| "It doesn't matter if they are exact for a given person so long as the labels are consistent. They are sufficiently consistent." You argue this with literally no data, and all available data says the opposite. The people charged at the FDA with coming up with the mechanism for these labels disagree with you, and have found 30-50% variance for a ton of foods. "I'm curious - have you tried losing weight, and is this from personal experience? " I can lose weight fine (and i'm actually at a normal BMI, FWIW :P), and i don't violate the laws of thermodynamics. However, counting calories from labels was the most useless thing i could ever do. I literally burned 1500+ calories in exercise a day, and ate less than 1500 calories by nutrition label calculations, and did not lose weight. I tried a variety of different foods/etc. I'm a scientific guy, i have logs of data :P
I didn't cheat, kid myself, whatever. It turns out, for various medical reasons i won't get into, i am not in the "vast majority" for whom these labels are targeted, and so the numbers on them are simply wrong by about 20-30% for me (this is factual, and was actually part of a controlled study). The out calculation was accurate enough (IE the exercise part of it). But as you can imagine, when trying to lose weight, 20-30% in variance matters a lot. You can argue "i'm outside the norm", but i suspect, based on what i saw, that i am not. |
I was not fitbiting or any crazy mechanism to count getting up from the couch as exercise, or counting anything other than the actual exercise calories as "calories burned". Thus, it should have been a significant underestimate due to resting calories burned, etc.
In any case, it was running 5 miles a day, as reported by GPS, at 8:15 pace (which is roughly 120-150 calories per mile, depending who you believe, but i took the low side), and then running 1000 calories on an elliptical (which is about 1-1.5 hours at high resistance and fast pace, depending on pace).
The elliptical i used was one which slightly underestimates calorie count (by about 3%, at least according to two peer-reviewed studies), unlike most, which overestimate (by about 15-20%).