[schmichael]

My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought.

But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...

[rxtexit]

It is a beyond stupid argument. What is imprecise is not counting calories at all. It is so easy to fool yourself and think you are eating 30% less calories than you really are. You also can get an idea of your micro nutrient breakdown and what you might be lacking.

[XorNot]

People screw it up by trying to measure energy expenditure is the problem I consistently see.

There is never a reason to do this: people do it because they want to eat more, so they want to factor exercise in.

They're basically already sabotaging the process from the outset: the goal is generally weightloss, they have an easy and precise way to track that, and one week of "under eating" isn't going to kill anyone.

[SoftTalker]

People tend to overestimate the amount of calories they can burn through increased activity or exercise.

Walking a mile will burn about 100 calories, give or take. That's not much. A latte from Starbucks or a "healthy" snack such as a granola bar has more.

Good rule of thumb is that you cannot offset a bad diet with exercise for weight loss. Diet is by far more impactful. Exercise has other benefits though, which I'm not intending to dismiss.

[tayo42]

Oh I guess, I try to go towards overestimating calories taken in and underestimate my calories spent.

It does work for me, but being vigilant about it is tedious so I'm open to hearing if people have better ways.

[squillion]

Take a look at these books:

- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?

- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution

The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.

[adrian_b]

Good food in the right proportions is necessary, but not sufficient. The total amount of food is at least as important.

I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.

I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.

Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.

For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.

[squillion]

Well, I simplified.

I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.

The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.

I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.

tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.

[adrian_b]

I agree that calorie counting in the strict meaning is not necessary.

What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.

Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.

What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.

This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.

[surfmike]

Sure, but not counting calories is even more imprecise. For many of us our built-in "calorimeters" are broken and we need to find other ways to limit intake. For example, restricting food by time or by type of food, or calorie counting.

[squillion]

I also read that counting calories is so inaccurate that you may die of starvation or become obese, on the same diet. That is, if you exclusively ate what you measured, and all of it.

Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).

[edanm]

> Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc.

This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.

When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.

[adrian_b]

Counting calories has low accuracy for various reasons, e.g. for variances in the percentages of food digestion and of nutrient absorption, even in the same individual. There are also appearances of low accuracy caused by the fact that the body adjusts the energy allocated for various internal processes in order to compensate the variances in daily energy intake, but this capacity of compensation is finite and it can be overridden by changing sufficiently the daily energy intake, i.e. the calorie count.

Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.

I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.

However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.

The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.

During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).

After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.

For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).

There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.

The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).