This sort of result has been showed repeatedly. We really need more (and better) nutrition education. The level of obesity and overeating in our society is astounding. I'd be surprised if most people could even implement basic calorie counting.
I suspect part of the problem is that if anyone ever admits to skipping breakfast they're shamed and guilted about as much as if they'd started the day by doing lines of cocaine. The breakfast nazis are out in force, and they push this idea on people when they're very young (even though breakfast is mostly a scam made to sell sugary grains).
Anecdata, but I only started to lose weight and feel healthier when I switched to only eating when I was hungry. Most of my eating had been to adhere to US social norms or combat boredom (while not great, diet soda worked to fight the latter until I got used to the idea that I didn't need to be consuming stuff). For all the "education" out there, "you don't have to eat if you're not hungry" is shockingly rare advice.
It's just mentally hard to do. Like sleep, sex and other physical needs, food is wired pretty deeply in our heads, and changing our behavior in regards to it takes a lot of mental and emotional effort. And most people have a lot of other things more immediately important in their lives that take mental effort, so they eat more than they should, even if they know the consequences.
You either cook everything yourself and weigh every ingredient. Or you buy totally packaged meals (Lite 'n Easy, etc), or you buy fast food (And even then, the calorie counts in fast food are... inaccurate at best).
If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate.
While it's good to be aware just how energy dense foods are (like muffins... aka breakfast cakes) there is no method that I'd consider both achievable for the average person to consistently do AND accurate enough to be considered 'counting' as opposed to washy estimates.
You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent.
The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake.
The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem.
If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze.
With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.
So for me it is a very small minority of food that I can't get an exact number on and I've been weighing and entering things enough that for those edge cases I can usually do a decent job at eyeballing serving sizes.
Calories are never an exact numerical science anyways, even if you did weigh everything precisely. You really don't care if you have a margin of error of 50-200 calories if you are lower than your goal most days. You still loose weight.
I've been using MyFitnessPal on and off throughout the years and have always been able to consistently gain or loose weight (depending what I am aiming for) even when relying highly on estimates. This is just my experience though.
uh, why not? i'll do it right now for you off the top of my head, which anyone can do after they look them up for a while.
100g of white bread = ~ 250 calories / 2 tbsp of mayo = ~ 200 calories / 4 oz of deli turkey = ~ 100 calories / 1 tbsp mustard = ~ 10 calories / 2 slices (2 oz.) of cheese = ~ 240 calories / 2 slices of tomato = ~ 20 calories / 1 slice of lettuce = ~ 5 calories / 1 bag of chips = ~ 280 calories (probably on the bag)
there. 1105 calories total. is that perfect? no, but is that useful? yes, a whole lot more useful than "it's too hard, so i might as well not do it."
as an aside: this is why people are fat. a sandwich and a bag of chips is insulin-spiking can easily be over 1k calories, and most people would probably guess it's 300 calories, and 'not fattening', whatever that means.
throw in a soda and you've got a recipe (literally) for disaster.
How is that counting? That's my point.
You're getting a vague idea of what you're eating but it is in no way calorie counting.
I've had far more success just keeping a simple food diary and going "wow I eat a lot of cakes" and cutting them out.
I have a theory that 'calorie counters' are shockingly inaccurate (one other poster mentioned a 25% margin is 'fine'!) and their success comes from the very act of attempting to quantify what they're eating being a defacto food diary.
The point remains, though, that it really doesn't matter how accurate or precise you are, simply that you're gathering data and using it to make measurable changes in your diet.
Your way is perfectly fine too! The nice things about calories (just like money) is that they're a universal medium of comparison, so you can compare your cakes to steaks. But if you simply want to look at a category and say "I am eating N of these, I need to eat N-1 to lose the weight", that's perfectly functional!
The thing I hate is when people make totally non-empirical diet changes, and then lament that they aren't losing weight. You just have to measure and adjust.
The above poster talking about the deli sandwich mentally breaking down all the ingredients... I'm happy to be proven wrong but I simply don't believe you can do that with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I suppose this is turning in to quite a pedantic argument about the definition of "count". I'd call what everyone has said they're doing more accurately a "calorie estimating food diary".
My initial post was genuinely curious about how people can be so accurate when eating foods from a variety of non pre-measured sources. It turns out they're not being accurate.
You are just overestimating both the difficulty and the degree of accuracy required.
While at the same time, still relying on even more vague terms, to determine if you ate too many cakes etc (as per your other example).
I can't believe people are defending such poor data collection practices. You'd be all over it if someone else was selling their results based on such inaccurate data but in this case it's fine?
If you're going to call it counting you need to be accurate.
The mechanism is simple: they reduce their caloric intake, because they can track how much they eat. More or less: it doesn't have to be perfect, nor is it "atrocious" if it isn't. And you can easily just round the numbers up ("I calculated 500 for this thing, but let's say it's 600 just to be safe").
You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless. Or that people only eat complex multi-part meals with no nutricion information, and have to gauge everything from zero all the time.
It turns out like everything, that's a tricky thing to study. When people are aware that their meals are going to be scrutinised they change what they eat for the duration of the study.
I wasn't able to find a recent study that investigates people's ability to estimate calories and the variance in their estimations.
> You seem to believe that any kind of "back of the envelope" / "ballpark" calculation is useless.
I do think that anything above a "good, bad, not sure" estimate is probably going to be so inaccurate as to not be worth the effort. However the act of trying to count calories itself promotes a mindfulness of what we're eating and that can induce change.
Accurate or inaccurate is only meaningful related to the task and its requirements. 25% can be totally acceptable margin of error for the task. We use even bigger margins in lots of ventures (determining which startup will have a succesful exit to fund, for one).
And yes, the mere act of quantifying helps. But quantifying with even 25% error is still better than just writing down "ate 5 cakes", especially if one doesn't eat too many repeats of the same food.
Not sure in what reasoning one can complain for a method with 25% margin of error (say), but be OK with a method like "5 cakes" which still applies quantification, just in an even more vague and hazy sense.
5 cakes is much worse than 5 carrots, for example, but with merely writing down how many you ate, you have to rely on a far more relative guesstimation of their relative harm than you would be if you were counting their calories and being off by 25%).
One method implies rigour and the other one is honest about what it is setting out to do
Everybody said it's a quick ballpark figure / back of the envelope style calculation.
The mere fact "cake bad, carrots good" everybody knows. It's not much information concerning "Did I ate too much today?". One can have a caloric budget and stay within it (more or less) without having to be perfect in measurements (or sticking to carrot because it's easier to know its light).
No, that's exactly calorie counting in the real world.
This is not advanced math or chemistry lab, and you don't need to get to even 80% accuracy for everything. Just to be consistent and get a good feel.
If you're going to get hung up on the term calories let's call them approximate calories (or ACs) instead. If I eat mostly the same foods all the time I can use reasonable guesses to get the ACs in each food. Foods I eat infrequently will probably have a greater deviation between my ACs and the actual calories but that doesn't matter much because I don't eat them very often. Foods I eat frequently will probably have less error and the error doesn't matter much as long as I'm consistent with the numbers.
Let's say I decide I want to lose weight. I can start off with the general rule that for a male of my age, build and activity levels I need about 2500 calories a day to maintain weight. Since I want to lose some weight I'll set my daily AC allowance at 2000. After a couple weeks I check how the weight loss is going. Am I losing weight too slowly? Drop the ACs a bit. Am I losing weight too quickly? Increase the ACs a bit. Keep checking and adjusting every couple weeks until I'm happy with the weight loss.
This approach works in the real world. I do weigh and measure some of my food but if I had to weigh everything down to the last gram to make sure I ate exactly 1947 calories per day for ideal weight loss I'd quit pretty quickly.
Besides, 140 calories is a lot, considering it has about the same calorie density as milk and the number of great drinks available to you at 0 calories, like black tea, green tea, coffee and plain water.
Soda is sugar only, always, so it's much easier to throw your daily balance of carb/protein/fat off with soda than any other drink (e.g. milk).
Basically, you need a feedback mechanism like your actual weight. Counting calories is not about actual calories it's a way to cut back if your not getting the results you want.
You don't have to be perfect (or honestly even that precise) but it's immensely helpful to do the exercise for a few weeks to dial your brain in. When you calorie reduce at the same time, you grow razor-sharp appreciation for foods that you can eat a massive amount of that provide few calories. When you're hungry, a choice between a muffin and a tray overloaded with vegetables and turkey slices becomes a lot more clear.
I've often wondered if an app that has me take a picture of everything I eat in a day and then sends me a collage of all yesterday's consumption by email in the next morning would be a suitable replacement for calorie counting. I wonder if the process of taking my phone out to photograph things before I eat them would cause me to more carefully consider my choices, and the private shaming the morning after on days I don't do well would serve as a behavior modifier for the day.
Surely it would be better to just eat your fruit and veggies, and avoid excessive cheese burgers and thickshakes.
Consuming consistently similar foods provides a ballpark guide even if it's not perfectly accurate. You don't need perfect accuracy. For example, I know that a piece of cooked chicken breast of a relatively normal size, is going to be within an acceptable margin of error of N calories. I can calculate what a purchased turkey & swiss sandwich represents calorie wise, in a wide enough ballpark to make it completely meaningless as to whether it's a perfect count.
If you buy prepared food like that, the easy way to deal with calorie counting is to use an aggressive margin of error. Allocate more (possibly a lot more, user choice) calories to that meal than you think it probably represents. You won't die from under-consuming 50 or 100 calories because you guessed wrong to the high side. If you go the route of allocating a lot more calories to it, it simultaneously acts as encouragement to prepare your own food instead when possible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/why-calor...