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Calories. They've been at the heart of dieting advice for decades.

Eat fewer, burn more, lose weight. Simple, right?

Except it's not that simple. Calories only tell us a fraction

of the story. To really understand what's going on, we need to take a step back and look

at the bigger picture. Helping us take this step is biologist Giles Yo. He'll explain why

obsessing over the numbers doesn't work and how we can change the way we approach weight loss.

Everybody knows that you need to count your calories.

There's a certain number of calories that you're supposed to eat.

And as long as you eat less than that, you'll lose weight.

And if you eat like one calorie more than that, you'll put on weight and we're living in this world where like counting

calories is the way that we understand what happens and the calorie number is what determines

our weight. It's not correct if you deal with it the way we do today. In order to lose weight, you need to eat less.

Let's just, if you want to debunk anything, because that's got to be true. You need an energy

deficit in your food if you want to lose weight. And there is no if, ands and buts about that,

because it's a function of physics. So in other words, if you now have a

meal, let's call it a balanced meal, whatever you might actually look at. And if you then suddenly took that meal and says, well, instead of eating all of it, I'm going to eat two thirds of it or half of it in a balanced way in which I'm going to halve the carrots and half the steak and half the potatoes and actually eat that, then ultimately, yes, you will lose weight. So if you

calorie count in a perfectly I'm going to half the carrots and half the steak and half the potatoes and actually eat that, then ultimately, yes, you will lose weight.

So if you calorie count in a perfectly balanced way, yeah, you can actually, you can and you will lose weight.

The issue is that is not the way life functions and people begin to sort of take it to extremes and sort of

worship the calorie and use the calorie as the only piece of information there. Because ultimately,

I think in order to lose weight, you need to continue eating a balanced diet, but eat less of it.

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