The diet industry is full of misinformation, logical fallacies, half truths and hypocritical arguments. One of the worst is the concept that calories don’t matter in food but they do matter in the gym.

Almost all treadmills and exercise bikes display 'calories burned'

There are many diet philosophies that try to ignore the basic principle of weight loss being calories in vs calories out. They’ll talk about hormone regulation, specific food items that help change your hormonal make up and ‘mobilize fat’ and other foods that can ‘impair’ your ability to burn fat blah blah. You get the picture. In general they’ll find any excuse besides the total calories.

The hypocritical part comes in when the same people talk about the number of calories a specific exercise can burn. By doing this they are contradicting the original stance taken with specific diet foods saying that calories don’t matter.

So which is it?

Is it specific foods that somehow change you into a ‘fat burning machine’ or is it the total calories burned by a special workout?

This is a case of having your cake and eating it too (literally). Or it’s just ignorance of the way the body functions (I tend to think it’s the latter)

The point is the same marketing/media source will tell you that calories don’t matter when it comes to food, but that they do matter when it comes to exercise.

The real answer is that total calories matter when it comes to food AND exercise.

If you don’t believe me try overeating by 1000 calories every day for a week with all ‘fat burning foods’ or ‘healthy’ foods and I guarantee you will gain weight.

Then try undereating by 1000 calories every day for a week eating only ‘junk food’ and ‘fat storing food’ and I guarantee you will lose weight.

Or you can skip the personal experiment and follow the progress of a university professor from kansas state Mark Haub who started a calorie reduced diet eating twinkies and typical ‘junk food’ in order to prove the point that weight loss is just a matter of calories in vs out.

He reported that after the first week he had already lost 7lbs (I’m sure some of that was water, but the fact remains he is losing weight eating what many would call the wrong food)

His next step is to overeat ‘healthy’ foods to prove you can and will gain weight no matter what kinds of food you eat as long as you’re eating too many of them.

As long as people believe that calories don’t matter they will always be at the whim of the next diet fad promising people they can eat as much food as they want as long as it is healthy. Sadly these will be the same people frustrated that they’ve failed on yet another diet.

JB

A comment I received from Kenneth in an earlier post brought up a very good point about calorie counting.

Don't Kid Yourself, There are More Calories In Your Food Than You Think!

Kenneth brought to my attention a new study done at tufts university that analyzed some commercially available foods (from restaurants and grocery stores) and compared how many calories that were stated on the label vs how many calories were actually in the food.

At this point I haven’t had a chance to pull the full article and analyze their methods but if this study is a well done piece of research (which I have no reason to believe otherwise) then this is an eye opening tidbit of information.

I always tell people to overestimate the amount of calories they’re consuming because most of the time you’ll be forgetting about something you ate or drank throughout the day. Most people can’t even remember all the items they’ve eaten within the past 24 hours (let alone how many calories were in them). So it’s pretty clear that keeping an accurate record of calories consumed is very difficult if you flat out forget entire meals and snacks that you’ve consumed.

As far as food labels go, you have to keep in mind that they are an ESTIMATION of total calories and not exact numbers. Commercially available items and restaurant serving sizes aren’t standardized right down to the exact calorie. There will always be some margin of error.

If they always err’d on the lighter side we wouldn’t have much to worry about, but unfortunately that’s not how it works. If anything they are an estimation and an average. Some items might be lower and some might be higher. And as this study is indicating some of them are WAY higher.

Take the calorie count on your labels as an estimation only.

I actually did a little experiment like this with Brad Pilon a while ago. We went to our local grocery store bakery and bought a 6 pack of muffins. The label on the package gave a complete calorie and nutrient break down per muffin. But when we opened the package and weighed the muffins we found a 25% degree of variance in their weight.

In other words, some of the muffins were almost 25% bigger than the others. This would also mean some of them had 25% more calories.

The point is labels are a guideline and are never 100% accurate. Without measuring all of the ingredients in every thing you eat and preparing it yourself you can never be 100% sure of the calories in it.

The best you can do is follow the labels as a guideline or estimate of how many calories are probably in that food.

And just to be safe, always assume there is MORE calories in everything you eat. This way even if the labels are underestimating you will be compensating for it with an overestimation.

John