Dr. Myers, Explain to Me the Analogy You Use about Storing Calories in the Pantry and the Cellar

First Burn the Calories in Your “Pantry” so You Can Begin to Use Up the Fat Calories Stored in Your “Cellar”
I often use this analogy to help people to understand what they can do to use up the calories they have stored as fat.
Humans store calories in two ways.
First we have a limited amount of storage in an animal form of carbohydrate called glycogen. Glycogen is very similar to starch and it stores calories by linking sugar molecules end to end. This is stored primarily in the liver and muscles so that energy is rapidly available in these organs in case of an emergency. I call these energy storage locations a person’s” pantry” since it is most readily available.
Our bodies prefer to “burn” the energy held in the sugar molecules. Therefore when energy is needed the first location the body goes to for energy is to the “pantry” where the attachments between the sugar molecules are broken and the individual sugar units are released to enter into the body’s machinery as fuel. This is very much like burning the wood in a wood stove for your first selection for heat.
Secondly we all know we store our calories as fat.
After about 2 or 3 days of fasting the body uses up the relatively small amount of glycogen stored in the “pantry” and must seek other fuel sources when it has used up the glycogen stores. This is when the body turns to the fat stored in the fat cells which I will refer to as calories stored in the “cellar”. This is somewhat like turning of the oil furnace once you have used up all of the wood for your fireplace.
In other words, the body does not start to burn fat stored in the long term storage location or the body’s “cellar” for fuel until the short term storage in the “pantry” is depleted of sugar calories.
The reason obesity occurs is that when we do not allow ourselves the use up the calories in the “pantry” to get to the long term storage of and we eat more calories than we use we not only fill up the pantry” to overflowing but as we keep adding more to the fat stores with every meal.
If someone goes on a diet or has bariatric surgery and for a time are not eating as many calories as they are expending , they continue to use all of the calories stored in the “pantry” and then they will begin to burn fat for fuel.
Another term we use when a person burns fat for fuel is ketosis. This is because most of the fat we store is stored as triglycerides which has a backbone of 3 carbon atoms, (thus the part of the word tri), each with attachments or long trailing lengths of stored calories called glycerides. A glyceride is made up of many two carbon fragments also called ketone bodies. When we start to burn fat for fuel the ketone bodies are separated from the rest of the glyceride and the ketone bodies circulate in our blood stream until they are picked up by the body’s energy forming machinery to be runt for fuel.
We even breathe out the ketone bodies and our breath may be fruity or musty when we are in ketosis. Once we are in ketosis and burning fat for fuel we want this to continue so we will lose our fat mass and therefore lose weight.
However if we stop the diet and or otherwise consume allot of carbohydrates the fat burning will stop and before we will not burn any more fat until we will again use up the carbohydrate calories we have just stored in our “pantry” and we can again switch over to burning fat for fuel.
Hopefully now you understand why I explain to my patients they should “use up the calories they are storing in their “pantry” so they will be able to start to burn the fat for fuel they have stored in their “cellar”!