Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

Moderation in eating isn't equivalent to a minor eating disorder. I agree though that some behavior you need to do today might have been seen as symptoms of a type of disordered eating in the past.

But by definition, if it's keeping you healthy, it mostly shouldn't be considered disordered.

I know in the past cutting up food into very small pieces was seen as a symptom of disordered eating because the thought was that you're intentionally slowing your eating so you eat less. Today's portion sizes in the US make it mandatory to break up a pre-prepared meal or a snack into smaller pieces so each bite isn't so calorically dense. In fact, in certain contexts, cutting up food is seen as proper and having manners. If you're eating a big piece of meat, you don't grab it in your hands and chew on it, generally. You cut it up into bite sized pieces.

The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.

Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth.

There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index foods simply because they're a cheap way to feed a population, ground subsidence due to unchecked dependence on slow-filling aquifers, native habitat destruction... off the top of my head.

But all of that doesn't make "natural", on its own, better for human nutrition.

It's like the popular line,

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

My behavior definitely looks like an eating disorder sometimes. But holy hell, they're still putting unhealthy-at-any-level trans fats in regular food, and the label can say "0g trans fat"!

It’s true, but an eating disorder doesn’t mean eating scantly, or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make. Eating disorders are compulsions, and those that suffer from them aren’t able to choose not to do them. This is similar to how alcoholism doesn’t mean drinking a lot. Alcoholism is a complete dependence on alcohol, making it nearly impossible to stop.

> Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural

Please avoid this emotional appeal. All things are natural. What would be unnatural? Ectoplasm? Sorcery?

> there is a massive amount of sugar in everything

Not everything. This even lead to a somewhat humourous case against Subway's bread [0].

Other commenters have pointed out how flawed your mass production statement is as well, so I won't reheash.

* [0] https://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/subwa...

Theres a really persistent lay theory that calorie counting, weighing yourself, etc. in itself causes eating disorder.

I think its used defensively to avoid health behaviors but thats a different issue.

I think this persistent popular idea is what this paper was trying to address.

Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.

So? That seems like exactly the population you’d want to study if your worry is that calorie counting will induce eating disorders.

Weight, finances, like anything tracking it makes you aware. I started counting calories eight years ago (Jan 11, 2014) I do it at the end of each day. I did find that tracking my weight (or my spending) makes me modify my behaviour. Even eating the crap I do I am more aware it it's made my weight stabilize. I can even see a bump in the graph of my weight after I buy groceries or a dip when I go for bike rides in the summer. I also see patterns of same weight for multiple days then a weight change up or down; trends.

I'm not female and not obese but a slightly overweight middle-aged male with hypothyroidism (synthroid pill #1 Mar 12, 2013). So not the typical person most people would think of. But I never had an eating disorder just curiosity.

I believe obesity is also type of eating disorder, just towards the opposite direction to something like anorexia. Binge-eating disorder is the term used in academic studies to understand some of the underlying psychology for a part of the obesity crisis.

Anorexic here. I think this misses it a bit. People with ED’s know what a healthy body looks like. You’re talking about a population that is unhealthily obsessed with food and their body in one way or another. Like I can name the calories and macros for basically any food off the top of my head. I know the calories burnt by most common exercises and what muscles they work. I don’t even need MFP to count anymore. It’s a fun party trick.

What complicates things is dysmorphia. I don’t “see” myself correctly. It’s really hard to explain but it’s kinda like something in my brain is wired wrong where my internal rendering of myself gets distorted. So then when I look at a healthy body and look at myself — even when that body is heavier than mine — my brain goes “ahh the path to go from where you are to there is to lose weight.” And I’ve had it as long as I can remember. My recovery has been learning to develop strategies to deal with when dysmorphia is particularly bad. Lotta sweatshirts, removing mirrors, and doing things in the dark along with safe foods that don’t trigger my anxiety on days when I feel disgusting.

I don’t want to look underweight. I see other underweight women and know that they’re unhealthily skinny.

In my whole life I've known like two people with eating disorders (the not eating enough kind). Almost every single other person aside from those two eat too much, and I'd say mostly they eat way, way too much.

Now, those two people definitely had a problem, but knowing them it was one I knew couldn't begin to understand, and I can't imagine that any of the pithy things people say all they time to express concern about not "developing anorexic" if I (while carrying a slight gut myself) skip a meal would make any difference to them. You might as well being telling someone in the grip of an oxy addiction to "just say no".

Conversely almost nobody has ever told me I was eating too much. I never see it addressed in "movies with an important message" or any other pop culture PSAs. Nobody said anything during the COVID pandemic where people are literally dying of COVID from being overweight and not able to get enough oxygen with their damaged lungs to keep their whole body alive. Instead they euphemistically called it "co-morbidity" and left it at that. All this concern for eating disorders I think it's mostly just a smokescreen.

Obesity is an eating disorder. It's one that's killed orders of magnitude more people than anorexia or bulimia ever have.

> People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like

That's in large part because even healthy people can't agree on what that looks like. Regardless, many people don't seriously care about eating healthy because otherwise they'd simply use the internet and quickly find some diet that actually works (pretty much any of the "fad" diets are better than the Standard American Diet).

> thinness (even extreme, unhealthy thinness) is popularized and praised as a sign of beauty and willpower because so many people are trying to lose weight and so few are trying to gain.

This effect can't be totally discounted, but is it really that or is it because being fat actually kinda sucks? The average person is not attracted to obesity, and obesity can lead to trauma that then leads to things like anorexia. Ironically, obesity is also caused indirectly by poor mental health.

Contrary to this idea that thinness is somehow this societal evil, obesity is more normalized than it's ever been. That's only going to do the opposite of getting people healthy. When was the last time an unhealthy image of thinness was promoted in the mainstream? Besides the fashion industry, which most people don't take seriously or even pay attention to, I can't think of even one.

So I've worked on psychiatric units clinically, as well as in obesity-related clinics.

It's not uncommon to hear things from family and other social support figures along the lines of "if X starts weighing themselves or counting calories they'll develop an eating disorder". Or even, with individuals who are anorexic to the extent that it's life threatening, and they need to be weighed etc. to gain weight, family and support individuals say things like "so and so's eating disorder is caused by them weighing themselves and counting their calories. [The staff] should just stop that because it's making the problem worse."

This paper is providing some data pertaining to that.

I don't monitor this literature closely but last time I touched base with it these kinds of things (monitoring weight and calories) were associated with healthier outcomes. I think it depends on the context though a bit.

> Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder.

You've said that the weight loss is caused by the mental illness. You're ignoring all the research showing that weight loss that precedes mental illness can then cause that mental illness.

The causation is complex, certainly more complex than your post suggests, and is self-reinforcing.

This is why re-feeding is a core part of treatment for people with anorexia.

Title is from the conclusion of the study, your suggested title exceeds the character limit or I would have already used it.

The paper makes no assertions about change in risk when the risk is high.

Careful, you're summoning the CICO cult

It is not possible to gain weight by eating your total daily calorie expenditure in pure sugar.

Yes, not all calories are metabolized the same, and sugar may lead to over eating, but at the end of the day, it’s a simple equation. You can’t gain weight without taking in more than you’re putting out.

In clinical terms what you're describing is the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity. This remains controversial in the field and hasn't been completely proven, but there is some experimental evidence to support it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-020-0658-8

I think this would be too nuanced to think about while you're shopping at a grocery store, but every absorbed calorie is a calorie. Sugar is a very direct and easy source of energy that does not take much additional energy to be made into a usable form by the body. There's no additional food slowing or stopping the absorption of sugars. On the other hand, if you look at some complex fats and proteins, the body takes some energy to break it down or convert it into something usable. In addition, if you look at the complex make up actual foods like fruit, your body isn't able to exact every single calorie a nutrition label states. Ingesting 100 calories of sugar is going to give you pretty close to a net of 100 calories. If you ingest a fruit, your body has to break down the plant cells by chewing, the fibers have to be broken down, the stomach has to digest and crush and humans still aren't able to extract all of the nutrition in food. As you age, your ability to absorb or breakdown nutrients might even change. You probably won't be getting much energy from lactose if you're intolerant. But if you just read a nutrition label, it will say it's 100 calories of energy. Every absorbed calorie is a calorie and at the end of the day it is calories in vs calories out if you can control the psychological urges to eat or not eat. Humans aren't that simple, but CICO does work. Dietary education needs to have a foundation of CICO.

> What would be more beneficial than calorie counting would be dietary education.

Not sure I agree. I think only some basic education is really required. Once you start getting into the weeds about how not all calories are equal, it's easy to get overwhelmed and give up.

Generally, refined sugar is to be avoided. Not too many other carbs. That's about all the education the average person needs to be an effective calorie counter.

With calorie counting, you typically stay aware of your caloric intake before each meal, which is the biggest battle - not mindlessly eating. Better choices tend to naturally follow.

> What would be more beneficial than calorie counting would be dietary education.

Both are needed in different ways. Stuffing yourself with avocado and nuts might be "healthy" but is also gonna be a calorie bomb that will lead to weight gains.

Calorie counting is simple (albeit somewhat tedious) and makes sense and naturally leads people to healthy food.

The study is looking at whether it has an impact on mental health outcomes or the development of eating disorders. Not if calorie counting has an effect on weight loss.

Regarding sugar, simple refined sugars consumed on their own causes large fluctuations in energy levels, but not all sugars. Complex carbohydrates/sugars consumed with fibre are much more preferred overall, unless you're doing heavy exercise where your body needs more glycogen.

Triggering the bodies' insulin response is normal and isn't necessarily a bad thing, afterall it is always being triggered. Unless you continually eat highly processed simple sugars that isn't accompanied by movement (e.g. chocolate bars and lollies), you wont have a problem. A good example is moving from eating white breads to multigrain or rye breads which reduce the glycemic index of food, in combination with appropriate toppings.

I 100% agree that dietary education is extremely important, having been lucky enough to study nutrition in high school it has helped me greatly in life.