Counting Calories???

   Counting calories is not a good strategy for long-term weight loss or good health. I cannot think of a diet that is not some form of counting calories. It is as if we are so obsessed with calories, we are at war with them, and we count them over and over. We sweat and sweat through exercise to get rid of them.

   This may shock you, but calories are not the enemy. Nutritional science now says that counting calories may not be the most effective way to lose weight and get healthy. In order to address this I think it is important to explain the difference between what a calorie is and what a calorie is not:

Definitions of the calorie fall into two classes:

    The small calorie or gram calorie (symbol: cal)[2] approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C at standard atmospheric pressure (101.325 kPa). This is approximately 4.2 joules.

    The large calorie, kilogram calorie, dietary calorie, nutritionist’s calorie or food calorie (symbol: Cal)[2] approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 °C. This is exactly 1,000 small calories or approximately 4.2 kilojoules.

You see, a calorie is nothing more than a measurement of heat. It is not a physical thing. Your body cannot count calories, so it does not give a hoot about them. The only thing your body counts and cares about is nutrients. The problem with our food today, according to many studies, is that nutrients are vanishing in alarming numbers. A couple of weeks ago, a report said even organic foods in a conventional grocery store do not have much more nutrition than typical foods. (I am, however, a proponent of organic food in that it contains less herbicides and pesticides.) But recent studies show that organic still falls way short of our bodies’ requirements for even basic nutrients.

   A recent study said that there are 51 basic nutrients that the body requires. Keep in mind this is the bare minimum. If just one of those basic 51 nutrients are missing no matter how much we eat the body will never be satisfied. We all remember the commercial with the line “Nobody can eat just one!”

   The food of today is like a beach ball. The beach ball, when fully inflated, represents the calories. Inside the beach ball one grain of sand represents the nutrition. So, we eat these massive numbers of calories to get at the one grain of sand. This is the fundamental flaw with counting calories—as it is not the calories that are important, it is the nutritional density of the calories we consume.

Here is another example of what I mean. Let’s say you go on a diet and are having, say, 600 calories for lunch. If you go by the normal diet method of counting calories, a lunch of a salad, vegetables and fish (equaling 600 calories) would be the same as the 600 calories in a candy bar. Nothing could be further from the truth. All calories are not created equally. The six hundred empty calories from the candy bar are completely different, as far as the body is concerned, from six hundred nutrient-dense calories from the salad, vegetables and fish.

   It has been estimated that the nutritional value of an apple from 2012, measured against an apple in 1976, would require us to eat 6 to 12 apples to get the nutritional value of that apple from 1976. This is true of all our fruits and vegetables. The nutritional value of these foods continues to spiral downward. So before you waste anymore of your time counting calories, make sure you know what is in those calories.

   Believe me; your body knows the difference.