Gary Taubes’ books, which are referenced in the Recommended Reading section, essentially state that “calories in=calories” out is a bad and incorrect equation.

In the movie (which shocked me, which I loved, and which my CHILDREN have begged to watch twice in two days), you yourself lost twice as much weight as the “calories in=calories out” equation said you should have expected to lose.

If the excess consumption of carbohydrates can trigger excess insulin to block many of those calories from being burned as energy, and instead store a greater percentage of those calories as fat, couldn’t the high carbohydrate consumption (and FAST burning carbs, as opposed to the slower whole carbs he was used to processing) combined with the extra calories he was eating from fat (which he likely didn’t eat much of on a low-fat, vegan diet) have produced greater weight gain than expected? Isn’t the whole premise of lower-carb, higher-fat eating that the composition of your food DOES matter?

I have no idea if Spurlock cheated or not. I’m just wondering, if the math doesn’t “add up”, couldn’t it be because, as Taubes and others have explained, the “calories in=calories out” equation is vastly oversimplified.

Truly curious. Not disagreeing with you. Just curious whether that could be a possible explanation.

If we were going only by his weight gain, that could figure in. But his nutritionist told him twice on camera that he was consuming more than 5000 calories per day.

PS
I got my dad your wheat is murder t-shirt for Father’s Day. Best.Present.Ever.

Outstanding. I hope he likes it.

The irony is that saturated fat raises your testosterone.

Very good article. I guess it’s like people who are so tone deaf, they don’t know they can’t sing.

“As for the ethics of him lying or not, I don’t care…”

Comments like this boggle my mind. “It’s ok if he lies to me, as long as he says what I want to hear.”

I guess people have gotten so used to seeing facts twisted in news shows and documentaries, it doesn’t even bother them anymore.

Plenty of fat goes through the digestive system. You get more “floaters” when you eat lots of fat.

I don’t recall anything in the movie that would indicate how much of his weight gain was fat, as opposed to muscle or water.

You can’t use simple math to tell what’s going on with human metabolism because we simply don’t know enough about that yet. For instance, either people don’t understand what calorie theory actually states or calorie theory is based on nonsense, because you never burn every “calorie” you eat. (A calorie isn’t even a real food ingredient. It’s a human-invented measurement, like an inch.) Fat and protein go into things like cell membranes, DNA synthesis, hormone production, and so on. If you use those “calories” for building, you will not burn them for energy. And we have no way of knowing how much of a given meal goes into rebuilding and how much into energy.

Except the carbs. They aren’t used for anything but energy. If we can’t use them for energy, they wind up in fat tissue or they wind up in the toilet (as with fiber). You can’t leave all that glucose floating around in your bloodstream or you will go the way of the untreated diabetic. So the body does something with it as quickly as possible.

This is why the LC diet gurus tell us to count carbs. That’s where you will really see a difference if you lower the count.

Dietary fat, as far as I can tell and probably as far as anyone knows, is only going to be stored as fat if you’re intaking enough sugar to make enough glycerol to turn that fat into triglycerides. Drop the carb intake and you have no central axis for the triglyceride and either your body does something with the dietary fat or excretes it–there is virtually no storage. This is why traditional Inuit didn’t get fat–they had round faces and they wore bulky clothes, but Steffansson said that under the bulky clothes they were of a normal weight range. And most of what they ate was fat!

Maybe he could gain that much weight on 3500 calories, but I doubt it. He was a healthy young male going into it, and also lived on his girlfriend’s vegetarian meals, which means he probably consumed a lot of carbs before. I think it’s unlikely his basal metabolic rate dropped to 500-600 calories per day, which is what would be required to store 25 pounds of fat in 30 days on a 3500-calorie diet.

And it still doesn’t explain why he didn’t correct the nutritionist when she told him — twice, on camera — that he was consuming more than 5,000 calories per day.

Breakfast:
1 Egg McMuffin
1 Coffee
1 Half and half creamer
1 Hash Brown
1 Sausage Biscuit
1 Orange Juice

Lunch:
1 Big Mac Hamburger
“2.18 Servings” Fries, Small (Probably used to indicate a larger size)
1 Chocolate Milkshake, Small
1 Coke

The last part visible is my favorite part…

“Afternoon Snack”

Interesting. That puts him at about 2800 for the day so far. A QP w/cheese, large fries and large coke for dinner would put him just over 4100. So to surpass 5000, he’s going to need a heck of a snack, or an extra sandwich + dessert with dinner, or a big milkshake, which be his second milkshake of the day.

Once again, it adds up to super-sizing without being asked.