Is Calorie Counting Really Necessary For Fat Loss?

This post is another from my good friend, Marlene Harris, from her fitness newsletter.

Although I'm not a calorie counter, Nick Nilsson brings up some good points. I may have to rethink my stance, or at least modify it in the future.

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Is Calorie Counting Really Necessary For Fat Loss? by Nick Nilsson 

And without further ado, the answer is yes...and no...Allow me to explain...Calorie-counting is one of those things that you either love or hate. You either feel you HAVE to do it in order to get results or you feel there's NO WAY you'll ever be able to do it. It's rare you find somebody who sits on the middle ground on this one. As most people know, in order to lose fat, you've got to have a caloric deficit, taking in fewer calories than you burn on a daily basis. No surprises there. Now here's the thing...in order to consistently achieve that caloric deficit and lose fat, you must be AWARE of your calorie intake.

I believe the REAL question we should be asking is; "Am I really AWARE of how many calories I’m really taking in?" So if, in order to be aware of how many calories you're taking in, you need to specifically COUNT them (by weighing food and referencing food charts), then THAT will be what you have to do to get results. The key here, again, is awareness.
You see, the big problem with not counting calories arises when a person THINKS they're aware of their caloric intake but they really are NOT. It's a fact that most people dramatically under-report their caloric intake when they are asked to estimate how much they eat in a day. When they keep a food diary and have to write down every little thing that goes in their mouth, in some cases their TRUE caloric intake nearly DOUBLES. So even if you don't want to count calories, it may be time for a quick compromise. It's a calorie count reality check!

If you're not losing fat right now and you feel like you're not really eating much, here's something you can try in order to test your "caloric awareness":
First, write down how many calories you THINK you're eating every day. Now for the next couple of weeks, actually write down everything you eat. And I do mean EVERYTHING. Every little taste and every little snack. EVERYTHING. Keep doing what you've been doing, and write down ALL the foods and the actual, measured portion sizes you’re taking in. At the end of the week, go to a food chart and research everything you ate. Add it up and divide by 7. This will give you your average daily caloric intake.

If you're within a couple hundred calories of your original estimation, congratulations! You're fairly accurate in your "calorie awareness!" But if you're off by a significant margin, this will give you some VERY useful feedback on what you need to do to get fat loss rolling again. So, there's a vote FOR calorie counting...let's look at the other side of the coin.

And I'll be blunt here...calorie counting, no matter how careful you are, is simply not 100% accurate. Think of it this way...no two pieces of food are alike. When you buy a steak at the grocery store, they don't charge you per steak, they charge by the pound. And even when they charge by the pound, two steaks of the same cut can have DRAMATICALLY different composition - one could be more lean and one could be more fatty! But if you look at a calorie chart, you'll see "3 oz sirloin steak - 100 calories"...or something to that effect.

So even if you weigh and chart every single piece of food you put in your mouth, you're STILL going to be off a bit on the calorie counts. That's just a fact.

And while how MUCH you eat has an impact on fat loss, WHEN you eat it and what foods you eat makes a HUGE impact on your results as well. "Calories are calories" is true only up to a point. For example, if you eat a big meal after a workout, a lot of that will get used for recovery purposes. But if you eat that same big meal then go camp on the couch in front of the tv., a greater portion of that will just be stored as fat. Another example is eating sugary carbs with fatty foods - the insulin response you get from sugary foods will push that fat right into your fat cells with very little trouble! (Though it is true that insulin response will be somewhat blunted by the fat intake, there is still enough to make it troublesome)
So now that you have absolutely no idea WHAT the heck to do now, here's my step-by-step solution...

1. If you don’t mind counting calories and it gets you results...keep on doing it!

2. If you don’t mind counting calories but you're NOT getting results, either eat less, or make sure you're writing down EVERYTHING you're eating AND are being as accurate as possible with your portions sizes and your charting.

3. If you DON'T like to count calories and you ARE getting results...keep it up! Calorie counting isn’t necessary if you're aware of how many calories you're taking in AND you're getting results.

4. If you DON'T like to count calories and you're NOT getting results, it's time to take a week or two to count your calories and improve your caloric awareness. It's not that long and it'll give you a MUCH better idea of what you're actually taking in. This will pay off BIG in the long run because once you get a feel for your TRUE intake, you can very easily keep yourself honest and ADJUST on the fly.

In my thinking, the bottom line is results. If you're NOT losing fat, then you're not getting the results you want...if you’re not getting the results you want, you need to do things differently, simple as that. Your approach should be focused on doing what you need to do to get those results. Developing your caloric awareness is the key to long-term success with fat loss. And if you have to count calories to do it, then that's what you've gotta do!

Hard-Wired = Permanent

The following is a reprint from the Wednesday, January 22, 2014 edition of eSkeptic Magazine. In this article, Michael Shermer addresses the question, "What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?"

Hard-Wired = Permanent

BY MICHAEL SHERMER

We should retire the scientific idea that a hard-wired trait or characteristic of an organism is  permanent feature. Case in point: God and religion.

Ever since Charles Darwin theorized in his 1871 book The Descent of Man that “a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal” and therefore an evolved characteristic of our species that is hardwired into our brains, scientists have been running experiments and conducting surveys to show why God won’t go away. Anthropologists have found such human universals as specific supernatural beliefs about death and the afterlife, fortune and misfortune, and especially magic, myths, rituals, divination and folklore. Behavior geneticists report from twin studies—most notably twins separated at birth and raised in different environments—that 40–50% of the variance of God beliefs and religiosity are genetic. Some scientists have even claimed to have found a “God gene” (or more precisely, a “God gene complex”) that leads humans to have a need for spiritual transcendence and belief in a higher power of some kind.

Even specific elements of religious stories—such as a destructive flood, a virgin birth, miracles, a resurrection from the dead—seem to appear independently of one another over and over again throughout history in a wide variety of cultures, implying that there is a hard-wired component to religion and God beliefs. I have held this theory myself. Until now.

If and when we establish a permanent colony on Mars, if its members consist of nonbelieving scientists with a purely secular worldview it would be interesting to check in 10 (or 100) generations to see if God has returned. Until that experiment is conducted, however, we have to consider the results of natural experiments run here on Earth. In the Western world, for example, a 2013 survey of 14,000 people in 13 nations (Germany, France, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Canada, Brazil, India, South Korean, and the UK and US) conducted by the German pollster Bertelsmann Stiftung for their Religion Monitor found that most of these countries showed a declining trend in religiosity and belief in God, especially among the youth. In Spain, for example, 85% of respondents over the age of 45 report being moderately to very religious, but only 58% of those under 29 years of age so report. In Europe in general, only 30–50% said that religion is important in their own lives, and in many European countries less than a third say that they believe in God.

Even in the über religious United States, the pollsters found that 31% of Americans say they are “not religious or not very religious.” This finding confirms those of a 2012 Pew Forum survey that found that the fastest growing religious cohort in America are the “Nones” (those with no religious affiliation) at 20% (33% of adults under 30), broken down into atheists and agnostics at 6% and the unaffiliated at 14%. The raw numbers are stunning: with the U.S. adult population (age 18 and over) at 240 million, this translates into 48 million Nones, or 14.4 million atheists/agnostics and 33.6 million unaffiliated. There were also generational differences that reveal a significant trend toward unbelief, with the “Greatest” generation (born 1913–1927) at 5%, the “Silent” generation (born 1928–1945) at 9%, the “Boomers” (born 1946–1964) at 15%, the “GenXers” (born 1965–1980) at 21%, the “Older Millennials” (born 1981–1989) at 30%, and the “Younger Millennials” (born 1990–1994) at 34%.

At this rate I project that the Nones will reach 100% in the year 2220.

It is time for scientists to retire the theory that God and religion are hardwired in our brains. Like everyone else, scientists are subject to cognitive biases that tilt their thinking toward trying to explain common beliefs, so it is good for us to take the long-view perspective and compare today to, say, half a millennia ago when God beliefs were virtually 100%, or to the hunter-gatherer tribes of our Paleolithic ancestors who, while employing any number of superstitious rituals, did not believe in a God or practice a religion that even remotely resembles the deities or religions of modern peoples.

This indicates that religious faith and belief in God is a byproduct of other cognitive processes (e.g., agency detection) and cultural propensities (the need to affiliate) that, while hard-wired, can be expunged through reason and science in the same manner as any number of other superstitious rituals and supernatural beliefs once held by the most learned scholars and scientists of Europe five centuries ago. For example, at that time the prevailing theory to explain crop failures, weather anomalies, diseases, and various other maladies and misfortunes was witchcraft, and the solution was to strap women to pyres and torch them to death. Today, no one in their right mind believes this. With the advent of a scientific understanding of agriculture, climate, disease, and other causal vectors—including the role of chance—the witch theory of causality fell into disuse.

So it has been and will continue to be with other forms of the hard-wired = permanent idea, such as violence. We may be hard-wired for violence, but we can attenuate it considerably through scientifically tested methods. Thus, for my test case here, I predict that in another 500 years the God-theory of causality will have fallen into disuse, and the 21st-century scientific theory that God is hardwired into our brains as a permanent feature of our species will be retired.

May this new year be the best

Here's wishing you a prosperous and joyful 2014