Calorie Counting: Yay Or Nay?
I’m seeing a LOT of calorie counting as of late. After a year and a half of COVID-19 and the stay-at-home munchies that followed, the pants are snug…or even worse–no longer fit!
When it comes to weight, we’ve been taught to look at calories. In simplistic terms, if you eat less calories and/or burn more than your basal metabolic rate (the calories your body burns at rest), you should lose weight. Thus, when you do the opposite, you should gain weight…right?!
With this old-school way of thinking hammered into our heads, when we want to lose weight, we turn to our computers, smartphones, apple watches and other dietary software analysis programs to track calories, macronutrients and workouts.
While this approach can be helpful at times, I also think there’s a MUCH better way, and here’s why:
Calorie counts can be off by 30% or more - a calorie is a unit of energy that is defined by the amount of heat that’s needed to raise the temperature of water by one degree. Although seemingly precise, these numbers can be off by up to 50%! Aside from the fact that the FDA permits inaccuracies up to 20%, the type of food you eat, how it’s prepared and each individual’s unique digestive system ALL dictate the caloric density of a given foodstuff.
Calories are not equal across the board - a 250 calorie Snickers bar is not going to be processed nearly the same as 250 calories coming from a plate of broccoli. Quite simply: real food is digestible and revs the metabolism (burning calories in the breakdown process), whereas calories coming from highly processed (and nutritionally void) food slows everything down and triggers a hormonal cascade that increases fat storage (yikes!).
It sets you up for binges - what happens on the days you aren’t tracking? For most people, these turn into “cheat days”, aka free-for-alls. As a Nutritionist who’s guided over 1,000 women towards weight loss, I can say (with confidence) that cheat days DON’T work. First of all, they set you up for categorizing foods as either “good” or “bad”. Secondly, they can easily pack in thousands of EXTRA calories that will be nearly impossible to make up for later in the week, thus negating all of your weight loss efforts.
It is far removed from intuitive eating - tracking calories naturally leads you down the path of relying on numbers (which are inaccurate anyways!), rather than your true physiological signals of hunger, to tell you what you can/should eat next.
Although calorie counting does help you get your bearings and understand what a portion should look like, there’s a better way–that’s much less stressful, more fun, and in alignment with what your body truly needs.
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