Sat, Feb-29-20, 07:48
|
 |
Senior Member
Posts: 1,901
|
|
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
|
|
Counting Calories is Basically Pointless, So Why Do We Still Do It?
This showed up a few weeks ago on Huff Post - kept meaning to bring it over here, but life kept getting in the way every time I thought of it:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coun...5b6da971d1579dd
The author seems to have a lot of insight into why calories in/calories out isn't nearly as important as the composition of those calories in determining how it affects your weight, but it also goes into the toll constant calorie counting takes on a person mentally.
This is the paragraph that really floored me though:
Quote:
|
Figuring out how many calories are in the foods we eat isn’t an exact science, either. In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows calories on nutrition labels to have a large margin of error — up to 20%. So that means that a 500-calorie muffin you ate for breakfast could really have been anywhere between 400 and 600 calories. When it comes to cooking meals at home, you’d need to measure every tablespoon and weigh every ounce of your ingredients to obtain a somewhat accurate calorie count — and that’s just not worth the effort for many people.
|
In another thread, I posted the ever so slight calorie differences in very similar sized servings of several very common foods which could account for hundreds of calories more than your carefully measured portions supposedly provide - but this... !!!  The fact that even the FDA even allows nutrition labels to be off by up to 20%...  You could carefully, and obsessively weigh/measure, and count the nutrition label declared calorie count for every single item you eat, every single day of your life, and still be over your calorie allowance by several hundred calories every single day. Just one more reason why calorie counting simply doesn't work.
|
Threaded Mode