5 Reasons Why Calories Don’t Count
These days, you can’t really escape calories, they are everywhere! They are the first thing you see when you turn around a packaged food product to read the back label (often as ‘energy’ in the nutrition chart). You even see them listed in restaurant menus these days.
Do you pay attention to calories? If you do, I say stop!
Of course you will lose weight if you consume fewer calories than you burn. And the opposite is also true: if you consume far more than you need then you will put on weight. But did you know that 80% of dieters regain any lost weight and often more. Yoyo dieting has been shown to cause increased weight gain after the diet has ended:
Facts about calories and why you should not waste your ENERGY (pun intended!) on them
1. The body doesn’t really see or understand calories.
Calorie is a man-made unit to measure, completely unnatural and nothing to do with biology! Calories were originally calculated by placing food in a sealed container surrounded by water, a device called a bomb calorimeter. The food was completely burned and the resulting rise in water temperature was measured. This rise in temperature was determined to be the amount of calories in that food.
How natural does that sound? To me it sounds completely ludicrous to use this as the basis on how our bodies burn food! And Dr Giles Yeo agrees in this talk at Cambridge Univesiry.
This is also not how food manufacturers calculate calories these days. They just estimate the calories based on food tables (created late 19th centrury, around 120 years ago!) and often this estimate can be up to 20% out of the actual amount. Hence, accurately counting calories from food labels is impossible!
2. Calories are not equal.
The same number of calories from different foods can have completely different effects in your body. Calories from a high sugar and high processed carbohydrate diet will play havoc with your blood glucose and insulin levels as well as your hunger hormones. It will also lead to blood sugar crashes which in turn lead to hunger, cravings and overeating the wrong things, while protein and fat (which has double the amount of calories than carbs and protein) will keep you fuller for longer, so you need to eat less.
A fast food meal with a burger, chips and a fizzy drink can be close to 2,000 kcal. That’s one meal alone that most probably leaves you hungry in a couple hours again. When you eat whole foods in a varied diet, 2,000 calories is probably your total daily calorie intake but that’s from of 3 different meals during the whole day.
3. Your gut microbiome can determine how much energy you get from the food you eat.
We all extract calories differently, partly because of your unique gut microbiome that is different from the microbiome of anyone else. In animal experiments, mice that has been colonised with an ‘obese-type’ gut microbiota had an increased ability to absorb energy from the diet and hence put on more fat, compared to mice with a ‘lean-type’ microbiota.
So focusing on feeding your beneficial gut microbes and supporting a healthy gut microbiome is a much better approach than counting calories.
4. How you consume your calories also matters.
From every 100 calories of protein you eat, you only absorb 70% of the calories, i.e. 70 calories, while from sugar you would absorb almost all, around 97% of the calories. If the calories are packed in a fibrous food matrix, such as in whole fruit (as opposed to fruit juice) or corn on the cob (as opposed to tortilla chips) makes a difference on how many calories you are getting from that food. This means that the level of food processing is hugely important in how your body responds to that food.
Cooking and cooling down and then reheating potatoes (as opposed to cooking and eating them immediately) reduces the calorie and glucose load due to the resistant starch that is formed during the cooling process. Resistant starch resists human digestion but feeds your beneficial bacteria.
5. Counting calories is hard, stressful and downright boring!
It’s really hard to follow a low-calorie diet, and people often suffer while on them! They just make you feel hungry, deprived and unhappy. And as soon as the diet is finished, many people can’t wait to go back to their normal eating habits….
…and the yoyoing carries on!
…and the weight keeps creeping up!
And we’ve come back to what I said at beginning of this article.
What to do instead of calorie counting?
Counting calories for health purposes is completely useless – or can be counterproductive, causing unnecessary stress and anxiety and taking all the enjoyment of food and eating.
So… this is what I suggest:
❤️ Stop counting calories that are marked on the label but start counting colours (‘colouries’) and nutrients of foods that don’t have labels. Studies show that tracking colours of food leads to eating more vegetables and less sugary food.
❤️ The more you include real food and vegetables into your diet, the less you have to worry about calories as these kinds of meals are more satiating making you to eat less and they are often lower in calories anyway.
❤️ Count beneficial compounds (e.g. anthocyanins in dark fruit, lycopene in tomatoes, nitrates in leafy greens, flavanols in dark chocolate, betaine in beetroot….) in whole foods that help your body to thrive; these compounds feed your gut microbes, act as anti-inflammatories and communicate with your body and genes, calories don’t!
❤️ Choose quality over quantity, go back to basics and enjoy your food (even treats!) rather than stressing about calories.
(Main image: Dan Gold, 4_jhDO54BYg, Unsplash)
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