So what happens then?

I am intrigued by the question of, "what happens next?" that came to mind when I was reading Why We Get Fat. I have read extensively in the subject, and I can't remember ever seeing anything about nutrient partitioning as it relates to momentary food consumption.

There was an important part of the book that talked about how in the 1960s overeating and thus obesity became an issue of morality and personality, as opposed to the reality of living in a biological organism and having it respond to the world. Overeating was always a moral failing to me. It was always a question of personal responsibility, always an issue of my own flawed decisions. But if you take one step back, you realize that whatever body you inhabit still responds like a biological organism to stimuli. As much as you might want to, you can't control how quickly your heart beats. Try as you might, you can't will your food to digest faster. And just as similarly, you cannot control what your body does with food once you ingest it. The whole biological organism takes over, and your input is off the table.

So taking another step back, removing the question of morality and deadly sins from the picture, we are left with a question. We know calories are a measurement of heat, and a method of transferring energy from an edible substance to a body. Okay. We know that when we digest food, those calories are "absorbed" by the body. But once they are absorbed, where do they go? Yesterday I talked about nutrient partitioning and the ideal of "saver" and "spendthrift" bodies. We vaguely have the idea that some bodies store fat easier and some people eat as if they had a hollow leg, but what exactly is happening? What is causing some bodies to store half their calories? What mechanism makes other people able to eat a bowlful of ice cream every night and not see the effects? Thinner people have been shown, unarguably, to move more than heavier people. Fidgeting, walking, bigger body movements, more exercise, whatever. They move more because they have more energy in their cells and thus are able to move more, but WHY do they have more energy in their cells? What mechanism determines that their cells get the energy that has been transferred from food, instead of that energy being stored for future use?

This isn't easily answered by throwing out the word genetics. Genes are constantly being turned on and off in the body. And if it IS genetics, then what's going on? Is there a gene that determines that fat gets stored in cells last, as opposed to first? Can we switch that on? For people whose storage genes have been expressed, can we turn them off again?

What does it take to turn on the nutrient partitioning genes? How do we influence that? We know that ingestion of carbs influences the release of insulin, and the release of insulin helps store calories as fat. We're learning, through Crossfit and other more aggressive, more intense exercise styles, that with variable training demands comes different uses of the metabolic pathways. How do we couple those ideas together for people whose bodies want to store and rest? How do we quantify that so we know to what degree it's necessary to control those inputs?

That's what I want to know.