Calorie tracking is also about educating yourself about how many calories certain things are, so you can make better decisions.
Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens.
Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.
You develop a sixth sense for how calorific foods are when you track calories consistently. I kept a meticulous food journal for about six months before I realized I didn’t really need to anymore because I had gotten so good at just estimating my totals.
Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol
> most people underestimate the calories in alcohol
Funny, I feel the other way around. I kept hearing about how much calories there are in alcohol, and then when I started calorie counting I didn't find it so high.
Like 6 shots of gin are ~550kcal and enough to get anyone pretty drunk. Unless one is a regular heavy drinker it's not that hard to once in a while budget calories during the day to be able to get a few shots when going out in the evening.
I think when people are mentioning alcohol they typically mean beer or wine - a can of beer is ~150 calories, so have a few of those a night, which isn't at all uncommon in some households, and over a week you're up ~1 lbs.
Haha, I'm from almost-eastern-europe, so pretty much all drinkers I know. (Actually "Borovička" is the most popular. It is not gin, but somewhat similar to gin.)
But I mean, when someone is trying to reduce calorie intake, they don't consume whatever they want to. They need to make some concessions. So instead of a fancy cocktail or a bottle of wine, you can drink some vodka (provided getting intoxicated is the goal).
The idea that a night out with 4-5 pints might clear my daily total requirement for calories was not something I had really considered until my late twenties.
That doesn't match my experience, or most of the stuff I've read. The number of calories I need to hit to lose weight has been pretty constant from my early twenties to late thirties.
That said, I didn't have to be as careful in my twenties because I did a lot more exercise. And that's because I had more free time and opportunity for sports, fewer energy demands, less money for food, and more incentive to walk or cycle places. So I agree it's probably easier for university students to be slim, but I suspect metabolism is not a primary reason.
20s to 40s metabolism isn't that different. 4-5 pints is nearly 1000 calories, and basically nobody has a 1000 cal decline in base expenditure from 20 to 40.
A bigger change, generally, from someone in college and someone in their 40s is their activity levels. Even just considering the amount of walking most folks do on a college campus is a huge difference, compared to someone that gets in their car and drives to and from work.
That's nonsense. A shot of spirits is one unit of alcohol. A pint of strong-ish beer like Stella Artois is 3 units. 550 calories is easily a dinner's worth for a woman of 70kg, or a man that's heavier but trying to gradually lose weight. Either of whom would normally not be too affected by two pints of Stella.
> A pint of strong-ish beer like Stella Artois is 3 units.
No it's not. Stella is 5.2% in the strongest form (some places sell a weaker version that is 4.6%). Both are roughly standard ABVs. At worst, a 20 oz 'pint' of Stella would be ~1.7 units. In most places in the US, a pint is 16 oz, so it would be ~1.4 units. Two pints at worst is slightly over 3 units total.
Maybe I'm misreading it (or it's just wrong) but this NHS webpage very clearly states that a "Pint of higher-strength lager/beer/cider (ABV 5.2%)" has 3 units:
Ah, right. We're both getting it a bit wrong. A 'unit' (10 ml of pure ethanol) isn't actually equivalent to a 'drink'. One 'drink' is considered to be 12 oz of 5% beer, 5 oz of 12% wine, or one 1.5 oz 40% shot. None of those are actually '1 unit', they're all ~1.7 units (~17 ml of ethanol).
I think most folks think in 'drinks' and not 'units'.
So, back to the original comment: 6 shots at most establishments would be ~10 'units' of alcohol. Or, closer to 3.3 20oz pints of beer. 3.3 20oz beers would be enough to get most folks pretty intoxicated if drank quickly; the difference being that 3.3 20oz beers (66oz total!) is a lot harder to drink very quickly than 6 shots, purely by volume of liquid.
Thanks for the clarification. Though on a lighter personal note I'd definitely struggle to drink 6 shots of gin (or tequila for that matter) in the same day. Awful stuff!
What is nonsense? Go to https://alcohol.org/bac-calculator/. Putting in the numbers for a 150lb woman drinking 6 shots over 2 hours gets you 0.21% BAC, which is plenty enough for black out drunk.
I see. That looks a lot like it's applying a Widmark-style model [0], which assumes that absorption is instantaneous, and that drinking starts in a fasted state unaccompanied by food or water. I guess that makes sense if we're literally talking about replacing a whole meal with alcohol. But normally I imagine cutting back on portion sizes so that I can have some drinks later. I don't know about other users but the idea that an 80kg man will have body control or speech impairments after 3 pints (60oz) of beer over 3 hours just feels wrong. Especially if they start after dinner and have a glass of water in the middle.
Yeah good point. It’s saying a bottle of wine gets you to 0.3% which basically is close to dying, so it’s not realistic. Still six shots is equivalent to 6 beers or a bottle of wine, so it still affects you quite a lot.
Oddly, I think how you track can matter here. If you do it as a lookup of "I am eating this, and it says it was this many calories" then you are not likely to remember and develop a sense of how many calories things have. However, if you do it as "I am eating this, I think it has X calories, but looking it up I found it was Y" that can help remember.
I can try to find the studies, but basically, "guess and check" is ridiculously powerful in learning. Is part of what makes flash cards so strong. Just "ask and answer", not so much.
I did Weight Watchers once when I was young. It didn't stick at the time, but it did give me a great deal of perspective that lead to healthy eating and exercise habits that did stick. I worked at Barnes & Noble then, and coming in and realizing that a grande frappuccino wasn't just 'unhealthy' it was all the points. I started reading labels.
Ultimately what worked is what you say, "educating...better decisions" Every diet I tried I concluded the secret sauce was just doing what I already knew - stop eating so much crap and move around more. It was hard yet liberating to get to a point where I wasn't on a diet I was just consciously choosing salads over fries, passing on desert, and not buying junk food so I just don't have it when the compulsion hits. (ADHD meds helped with compulsions, so it wasn't all iron will)
It was like getting sober in a way. I knew, but I also had to want to stop.
This was the huge benefit of weight watchers. I saw hundreds of people utterly shocked they could eat a literal mountain of salad for the same number of “points” (calories/50) as a tiny piece of something sweet or fatty.
They genuinely had no idea, and it changed their lives.
Yes, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that is so bad that it's best to just not do it at all. Soda was the big one for me. There's really no responsible way to drink full-sugar soda, it's just too many calories. Oh, and ice cream.
I actually saw a large observational study recently with the surprising result that people who began eating more ice cream actually lost weight. It's not that ice cream is good for you (obviously), but that people often use it to replace foods that are even worse.
"Healthy" is a pretty loaded word. In the grand scheme of things apples and peanut butter is indeed a pretty healthy snack: good balance of fiber and protein and carbs and healthy fats, and nothing particularly bad like partially hydrogenated oils if you stick to a decent brand of peanut butter. But its not a particularly low-anything snack, so maybe not an efficient use of calories for someone trying to watch their weight. Nuts in general are a pretty caloric food.
Occasionally (usually as a distraction while trying to make a meal plan for the week) I find myself wondering by what we could do differently with the concept of healthy foods that makes nuances like this easier for people to understand, without getting into fad diet territory. I've never had a brilliant idea here because its fundamentally asking the public to have a nuanced understanding in an industry with tons of historical marketing spin, which is... hard. Really hard. Fad diets and diet plans in general exist because someone telling you exactly what to eat is sometimes more effective than trying to give an understanding about why those choices are made.
The reality is that "healthy" is an individualized goal and different foods are a tool for getting to that destination.
100% agree it is about re-educating yourself about calories in food. I wasn't happy with my weight but it was never 'obese': I am 5' 8" and weighed 187 lbs.
Back in November I started tracking calories in the app Cronometer. I lost 35+ lbs down to 151 lbs as of this morning.
Even as a 'relatively healthy' dude, I realized just how bad my perception of calories and macros in food was. So, I totally agree with this.
This was my story too - calorie tracking made me reevaluate my whole diet. Suddenly when I couldn't "just have more" I was getting much more interested in the value of what I was having and the quality improved a lot.
Yes exactly, all that's needed in practice is to learn a handful of simple heuristics and you'll be fine if you follow them. Unfortunately simple does not equate to easy, losing weight is quite hard for most people but the hard part is not knowing what to do, it's actually doing it.
I think that nearly all of the consumer weight loss industry, of which these silly AI photo apps are a small part, is an attempt to turn a simple but hard process into one that's complicated but easy. In practice such shortcuts generally don't work which is why products like these have miserably low success rates.
In many respects calorie counting is an exercise in misinformation induced stupidity, from bad science.
What people fail to realize is the calories on the label aren't the calories they are actually getting. Those on the label are the calories for the substance found by burning it in a lab. Calories absorbed are quite different, and depend on the method of preparation and personal factors. Different methods release different percentage amounts to be taken up by your body in digestion.
Additionally, the standard saying "Calories in Calories Out" only applies when you are healthy, and have no weight or medical issues. The moment you have any kind of metabolism-mediated or norepinphrine-mediated reactions (i.e. allergies, chemical exposures [pfas], etc), that paradigm fails.
If you are getting ravenously hungry or nauseous , you are starving yourself, and this can damage your metabolism, and it won't result in long-term weight loss. You lose metabolically active tissue over fat which adapts to lower BMRs.
When you are eating healthy at the proper times, you aren't getting ravenously hungry.
Anyone who has done Atkin's knows that after they transition into ketosis, they don't get hungry. They eat very high caloric foods, but they eat much less, and the carbohydrates, or excessive protein, and usually so low that the extra fat they eat doesn't get stored as fat. Not everyone can do that though because of issues with kidney, liver, or gallbladder, but the ones that can lose amazing amounts of weight effortlessly. The diet itself is also anti-inflammatory, and cholesterol isn't an issue.
This is going to shock people.
I've weighed my food out to get that daily calorie count. Here's a mindblower. I can eat 2700 calories of fats, and protein in a 60 30 ratio keeping carbs at 20g for the day, and I will on average lose 1-2 pounds a day, and this is done after the transition where water weight drop off has already plateaued (the weight loss isn't water weight, and its mostly not muscle mass either).
Each pound is 3500 calories. My BMR is supposed to be 2200 for my weight and height/body composition. How am I in what amounts to an effective 9700 calorie deficit with no exercise, and no hunger?
I've done this alongside college friends too. They see almost the exact same results. They found it a little annoying because they had to get checked out by a doctor first for those issues, and had to drink a lot more water, eat more fiber, and ensure they got the essential vitamins. Aside from that, the fat just falls off.
> What people fail to realize is the calories on the label aren't the calories they are actually getting. Those on the label are the calories for the substance found by burning it in a lab. Calories absorbed are quite different, and depend on the method of preparation and personal factors. Different methods release different percentage amounts to be taken up by your body in digestion.
Bomb calorimetry is not how calories on a package are determined today. Individual constituent macros are used to determine calorie content, accounting for fiber and thermic effects of digestion. Calorie metrics on foods are largely accurate, when used for caloric intake reasons.
> If you are getting ravenously hungry or nauseous , you are starving yourself, and this can damage your metabolism, and it won't result in long-term weight loss. You lose metabolically active tissue over fat which adapts to lower BMRs.
"Starvation mode" is a myth. If you are in too great of a deficit, sure, you will lose muscle in addition to fat, which can lower your metabolism... but it's not going to somehow damage you forever. If you weigh less, you burn fewer calories... just a fact of life.
> I've weighed my food out to get that daily calorie count. Here's a mindblower. I can eat 2700 calories of fats, and protein in a 60 30 ratio keeping carbs at 20g for the day, and I will on average lose 1-2 pounds a day, and this is done after the transition where water weight drop off has already plateaued (the weight loss isn't water weight, and its mostly not muscle mass either).
Nobody is losing 1-2 pounds of weight a DAY in any sustainable way. You might be able to pull that off for a little bit, but unless you're morbidly obese that just isn't happening for any reasonable period of time.
> Each pound is 3500 calories. My BMR is supposed to be 2200 for my weight and height/body composition. How am I in what amounts to an effective 9700 calorie deficit with no exercise, and no hunger?
BMR is not the same as TDEE. Most people's BMR is substantially lower than their actual caloric expenditure. It would not surprise me at all that you could lose weight at 2700cal/day if you have a BMR of 2200. You are likely in a caloric deficit.
Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens.
Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.