Calorie counting - a healthy habit?
In the world of healthy habits, we often hear about workouts, mindfulness, sleep, recovery, and nutrition. And truth is - a truly healthy life is a nice combination of all of these and much more. A big part of healthy living is understanding what we should actually eat in order to optimize our health and wellbeing.
Lychee Martini (163 kcal), medium fries (337 kcal), tuna cones (278 kcal each)
Whether your goal is to lose weight, maintain, or even gain weight, you would most likely have come across the concept of calorie counting. There is a lot of debate around calorie counting and its usefulness in health and weight management and for a good reason. A truly healthy and balanced diet with which one can maintain a healthy body weight and body composition should not require one to conduct calorie counting. The problem here is that many of us actually are not maintaining a healthy and balanced body weight and there are millions and millions of people across the world trying to find the next magic pill for weight loss.
It’s not about WHAT but about HOW MUCH
Many of modern society’s health issues, such as obesity, are not happening because of the actual foods we eat – but rather because of the amounts we eat! We simply eat too much which leads to excess caloric intake. Those extra calories are then stored as fat in your body and over time you’re likely to face issues maintaining healthy body weight (unless you start restricting your caloric intake).
Why does it matter?
Obesity is linked with several lifestyle diseases – to get started you can, for example, read more about the connection between obesity and cardiovascular disease in this study.
As maintenance of healthy body composition is one of the most important healthy habits for a long and healthy life, we need to approach the subject sustainably instead of forcing certain diets or telling everyone to eat cabbage and broccoli alone for the rest of our lives. Therefore, keeping focus on maintaining healthy body weight and body composition through a mindful approach to the amount of food we eat daily (and its calorie content) is more important than denying certain food groups or banning all processed food items on the planet.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big proponent of a whole-food-based diet rich in fiber. But you can surely enjoy a well-deserved treat or a burger once in a while if you’re mindful about its calorie contents and adjust your daily activities and other meals accordingly.
Calorie counting equips you with the tools to eat mindfully
So why is calorie counting something that everyone should try as a part of their healthy habits? Simply because it teaches us mindfulness of the amounts of energy we actually eat each day. It teaches us how many calories are actually in a Snickers bar (241) or in 500 grams of strawberries (165). Or in a Big Mac (550) vs a chicken salad (sans dressing) (200). These are just some of the important examples to highlight the vast difference between the energy content of some food items. So yes, in the long term your food choices will have a massive impact on your body weight and body composition. This is not to say that you cannot have your favorite treats such as Pizza, a glass of wine, or a Snickers bar every now and then. It is simply to highlight that it will likely be better for us to eat with the basic concept of 80/20 - 80% of your calories from whole food sources (vegetables, fruits, dairy, poultry, meat, etc) and 20% can be a bit more freely chosen treats.
One Shake Shack meal is almost full day’s worth of calories for a grown man
I love food. To the fullest. Above is an example of my treat meal in New York a few years ago. I tracked the calories with MyFitnessPal and realized that the amount of calories I ate from that one meal is basically enough for me for the whole day. This is a good example of the 20% I mentioned earlier. No, I did not eat anything else during that day to balance out the overall caloric intake.
Protein bar & Coke Zero = 210 kcal
Learning the energy amount of the most common food items in your daily life through the habit of calorie counting helps you lead a more balanced lifestyle where you can still eat your favorite foods occasionally without destroying your healthy lifestyle or your body composition. It is all about balance. Why? Because simply excluding certain foods from our diet will increase the risk of rebound dramatically (read: binge eating) - so why not live your life in a balanced way and enjoy the occasional treats too?
Obstacles and hurdles and how to overcome them
The most common reasons people give why they do not track calories are:
Too laborious
Hate the food scale
Cannot do that for long term
This is understandable. Whichever healthy habit you are building, it will be hard and it will require some effort in the beginning. The same goes for calorie counting. But here is the fun part: when you actually build the habit it literally becomes unnoticeable! Measuring the foods you cook at home on your food scale will be a natural part of your cooking. Tracking calories eaten from a packaged food item is also very easy through the barcode scanning functionality many of the calorie counting apps currently have as standard. Simple and quick!
From weight loss’ perspective it is imperative that you are in a caloric deficit. Simply put: you cannot lose weight if your caloric intake is equal or larger than your caloric expenditure. The only way to really know if you are in a caloric deficit is to eat a certain amount of calories daily for a week or so and check whether your weight changes over that time. If it does not then likely you are NOT in a caloric deficit and need to adjust your calories slightly downwards. And obviously the only way to do this is by counting the calories you eat.
Want to get in shape? Count your calories and ensure you are in a caloric deficit.
How to get started?
Buy a food scale such as this one.
Download a tracking app such as MyFitnessPal
Start tracking your calories - every single bite :)
Track the progress of your new habit through Healthzilla app. It will automatically count your calorie deficit and track your progress, should you select weight loss as your primary health goal.
In summary – no matter what your goals are in terms of your body composition or weight management, do give calorie counting a try. It makes you more mindful of the amount of energy different foods actually have – there are some intriguing learnings here. Do it for a month and if your goal is not to lose weight just analyze the results and adjust accordingly. If your goal is to lose weight then I strongly recommend you continue counting your calories by setting a specific caloric limit per day which allows your body to burn the deficit calories from the fat storages of your body. I will be writing in detail about flexible dieting principles soon.