Want To Lose Weight? Stop Counting Calories

Instead, give the types of food you eat, when you eat, and how you prepare food, serious consideration

Viewing food as “what we consume in a 24–hour period counted as number of calories” is one of the biggest reasons three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or clinically obese.

Both my husband and I are in an older age range. I’m about to turn 61, and he is 69. He suffered a serious back injury a few years ago and has nerve damage as a result. He also has osteoarthritis (as do I). We’ve improved these health challenges by losing weight and keeping it in a healthy range.

Health is about a lot more than weight, of course.

There are a lot of good reasons to eat and live the way Bruce and I do, but achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is one that nearly everyone can understand and relate to.

I’m not sure why calorie counting or the calories-in vs. calories-out myth became so prevalent and dominant, but it’s definitely one that dominated my life until recently. Even when eating with health in mind since the late 2010s, I still counted calories “religiously.”

It was infuriating to get two to three times the recommended weekly amount of physical activity and count every calorie down to the last one, and know for a fact, I was consuming less calories than I was burning, and slowly, inexorably, continue to gain weight. I’ve used a fitness tracker and logged calories and meals for five years: I can make a confident statement:

Counting calories not only does not work for weight loss, it can lead to unwanted weight gain more often than not.

In preference to counting calories, many people count macros, i.e. how much of each macronutrient they are consuming, but most of the time, apps like MyFitness Pal and similar (Noom, etc) also include calorie counts. Noom even divides calories into allotted sections, which are currently categorized as “orange, yellow, and green.” The orange category was red when I started using Noom about a year ago. It was impossible not to see the color system as “stop, caution, and go.” Green foods were basically “unlimited” as they were primarily fruits and vegetables.

The yellow foods were primarily proteins and since I don’t eat bread, I’m assuming, basic carbs most people eat, like whole wheat bread.

The “red” (now orange) foods were any fat and any type of sweet. Noom would suck up my evening tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil into that red category, and because it gave me a “calorie allowance” that started at 1,350 calories a day — that would pretty much kill my “red” category, limiting me to the yellow and green for the rest of the day.

I found Noom helpful when I had hit a weight loss plateau doing things on my own in early 2021. I’m not saying Noom is a bad program — it helps many people. I am saying that it’s likely that most people who use Noom to lose weight will regain the weight once they stop using it.

All it takes is returning to a diet that includes foods that feed “bad” gut microbes that produce inflammation and metabolic problems. These foods aren’t the same for everybody, but after a week of using Zoe Nutrition, it’s fairly clear to me that foods that can feed “bad” gut microbes fall into two broad categories: (1) refined carbohydrates and (2) fats — often found in conjunction with refined carbs.

Wellness is About Much More Than Calories-In/Calories-Out

I now understand that wellness is about many more things than just eating the same amount or fewer calories than my body “burns” in a day.

However, one of the major criteria for wellness is proper diet and nutrition. As I’ve said before and will repeat again, people who are 50, 60, or more pounds overweight with metabolic diseases like diabetes or cardiovascular diseases, routinely tell me, “Oh, I eat healthy.”

It’s plain on the face of it that they are not eating what is healthy for them.

If you really want to not just lose weight, but become healthy and truly well, it’s important to discover the foods, meals, mealtimes, order of food within the meal (!!! still learning about this), and nutrition that’s right for you.

And: right for your microbiome. I’m not sure if the microbiome is the only key to health, happiness, and a long life, but I’m certain that it’s very important in this process. It’s much more important to take good care of your personal microbiome than it is to count calories.

I’m saying all this with the caveat: processed Frankenfoods are not good for anyone’s microbiome. The “bad” microbes in our U.S. microbiome don’t just influence inflammation and metabolic illness. They also influence our thought processes. I was joking with friends the other day and said, “One of these is probably the Twinkie microbe. It gets a Twinkie and goes crazy, and sends out chemical orders like ‘Give me Twinkie now! Now! Twinkie now!’”

My Big Mistake … The Reese’s Big Cup

I used to always feel horrible after eating a heavy meal with rich desserts. I mean physically and mentally horrible. These are cues or clues that our body sends us that we are doing something that isn’t the best for our homeostasis [word of the day!].

But throughout 2019 and 2020, going by the “calories-in/calories-out” approach, I believed myself to be “eating healthy,” although because I was very active (250–350 minutes of vigorous activity each week) and burning 300–500 extra calories a day according to my fitness trackers, I could “reward” myself by eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup each night. This habit advanced to the point where Bruce was treating me to double packs of …

Here she is! She’s a beauty! Only 200 calories per cup! Thanks Mr. Reese for telling me it’s OK to eat this treat every fricking night … no, it’s not

Mr. Big Cup was not only prohibiting me from losing weight and entering my healthy weight range, he was slowly, inexorably, causing me to gain weight — especially around my middle. I had never been an “apple shaped” person before, but I was on the fast track to Bingo Lady muu-muu land.

While counting every last calorie and tracking every activity! I was getting 11,000 steps per day while all this was going on.

Some sort of lightbulb went on in my head and I quit eating Mr. Big Cup and signed up for Noom. I then entered a year of the red-yellow-green system and daily tidbits of positive reinforcement and education around food psychology.

So, here is some food psychology: most women and many men count calories. They obsess over food. They also find it difficult to eat foods they think they don’t like, like kale and escarole. Bruce still won’t touch quinoa, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the taste, it’s the name and reputation (like “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche”). Maybe artichokes and arugula. They might not even like green beans or peas. They might never eat a grapefruit like an orange.

Here’s a shocker: guess what foods you will like — even come to love — if you do not eat out of the center aisles of the grocery store or from the fast food establishment?

Anything that grows in the ground, comes off a tree or a vine, or is a basic protein (fish, poultry, eggs, meats, real cheese).

Our toxic Frankenfood system has gone so far past the point of anything resembling real food in any way that it’s truly — I can say this after over a year of eating real food with very few exceptions — it’s worse than any of the prescription drugs that don’t really work. It isn’t just making us fat, sick, and nearly dead, it makes people crazy.

Part of this craziness is the religious adherence in the absence of any evidence that “calories-in/calories-out” is the way to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight (much less — actually be healthy). If this were true, I’m pretty sure Mr. Reese would not print the calorie count of the Reese cup in giant letters on the front of the package. This food and all others like it, including the ubiquitous “100-calorie-packs,” are being marketed to you as “reasonably low or moderate calorie treats”. They are the proverbial “gut bombs” that my dad used to joke about, is what they are.

The only difference between these processed food purveyors and the tobacco industry, is that they have been extremely successful in both demonizing dietary fat in favor of sugar/sweeteners, and in selling the calories-in/calories-out myth to the public, which includes the western “medical” community (I use the term loosely — if medical practitioners don’t know what I’m saying by now, they purposely do not want to know in the same way that Purdue Pharma’s ‘heavy prescribers’ were overlooking the deadly addictive properties of OxyContin as they wrote more prescriptions than there were people living in their city or county). Somehow, some way, doctors quit smoking Camels and recommending cigarettes to their patients. If they actually cared, they would educate themselves in the microbiome and integrative wellness instead of looking for their next Rx fix from Abbott, Teva, or Johnson & Johnson.

Helping Yourself And The Planet And Society

Probably the best thing any person can do right now to help themselves is to switch to a diet that is healthy for them, which is going to automatically exclude prepared foods, snacks, and fast foods. Forget about counting calories. Pay attention to how you feel after you eat — normal, basic foods — and throughout the day. Pay attention to how you sleep. These actions alone won’t just benefit you, they’ll benefit the planet by reducing the amount of processed food that is consumed, if even by a tiny bit.

If you can, you can also sign up for the Zoe Nutrition program which will give you real-time tests that show your blood glucose after eating and throughout the day and night, and tests of your blood lipid response after a meal, as well as an analysis of 30 different gut microbes and your personal microbiome. If you are interested in Zoe, here is a link to get $35 off: a benefit I didn’t get — I paid full price.

There are other apps on the market which purport to help you analyze your metabolism and tell you what to eat that day. If you go to the Zoe Nutrition website and read some of their studies and the background of the app and venture, you will quickly see the difference in quality of research and backing between this next-generation wellness company and their competitors who are — much like Mr. Reese — exclusively cash-motivated.

What we eat, when we eat it, and even the order in which we eat foods at a meal influences our microbiome. Just giving the example of a Reese’s Big Cup — maybe I could have eaten two of those — a month — and had no trouble and continued to improve my fitness and lose weight. Not because two of them contained “only 400 calories,” but because my microbiome and body could digest and handle occasional influxes of pure sucrose, some well-roasted ground peanuts, and cocoa butter.

Day after day? There were gut microbes enjoying this meal — and I still don’t know their names — and they probably were growing and pushing out other microbes that like vegetable fiber and legumes and whole fruit.

When I look at how prominently calories are listed on various food packages that all contain addictive, problematic processed foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber, and often high in fat (along with massive ingredient lists of additives and chemicals) — it’s a “tell.” It is a tell that this information is at-best, meaningless to our health and at worst, will send the message that it is “okay” to regularly consume these foods.

An apple contains 95 calories on average. It’s isn’t “almost the same” nutritionally as a 100-calorie snack pack of tiny little Oreos and the difference isn’t just “5 calories.” I still don’t know exactly which gut microbes love Oreos, but they are probably also the ones that send negative messages to our brain, promoting anxiety and depression. You may be surprised to learn that the apple contains more than twice the amount of sugar that the Oreos contain: 19 grams vs. 8 grams. But the Oreos contain negligible fiber and the apple has 4.4 grams, about 20% of what we should eat a day.

Weight gain and general health deterioration aren’t about eating more calories than you burn each day in any way. They are about inflammation — imagine getting a bad sunburn inside your body three times a day, every day, for your entire life. That’s inflammation. I remember people saying, “You’re just losing water weight” on the first few weeks of a diet, when rapid weight loss often occurs. Yes, let’s just wait until through calorie restriction and lack of nutrients and fiber, our bodies start burning the REAL STUFF like muscles and internal organs!

A home scale wasn’t invented until the late 17th century, apparently. Bathroom scales didn’t come into common use until the 1920s.

And companies didn’t start making, and people didn’t start eating all this Frankenfood until I was a kid. We had chubby kids, but I estimate that 80% of kids I went to school with were the typical “skinny kid,” and most adults were of normal weight as well. The obesity epidemic didn’t get underway until the 1980s, and has been worsening ever since.

The very idea of calories emerged during the mid-19th century: to measure the power of explosives (!). How, and why, this concept of combustion and explosive energy got changed into “Let’s burn food and measure how much energy it makes in kcal …” I’ve just read that it was actually just some guy feeding another guy that he had sealed into an “airtight chamber” a standardized meal and measuring how much “energy” the man seemed to have afterward.

The professor who trapped the guy in the chamber, Wilbur O. Atwater, was obsessed with the idea “that mathematical laws governed the ordinary act of eating.”

Well, there are more factors, and entities, eating every time we put anything in our mouth than Atwater had any idea. Atwater didn’t even get one organism eating right: he overlooked the 1 trillion others also involved.

Yet this primitive man’s simple ideas and rudimentary experiment rule the multi-billion-dollar “diet” industry and allow the poisonous Frankenfood exploiters to dominate our world, lives, and health — to this day.

I’m glad I’ve freed myself from calorie counting and excited to learn more about my microbiome and wellness.