The same goes for counting calories burned while exercising. You may not be able to figure out an exact count, but you can get in the ballpark, and that means that you can then adjust your habits so that you are moving toward your goal.
Counting the calories precisely will not allow you to scientifically formulate an optimal diet and exercise plan on paper without experimenting on yourself. It will, however, anchor you and protect you against fudging the numbers in the direction of letting you eat more or exercise less.
You could, I suppose, use an unbiased rounding system to try and use only as many bits of calorie information as you believe are significant, but that's a lot more work for very little theoretical gain.
But that's the point: you cannot make accurate adjustments unless you also keep track of the type of food you eat (cooked, processed, raw, etc.). Because you have no way of knowing whether you gained weight due to taking too many calories, or because the food you ate last week was processed and cooked.
This is one of those things that's really hard to understand unless you experience it, so don't worry if you don't get it.
The general approach of partitioning problem solving into fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate is very useful, since it's generally hard to make something that's simultaneously fast and accurate.
Note one other interesting thing about this approach: you can do unit conversions! That is, I can measure something with different units than the thing I'm trying to control. Our reference is body weight, but what we measure is caloric intake: the function we use to slowly adjust the calorie target as a function of our weight has units of calories per body mass.
Yes, absolutely, everyone should do this (I certainly know how many calories are on the label of most things I eat). But you aren't counting calories.
Counting calories temporarily tells someone how much he is overeating, but the problem is the amount he eats is an ingrained habit. Habits die hard, eating less for a couple months doesn't change anything for most people. There is a lot of evidence that most people who diet put the weight back on because they took temporary measures to lose weight instead of making deep lifestyle changes. [Anecdotal evidence alert]: making deep lifestyle changes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I believe counting calories would have distracted me from that goal.
Whatever works for you, go with that. But weight and body fat will fluctuate naturally and shouldn't be a huge factor in how you decide to eat. You could eat all kinds of crap that would keep you low-weight and low-fat but wreck your body.
Limiting yourself to reasonable portions of healthy foods 85% of the time is the easiest way to keep a long-term diet. Want pizza and beer? Save it for Friday night. It can't get simpler.
Is it that you can't do it accurately? That seems to be implied by the second two questions. I haven't found that accuracy actually matter that much; mostly what's important is nominal calories over time vs. weight/other health indicators over time. If the number's not technically accurate, I kind of don't care. All I know is I roughly ate so many calories, my weight changed by x amount, and I can walk x far without getting tired. Over time, I can have a pretty good guideline for the number of "back of the box" calories I should be eating to reach my targets (which addresses your first question of "what range to target")
You mention explicitly that most people won't do it over the long term, which is definitely relevant. But even doing it for a little while can give you a good baseline so you can at least make educated guesses as to what you're eating, which is especially helpful in the "food truck burger" scenario.
I guess my point is that we all agree knowing roughly how many calories you're eating is good, but the only way I know to figure that out is to, at least for a while, literally count them. There's still a huge margin for error, of course, but if I didn't keep tabs on it by looking at the back of the box, I'd have no idea at all.
A range of 2,500-3,000 seems to be a good fit for me. I'm a 5'9" adult male with a light workout schedule.
I don't expect labels to be 100% on target but I do expect them to be close enough for my rough estimates.
The food truck may not list the calorie count for the burger but I've probably eaten all the ingredients in the burger before. From experience of noticing nutritional content in the past, I can tell if it has more fat (lots of mayo, extra cheese), sugar (ketchup) and overall calories (heavy, overall size of the meat patty) than ones I've had in the past.
The caloric content is not the only tool, it's one of the many tools you should have when trying to keep a healthy diet.
I know the hacker in you wants a number to measure but if you know anything about math at all you should concede that calculating numbers which such a high error margin is indeed pointless.
It's really not, you just need to eat healthy relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories and start with a baseline calorie target and adjust according to your goals as you go.
This subject happens to be uh...my job...so I can answer questions if anyone has any.
What I got out of the article is unprocessed foods are the least accurate when it comes to calorie counts because they aren't digested as easily.
What's your job BTW?
The amount of effort it takes your digestive system to process raw chicken vs. cooked chicken is obviously different, but the fact that they chose to focus on these issues doesn't make them more impactful than portion control.
I was thinking in terms of cooking at home versus going to eat at a restaurant. Restaurants are far more egregious in terms of being calorific as well as highly variable and prepackaged food usually isn't that good for you.
2. Any thoughts/experience with raw foods? (also juicing, water fasting etc? someone documented their water fast, I can't remember the URL now. It sounded dangerous, but also awesome to know the results)
3. For a moderately active person, which is better? Eating 2 huge meals a day, or 5-6 small meals?
Thank you.
You could claim a different number but you'd be fooling yourself. Pick a number that seems reasonable relative to BMR and your goals and adjust as you go. That's kinda the whole point of my company is helping people make these adjustments without going through the hassle themselves.
Humans learned to cook because it allowed us to extract nutrients from food more efficiently and thus survive. If eating too much is your problem, tending towards raw food might help (but not to the exclusion of proper meals). If you're an athlete, not so much. I wouldn't take any one movement or fad all that seriously.
Juicing is a fad designed to bilk money from people, any diet/fast predicated on getting the majority of your calories from nutrition-less sugar is loony and bad for your health.
>For a moderately active person, which is better? Eating 2 huge meals a day, or 5-6 small meals?
It depends on what moderately active means. I think this is highly individual but I'll tell you what the "usual" is.
Strength trainers will generally eat 6 meals, but that's so that they can fit more calories in without getting stuffed.
Runner eating habits are highly variable and have a lot to do with glycogen replenishment. Carb-backloading before going to bed is a current fad for both runners and strength-trainers, but it seems pretty similar to the carb-loading stuff from the 80s, but with the benefit of more rigorous testing and study.
This is one of those things that require tinkering and experimentation. Some people eat 2 meals, skipping breakfast, some eat like hobbits. If you're trying to lose weight, optimize for eating habits that prevent snacking as well as over-eating during meals. Portion control is paramount.
getting the majority of your calories from nutrition-less sugar is loony What did you mean by nutrition-less sugar? Vegetable/leafy juices (celery, spinach etc) have lots of nutrition, correct? (much more than just a fruit juice).
It's fine to juice things, especially if it helps you to get vegetables in your diet, but avoid fruits and excess sugar. I know too many juicers who end up getting like 70% of their calories from sugar because they're sucking down glorified fruit smoothies all the time.
So early on, "avoid processed food" was a good way to guess at which foods were likelier to be healthy without having to actually examine them closely. But the heuristic is highly exploitable (i.e. you can trick people into thinking unhealthy food is healthy by making it from "unprocessed" ingredients), and in a relatively free market, it was inevitable that it would be exploited.
Now, if you advise people to either eat raw, unmodified ingredients, or make their own food out of raw unmodified ingredients, then that will still help them. But I think most people hear "avoid processed food" and think "Oh, I should buy these cookies that are made of whole grains and honey", and that is not helpful advice anymore.