3 Reasons To Ditch Calorie Counting

“What most people don’t know is that food is not just calories; it’s information. It actually contains messages that communicate to every cell in our body. Our gene expression, our hormones, our immune system, our gut flora, our brain chemistry, our muscle mass, our metabolism and more are all changed with every single bite of food.”

— Dr. Mark Hyman, Medical Director, Cleveland Clinic

Most people have been taught that losing weight is a matter of simple math. Cut calories — specifically 3,500 calories, and you'll lose a pound. But experts are now learning that this strategy is antiquated, misleading, and even damaging when it comes to building the body you want.

Food is our fuel. Calories are units of energy, but they don’t tell you anything about a food’s nutrient density or value. Think of it this way, you wouldn’t fill up a Ferrari with unleaded gasoline, right? A study published by Dr. David Ludwig (a professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) suggested that a poor-quality diet could result in weight gain even when it was low in calories.

The truth is you can eat the exact same number of calories as someone else, yet have very different outcomes when it comes to your weight. How your body processes calories depends on three critical factors:

1. Your gut microbiome. You may think you have your food all to yourself, but you're actually hosting a dinner party for an entire community of microbes living within your gut. Trillions of organisms live in your digestive tract — roughly 3-5 pounds of them to be exact — and this community of microbes helps break down food and extract energy from it. New research is finding that the predominant types of organisms in your gut may influence how many calories your body absorbs from food. That means the makeup of your microbiome not only plays an important role in digestion but research indicates that your it could also play a major role in your weight. The best way to create a healthy and diverse microbiome is to eat a plant-based, whole-food diet.

2. Your metabolic ‘set point’.  Maybe you’ve followed countless diet plans only to notice your weight always creeps back up to where it started. Or maybe through the ebbs and flows of life, the number on the scale normally hovers around, give or take a few pounds. The set point theory suggests that your weight may go up or down temporarily but will ultimately return to its normal set range. This set point reflects several factors, including your genes, your environment, and your behaviors. According to Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, your set point is why you might find your weight plateauing even if you are diligently dieting and exercising, and also why 96% of people who lose a large amount of weight regain it. In order to reset our set point to a lower level, experts recommend going slowly with weight loss goals and avoiding steep calorie restrictions. A gradual 10 percent step-down weight loss approach with persistent maintenance at each stage can help prepare the body to accept the new lower set point. That means you could simply forgo that late night snack, rather than obsess over tallying up every day’s worth of calories.

3. The type of food you eat. In order to cut calories, many people resort to things like 100 calorie snack packs, diet soda, and fat free yogurt. These foods might be lower in calories, but are usually higher in sugar or artificial sweeteners which compromise your metabolism and make you more susceptible to weight gain and glucose sensitivity.

In a study of 154 countries that looked at the correlation of calories, sugar, and diabetes, scientists found that adding 150 calories a day to the diet barely raised the risk of diabetes in the population, but if those 150 calories came from soda, the risk of diabetes went up by 700 percent.

The takeaway? Not all calories are created equal. Calories are units of energy, not nutrition. The same number of calories from different types of food can have very different biological effects. As Dr. Mark Hyman put it: "What most people don't know is that food is not just calories; it's information. It actually contains messages that communicate to every cell in our body. Our gene expression, our hormones, our immune system, our gut flora, our brain chemistry, our muscle mass, our metabolism and more are all changed with every single bite of food.”

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