on it if you want to lose weight. That is because just sitting around all day does not burn many calories. If you want to eat more and not gain weight, you have to be more active. Today’s bowl of hard truth in Dr. Steele’s Low Bull Diet, however, is that most of us cannot exercise enough to really control our weight and also eat whatever we want. We also have to eat less.

Doesn’t that just frost your cukes?

The average Couch Tuber, sitting cushioned-seat to seat cushion all day, working up a sweat only if the remote is broken, burns off perhaps 1,400 calories in a day (the number varies by individual – generally the MORE you weigh the more you burn). That number is the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) – what we all burn just existing. To keep the couch firmly attached to your butt and still lose weight you have to eat fewer calories each day than your BMR burns off.

Now, 1,400 calories sounds like a lot, but most of us don’t realize we can woof down 1,400 calories in one typical American meal without loosening our pants, and probably have. A good meal at most restaurants will do it. Disciples of the Low Bull Diet-Couch Tuber Variant lose weight on BMR only like this; on any given day they are committed to the couch, watching reruns of “Survivor” to see if the ending changes. They have someone fetch them a fast food lunch: super fries (600 calories), the 20-ounce Coke (250 calories), and the quarter-pound burger with cheese (530 calories).

That’s – belch – 1,380 calories and they are done eating for the day. They cannot have one more calorie, not even last month’s fry stuck between the couch cushions. Since their BMR is 1,400 calories a day, and they eat 1,380 calories each day, they burn off 20 more calories every day than they eat. At 4,000 calories to be burned off for every pound of weight loss, in another 200 days on the couch they will have lost an entire pound (they will, of course, also have the mind and physique of fried dough. Actually, that’s not fair to fried dough, which I love).

Now, most of us are more active than couch tubers, but the reality is that we are still gaining weight because we are not active enough to eat whatever we want. That’s because being active, even exercising regularly, does not burn nearly as many calories as we hope and need.

Take running, for example, which I do frequently so I don’t accumulate on my hips the calories of the four creams in my daily Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Running at a good clip burns about 10 calories per minute, which equals about three glazed doughnuts calories per hour of running.

Put another way, if you run for an hour and then eat three glazed donuts, you just ate in 10 minutes what it took an hour to exercise off. Sex burns about two to eight calories per minute. Pro basketball burns about 10 calories per minute. Walking briskly burns about seven calories per minute, or about 20 minutes per can of regular Pepsi.

A pound of weight is about 4,000 calories. In the weight-loss equation there are two ways to approach that pound: Burn it off through exercise or don’t eat it in the first place. Not eating it is much easier than burning it off by exercise. If you follow national guidelines and exercise for 30 minutes five times per week, and your choice of exercise is running, you will run for 10 hours a month and just barely burn off the calories from eight Big Macs in that month. The ninth Big Mac will become part of your can. If you run four miles a day and eat one more glazed doughnut than you burn off you will gain more than a pound a month.

On the flip side, if your weight is stable and then you cut out eight Big Macs or the equivalent in a month, you will lose about a pound a month without any exercise. If you do that and run five times a week you will lose two pounds a month. Isn’t math grand?

This is not to denigrate exercise. In fact, exercise has a crucial role in achieving and maintaining healthy weight. Dieters who exercise lose more weight, lose weight more quickly, and are more likely to keep the weight off. Exercise allows you to eat more calories and still lose weight if your total caloric intake is still less than what you burned off. Exercise suppresses appetite, adds years of life, and has a profoundly positive effect on your health. It improves your mood, your sex life, and delays some effects of aging. In fact, if you are not exercising regularly and frequently you are rotting at an accelerated rate.

The bottom line is that very few of us are still burning off calories at the rate necessary to be able to eat all the calories we want. When we played high school sports for three hours every afternoon and had the metabolism of a nuclear reactor, we ate our mothers out of house and home fries and still stayed sleek. Those days are gone, and for most of us weight control requires first and foremost the consistent use of nature’s only truly effective fat blocker: our closed lips.

The reality of the Low Bull Diet and all other weight-loss programs comes down again to this: It ain’t the fat, it ain’t the carbs, and it also ain’t just exercise, it’s first and foremost the damn calories.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.