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Calorie counting: it sounds simple enough.
If you want to lose weight, you just see to it you expend more calories than you consume.
The weight isn’t coming off.
Your meticulous calorie counting just isn’t adding up.
The good news is you’re not alone.
What is a calorie?
So, this might seem like a dumb question.
Acalorie isthe amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree centigrade.
You may be wondering, what does that have to do with my back fat?
Calories areessential for living.
The energy from calories consumed keeps our hearts pumping and our lungs full of air.
That energy alsorepairs in our bodieswhen we are injured.
By eating, we bring in the calories we need for our bodies to complete those basic functions.
Hence the back fat.
That’s while not eating anything, which is alsonot recommended.
So let’s say you actually consume 2,000 calories per day, the daily recommended value.
You would then need to burn 5,500 calories to lose that one pound.
Double that number if you’re aiming to lose two pounds per week.
It might seem like no big deal, but burning that many calories isn’t so easy.
Makers of these machines “help” consumers track their caloric progress with a calorie counter.
But studies show those trackers are often wrong.
They found that machines overestimated calories lost by 19 percent on average.
The worst offender was the elliptical machine, which overestimated calories burned by up to 42 percent.
A more recent study published in theInternational Journal of Exercise Scienceconfirmed that ellipticals are still overestimating.
AGood Morning Americastudy found wearable technology overestimated the number of calories burned by 28 percent.
However, asystematic reviewof two popular wearable brands Jawbone and Fitbit found they routinely underestimated caloric expenditure.
As wearables become more refined, a new market has cropped up: food intake trackers.
False advertising
equipment manufacturers aren’t the only ones getting the numbers wrong.
So that 320-calorie sweet and spicy Korean beef stir-fry from the freezer section might actually be 384 calories.
Foods with the lowest stated caloric content were the most likely to have more calories.
Even “healthy” foods that are often low calorie can have very high levels of salt.
Vegetable juice can have up to480 milligrams of salt.
Things like yogurt, granola bars, and dried fruit are all teaming with sugar.
High sugar and sodium can stymie your weight loss success.
More salt can cause you toretain water weight.
Sugar increases yourfat storage capability, making it even harder to shed those pounds.
Cooking changes everything
If you want to effectively lose weight, you will likely have to cook.
Yet cooking is where the practice of counting calories falls apart.
They also found that the mice got more calories from meat that was cooked compared to raw meat.
That 2,000-calorie number is arbitrary.
Well, sort of.
I should consume about 1,800.
Unintended consequences
When you boil it all down, calorie counting is really calorie restriction.
Normally, the body takes the calories from your food, mixes it withoxygen, and convertsit to energy.
That energy goes toward doing what you do every day.
By deliberately eating less food, you force your body to use its fat store to provide energy.
This is because calorie restriction is a signal to your body tolower your metabolism.
