These days you can’t really escape calories, they are everywhere! It’s the first thing you see when you turn a packaged food product over to read the back label (often under the name “energy” in the nutrition facts panel). Nowadays, you even see them listed on restaurant menus.
Do you pay attention to calories? If you do it, I say stop!
Of course, you will lose weight if you consume fewer calories than you burn. And the opposite is also true: if you consume way more than you need, you will gain weight. But did you know that 80% of dieters regain the weight they lost and often more. The Yoyo diet has been shown to lead to increased weight gain after the diet ends:
“Weight regain often begins during the first year and the pre-intervention stages [read: pre-diet] the weight is reached or even exceeded in the following 2 to 5 years.
Facts about calories and why you shouldn’t waste them ENERGY (pun intended!) on them
1. The body doesn’t really see or understand calories.
The calorie is a man-made unit of measurement, completely unnatural and has nothing to do with biology! Calories were originally calculated by placing food in a sealed container surrounded by water, a device called a bomb calorimeter. The food was completely burned and the resulting increase in water temperature was measured. This increase in temperature was determined to be the amount of calories in that food.
Does this seem natural to you? To me it seems completely ridiculous to use this as a basis for how our bodies burn food! And Dr Giles Yeo agrees in this lecture at the University of Cambridge.
These days, that’s also not how food manufacturers calculate calories. They simply estimate calories based on food tables (created in the late 19th century, about 120 years ago!) and this estimate can often be as much as 20% of the actual amount. Therefore, accurately counting calories on food labels is impossible!
2. Calories are not equal.
The same number of calories from different foods can have completely different effects on your body. Calories from a diet high in sugar and processed carbohydrates will wreak havoc on your blood sugar and insulin levels as well as your hunger hormones. This will also cause blood sugar drops which, in turn, will lead to hunger, cravings and overeating of bad things, while proteins and fats (which contain twice as many calories as carbs and proteins) will make you feel full. longer, so you have to eat less.
A fast food meal consisting of a burger, chips and a soft drink can approach 2,000 kcal. It’s a single meal that will likely leave you hungry again in a few hours. When you eat whole foods as part of a varied diet, 2,000 calories is likely your total daily calorie intake, but that comes from 3 different meals throughout the day.
3. Your gut microbiome can determine how much energy you get from the foods you eat.
We all extract calories differently, in part because of your unique gut microbiome that’s different from everyone else’s. In animal experiments, mice that were colonized with an “obese-type” gut microbiota had an increased ability to absorb energy from food and therefore accumulate more fat, compared to mice with an “obese-type” microbiota. skinny guy.”
So it’s better to focus on nourishing your beneficial gut microbes and maintaining a healthy gut microbiome rather than counting calories.
4. How you consume your calories also matters.
For every 100 calories of protein you eat, you only absorb 70% of the calories, or 70 calories, whereas with sugar, you would absorb almost all, or about 97% of the calories. If the calories are packed into a fibrous food matrix, such as in whole fruits (as opposed to fruit juice) or corn on the cob (as opposed to tortilla chips), it makes a difference on the number of calories you get from this food. This means that the level of food processing is extremely important in how your body responds to that food.
Cooking and cooling then reheating potatoes (instead of cooking and eating them immediately) reduces the caloric and glucose load due to the resistant starch that forms during the cooling process. Resistant starch resists human digestion but feeds your beneficial bacteria.
5. Counting calories is difficult, stressful and downright boring!
It’s really difficult to follow a low-calorie diet, and people often suffer while following it! They just make you hungry, deprived and unhappy. And as soon as the diet is over, many people look forward to returning to their normal eating habits….
…and the yoyo continues!
…and the weight keeps increasing!
And we come back to what I said at the beginning of this article.
What to do instead of counting calories?
Counting calories for health purposes is completely unnecessary – or can be counterproductive, causing unnecessary stress and anxiety and taking all the pleasure out of eating and eating.
So… here’s what I suggest:
❤️ Stop counting calories that are marked on the label but start counting colors (“colories”) and nutrients in foods that don’t have a label. Studies show that tracking food colors leads to eating more vegetables and fewer sugary foods.
❤️ More you include real food and vegetables in your diet, the less you will have to worry about calories, because these types of meals are more filling, making you eat less and they are often lower in calories anyway.
❤️ Count Beneficial compounds (e.g. anthocyanins in dark fruits, lycopene in tomatoes, nitrates in leafy greens, flavanols in dark chocolate, betaine in beets, etc.) in whole foods that help your body thrive; These compounds nourish your gut microbes, act as anti-inflammatories, and communicate with your body and your genes, not calories!
❤️ Choose quality over quantity, get back to basics and enjoy your dishes (even treats!) rather than worrying about calories.
(Main image: Dan Gold, 4_jhDO54BYg, Unsplash)
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