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Calorie counting – Helpful or not?

Calorie counting – Helpful or not?

 

Foundational health principle: Nutrition

 

What is a calorie?

It’s a measure of the amount of energy in a food or drink.

 

Is calorie counting helpful or not?

Calories are only useful for telling you how much energy you are eating. Calories tell you noting about the QUALITY of the food or drink you are consuming. Food is made up of many things not just calories. There are the obvious things like proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fibre, sugar. Then there are vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, enzymes, co-enzymes, co-factors and probably things we haven’t even discovered yet. There is also all the additives, colourings, preservatives, flavour enhancers etc that go into many foods these days which is a whole different topic all together. If you only focus on counting calories, you may be missing out on important nutrients or consuming things that aren’t good for you.

 

Overall calorie counting isn’t helpful for a number of reasons.

2. A calorie is a calorie.

  • 2000 calories of pizza is the same as 2000 calories of vegetables
  • Which has more nutrients and what can your body use more of?

 

2. How healthy are you?

  • If you stick to a calorie limit, you might lose weight, but how healthy are you?
  • If you ate more calories of healthier food, you would be healthier and consequently would burn fat more efficiently and naturally lose weight
  • What’s more important, your overall weight, or your health?
  • What good is being a certain weight but being sick, tired and lethargic all the time, having no energy to play with your kids, having poor concentration or poor libido
  • I always say “you don’t lose weight to get healthy, when you get healthy you will lose weight”

 

3. Calorific availability

  • Is the number of calories you can extract from a food versus the total amount of calories in the food
  • Example: pure white sugar’s calorific availability is 99-100% because no digestion occurs, it is instantly absorbed
  • Calorie counting makes no sense because when you process food you get different calorific availability

 

Examples:

  1. Eat some fresh corn and the next day you see corn in your poo. Therefore, you didn’t absorb or use much of the calories of the corn. But if you process that same corn (no not the corn from your poo) into corn meal and make corn bread, you will use more of the calories
  2. Celery increases in calories when cooked. A stick of celery might be 6 calories but when cooked it goes up to about 30 calories

 

Food variety

  • When people calorie count, they tend to stick to eating the same foods all the time
  • This can lead to food intolerance and missing out on nutrients from a variety of food

 

Summary

Calories are just a measure of energy. They say nothing of the quality of food.

Eating healthier food that may have more calories will improve your health in the long run and help you get more efficient at burning fat.

The same food can have different calorific effects on your body depending what you do with it.

Counting calories tends to lead to people eating the same foods all the time and not getting a variety of foods and nutrients

 

 

 

Yours in good health

 

Brad Corbett

Osteopath

Personal trainer

Holistic exercise & lifestyle coach