Counting calories is by far the most overrated concept in the diet industry. Every diet you can think of till today is based on the simple yet stupid idea of calorie counting. In her 1918 book “Diet and health”  Lulu Hunt Peters introduced this concept and insisted that you should eat everything keeping in mind the calories, so you don't eat a slice of bread but you eat 100 calories of bread. “Diet and Health” was the first book on dieting to become a bestseller.

Even after 100 years, we are still stuck in that same place. Every year new diets come and go leaving us fat or even fatter. Some of you must be new to dieting, starting the trendy keto or paleo. Why not? After all its ‘IN’ these days. I have no doubt all newbies must be seeing some fabulous results. Even dieticians, trainers and some experts, recommend restricting calorie and to some extent,  it does work then why bother?

Because the whole concept is flawed and it won't give you the results you are looking for at least not in the long run. Let's see what the whole calorie counting concept is and why it doesn't work?

What is a Calorie?

Scientifically speaking, a calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. It’s just a unit of energy measurement. When you eat or drink something your body converts it to energy. One unit of that energy is one calorie.

Depending on your age, weight, height and activity level different people require a different amount of calories to keep their bodies working. The bare minimum amount of calories your body needs is called your Basal Metabolic Rate(BMR).

Also Read: Top 15 Weight Loss Myths

Calorie Counting Concept

The calorie counting method works on the simple equation of calorie in minus calorie out. This is from where you get the “Eat Less Move More” mantra which says if you eat fewer calories than required by your body and exercise to burn more calories you will create a negative energy balance. Therefore, your body will have no other option but to use the excess stored energy (fat) to create the energy balance in your body.

Ohh!! This seems logical, just a basic subtraction equation. Yeah!! In an ideal world, with the ideal situations, this does work but for our body which runs on so many biochemical processes, this seems pretty much an exaggeration. After all even the best machines designed by us are not 100% efficient, there are losses. A calorie consumed is not equal to a calorie absorbed. Even the most sophisticated equipment or tests can’t find out how much of the calories consumed did we actually absorb.

Let me give you an example, to lose 1 pound (approx .5kg) you need to burn 3500 calories, if you create a calorie deficit of 500 calories every day you must lose 1 pound in a week and so on. But does that really happen? You might initially lose more than even a pound but after a few weeks you will notice the rate of weight loss goes on decreasing and at a certain point it won't budge even by 0.1 pound. How did this happen?

A Calorie Is A Calorie

A calorie is not a calorie. For god’s sake stop saying that !!! If that was the case you could drink a dozen diet cokes a day and still have consumed zero calories. Calorie from different food are different and your body reacts differently to them. A calorie from a broccoli cannot be the same as a calorie from a packet of chips.

For a matter of fact, the calories from fat, carbs and protein are different too. Fat is dense, it has more calories per weight than both carbohydrates and proteins.

Also Read: Top 10 Quick Pocket-Friendly Healthy Snacks

It’s Not About Just Calories But Hormones Also

The fact that calorie counting completely ignores is that energy balance within our body is not just an in and out equation there are several other factors involved in the form of hormones. And ignoring this particular factor(hormones) is surprising!! Because every single physiological process that occurs in our body depends on hormone. When we feel hungry, whether the calorie consumed is burned or stored every single thing is determined by hormones !!!

Leptin: This hormone is produced by fat cells and secreted in the bloodstream. It is the hunger suppressing hormone, it reduces appetite and also manages the stored body fat. It depends on body fat, the more body fat the more leptin your body has. Still people who are obese don’t eat less that's because their sensitivity to leptin reduces.

Ghrelin: This does just the opposite of leptin. It is the hunger inducing hormone. When your body is low on energy ghrelin rises and tells your brain that you are hungry. When you start eating it’s level starts falling down.

Insulin: It is a hormone produced by pancreas and regulates carbohydrates and the metabolism of fat. Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. When we eat, insulin rises, telling the body to store some food energy as body fat and when we don't eat, the insulin level decreases, telling the body to burn this body fat. Higher than usual insulin levels tell our body to store more body fat and thus making us obese.

Growth Hormone: Pituitary gland in the brain produces growth hormone. This hormone helps build muscle and bone, it also affects our metabolism. Obese people have low growth hormone.

So, you see there are hormones controlling when you take in calories, how those calories will be used whether they will be stored as fat or used up as energy, how your metabolism will work( will you burn more calories at rest or less) and even how your body fat will be distributed.

Obesity Is Hormonal Imbalance Not Calorie Imbalance

As Dr.Jason Fung from Diet Doctor says, “The main problem of obesity is not the calories we eat, but how they are spent. And the main hormone we need to know about is insulin.”

The 1993 Diabetes Control and Complications Trial which was conducted over a period of 30 years gave high and standard doses of insulin to 1441 participants. These patients suffered from type 1 diabetes, although the researchers were able to control the blood sugar in high dose group to a better extent than the standard dose group, the high dose group gained more weight than the standard group. Some patients had major weight gain. All the patients almost had similar weight before the study.

So, if your body has high insulin levels your brain is automatically set to gain weight. Even if you restrict your calories now the body will just decrease the energy expenditure slowing your metabolism but you will still gain weight.

The key is to reduce your insulin levels. Your insulin levels are high because either you eat food that cause your insulin levels to rise more than normal or you eat food that even though does not make your insulin level too high but since you eat too often it does not let your insulin level come back down.

Also Read: Skinny Fat: Is Getting Skinny Same As Getting Healthy?

Effects of Calorie Restriction

Our body always tries to maintain balance and it resists any change. Many studies have shown that when we start restricting calories all of a sudden our blood leptin levels fall, increasing our appetite and slowing our metabolism. (1)

In the short term you may get some results from calorie restriction but there are long-term effects of dieting. According to a 2017 study, even one year after dieting, the levels of leptin, peptide YY, cholecystokinin, insulin, ghrelin, gastric inhibitory polypeptide, and pancreatic polypeptide differ from their normal values . A diet-induced weight loss causes long-term changes in appetite gut hormones, which causes increased appetite and weight regain.

It has been found that between one third and two thirds of low calorie dieters in the study regain more weight than they lost initially and resort to a cycle of weight loss followed by regaining the lost weight, followed by again dieting, and so on.

If you are thinking of following a weight loss cycle( dieting, regaining weight and again dieting), the Summermatter Cycle describes how, initially during dieting, the energy expenditure of muscle reduces. Thus when more food becomes available, body favors the depositing of fat.

Quality Of Calorie Counts

A recent study published in JAMA headed by  Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, consisted of 600 obese and overweight people. The study was conducted to see the effect of a healthy low-carb diet and a healthy low-fat diet on weight loss.

The result shows that there was no significant difference between the weight change due to low-fat or low-carb diet. In fact, the common assumption that every person should be given a diet plan according to their genes and ability to metabolise carbs and fat did not hold true. There was no genetic effect on weight loss as long as people consumed a healthy diet full of veggies, fruits and unprocessed food.

There was no restriction on the amount of calories they consumed. Members of both groups were given classes with dietitians who trained them to eat nutrient rich food and unprocessed whole foods cooked at home. Soft drinks, fruit juice, muffins, white rice and white bread are technically low in fat, for example, but the low-fat group was told to avoid those things and eat foods like brown rice, barley, steel-cut oats, lentils, lean meats, low-fat dairy products, quinoa, fresh fruit and legumes. The low-carb group was trained to choose nutritious foods like olive oil, salmon, avocados, hard cheeses, vegetables, nut butters, nuts and seeds, and grass-fed and pasture-raised animal foods.

The study not only changed their diet but also their relationship with food. Participants avoided eating while watching TV or in cars, they started cooking at home and eating with family.

The study strongly suggests that it is not calorie that matters but the amount of nutrients in that calorie. (2)

The Verdict

As people are getting aware and research is making progress, it is becoming quite evident that we have been doing something really wrong by obsessing over calories. I do believe that eating even healthy unprocessed food every half an hour cannot be good for our body. How can excessive eating be good even if it's healthy? But limiting food to merely a term calorie can also not be the solution. We need to start looking at our food differently, not just in terms of taste or calorie but in terms of the nourishment it provides our body.

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