What we don’t care about at Patchwork (and neither should you)

How many calories are you eating?

A calorie is a good measure for comparing different macronutrients, but it mostly gives us zero context on what you are actually eating or how much.

On the whole we just don’t care that much.

Now if you tie calories to hunger, we can be curious on how hungry you are and potentially why you are suffering from food noise, but in this situation, calories consumed are an outcome and not that actionable.

The ideal world patchwork works towards is getting your body cranking, eating foods that fit well with your biology such that your body can expend excess weight naturally without obsessing over hunger/tracking.

Seeing food as numbers, and telling yourself you can or can’t spend numbers in a day (in the long term) is the epitome of confused eating and is obviously unsustainable.

How much exercise do you do?

Exercise is great for health, toxin degradation and lowering inflammation but is not necessary and in most cases useless for weight loss unless you’re in a metabolic hole and happy to do more damage.

Pontzer 2012 showed that the first 450kcal of additional exercise each day is net 0kcal burned as your body down regulates your metabolism to make up for it.

If you push past this 450kcal, you will burn additional net calories in the beginning, but again your metabolism can down regulate further and become more efficient to handle this.

Then when you stop with the crazy exercise – you’re stuck with a significantly down regulated metabolism which gets stuck as seen in the follow up studies of the biggest loser contestants.

If you want to do exercise – great!

That is awesome, it is so good for you and your heart.

But don’t do it to burn “calories”.

For further reading – look into “the constrained energy model”

Are you eating 1g of protein per lb of bodyweight?

When it comes to determining how much protein you need to build muscle, the science is clear and consistent: more isn’t always better. Let me walk you through the key findings.

In 2017, a comprehensive meta-analysis found that a protein intake of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day is enough to maximize gains in fat-free mass (i.e., muscle). Beyond this level, eating more protein didn’t provide any additional benefits.

A 2022 meta-analysis confirmed this, showing almost identical results with 0.68 grams per pound being optimal for maximizing strength gains. These conclusions came from a review of 45 high-quality studies that controlled for meal frequency and other variables. Across all of them, no study found additional benefits from eating more than 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day.

Even when protein intake was pushed significantly higher—up to 1.3 grams per pound per day—there was no improvement in muscle recovery, reduced soreness, or faster strength recovery. Once your body has the protein it needs, anything extra isn’t being put to good use.

This aligns with decades of research, going back to work by scientists like Dr. Tarnopolsky in the 1980s. Studies on strength athletes and bodybuilders consistently found that protein intakes around 0.7 grams per pound per day were sufficient to maximize muscle growth, strength development, nitrogen balance, and muscle protein synthesis.

The benefits of protein for satiety—how full it makes you feel—also plateau at similar levels. Research shows that eating more than 0.72 grams per pound of body weight per day doesn’t provide any extra advantage when it comes to hunger control.

For those who are overweight or working on weight loss, it’s worth noting emerging research on branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), a type of protein component. BCAAs may induce acute insulin resistance, which can make it harder to lose weight.

Fundamentally if you have a good amount of weight to lose, and you are on a biologically correct diet, your body should have zero need to catabolize your existing muscle mass. That’s where we get you to.

Consuming more protein won’t provide any additional benefits and, in some cases, may complicate weight loss efforts.

Are you juicing enough kale?

If you’re coming from veganism, kale is a superfood. If you’re coming from carnivore, kale is the devil.

We just don’t care. And you shouldn’t either.

Diet cults are unhealthy and we don’t play that game.

Is there context we gather where we’re curious how much insoluble fiber or soluble fiber you are eating – SURE!

But vegetables carte blanche – NOPE.