Don’t count calories
It’s a pointless exercise
As you’ve hopefully come to believe by now, weight loss depends on diet, not exercise. One of the most common approaches to measuring diet is by measuring the calorific value of food consumed against energy expended.
However, calorie counting is one of the most pointless exercises you can undertake. Not only is it impossible to measure calories accurately, it is also a meaningless measure.
A calorie (technically a “kilocalorie”, but always referred to as a “calorie” in the context of food) is a measure of the energy required to heat some water. The assumption is that each gram of your food, whether carbohydrate, fat or protein, contains a specific amount of energy that can be expressed in calories. If you consume fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight.
Calories in
Just how many calories are you consuming in your food? As the energy densities of the three macronutrient groups vary, you can’t simply weigh your food. You’ll need to know how much of each group you’re consuming. Fortunately, Nutrition Facts labels also include the calorie count for anything that came out of a packet. You’ll have to Google for fresh produce.
But what if you’re eating out? Restaurants don’t exactly list calorie counts. This is where apps like MyFitnessPal come in, with an incredibly comprehensive database of foods you can eat anywhere—but only if you’re in the US. Calorie databases for India are not comprehensive—we don’t eat mostly from chain restaurants—nor can they possibly capture the incredible diversity of foods in India. We are, after all, the country of “99 varieties dosa,” all variations of a single dish.
Spend a week with a calorie-based food logging app and you’ll possibly stop eating because you can’t deal with the tedium of data entry, or more likely end up feeding it garbage data.
Calories out
The flipside is measuring how much you burn. How does anyone know that? The theory is that if you can take enough metrics of the body, like the heart rate through the day, the steps moved, maybe skin temperature, you can build a reasonable approximation for how much energy you must be expending. A smartband congratulating you for burning more calories than usual does work as a motivation factor, but you need to acknowledge it for what it is: a feel good number that has no correlation to reality, especially when contrasted with the distinct data source for calories consumed (your food logs).
Calories in ≠ calories out
Calories are like startup valuations. The theory is that a startup’s potential can be guessed in advance, and an investment is a well measured bet on what the return of investment will be. In practice, if this were true, there would be no reason for venture capital—any bank could make loans. The reality is that startup valuations are little more than wild guesses that fail more often than succeed.
Likewise with calorie arithmetic. Even within a single food group, a gram of glucose and a gram of fructose take different metabolic pathways before they are burnt for energy. The fructose may be stored as fat today and used for energy tomorrow, while the glucose is almost always used up immediately. Besides, your body doesn’t burn calories. It burns glucose sourced from glycogen stores, only turning to fat when the glycogen runs out. Your body has distinct priorities for the type of food molecule to burn.
Using calorie deficit for weight loss is like assuming startup success hinges on funding alone, with no concern for what the startup actually does with the money. Is money important? Sure. Is it all that matters? Certainly not.
Don’t count calories. There are better ways to measure food intake that are both useful and less tedious.
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
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