Article written by Helga Marin April 2015
I was having lunch with my friend at her house. I noticed that before we sat down to eat, everything that went onto her plate she weighed on a small scale. First, she put the fish, then the potatoes and then finally she added the salad. I also noticed how she was writing something on her phone while weighing the food. I asked with great curiosity what she was doing, and she answered: “I’m weighing everything I eat and then a I have a program on my phone that calculates my daily calorie intake”. She continued: “My plan is to eat 1300 kcal a day for the next 30 days and according to my calculations I should be able to lose around 4 kg in one month if I stick to my plan”. I smiled and it brought back memories when I used to do this myself. Back in those days there were no smart phones or programs to calculate my kcal intake, so I memorized the kcal content of everything I ate and then at night I calculated by hand my kcal intake for the day.
I asked her if I could share my own experience with her and what I had learned? She agreed and I started sharing my own story with her. I told her how I had in my early adulthood been completely obsessed with losing weight and how I knew more about kcal in food than how many rooms there were in my house. I had to learn the right way the hard way. I had to experience torturing myself though a diet after diet with endless yoyo effect as I rarely stuck to one diet for more than a week or so as they were simply too hard to maintain. I had to go through lots of deprivation, bad mood and guilt before I learned what really worked.
It is my goal with this article to share with you that same knowledge I shared with my good friend in hope that it will benefit you as it benefited her.
The question I want to answer in the article is: ´How important is it to count kcal for weight loss?”
To start with let us look at what kcal is. A single calorie contains enough energy to increase the temperature of a gram of water by 1 degree on the Celsius or centigrade scale. It is a simple way to measure the amount of energy in foods. A simple way of looking at weight loss is counting the kcal you eat and then counting the kcal you spend. If your expenditure exceeds your intake, you will lose weight. For many years this was the way nutritionists would help people to lose weight and even though it does work to a certain degree its far from being the best way to shed those extra pounds off. When I started working with clients 25 years ago, helping them to lose weight, I realized quickly that counting kcal didn’t really work. My clients didn’t really lose weight by just cutting down their calories. I got curious why it didn’t work and below is a summary of my findings.
- Counting only kcal doesn’t take into consideration the different thermic effect of foods, which is the energy it takes the body to digest, absorb and transport the food’s nutrients to your cells. Five to ten percent of your body’s daily energy requirements goes into processing the foods you eat. Not all foods are created equal, and some foods have a higher thermic effect than others. As a general rule, your body spends more energy (calories) to process proteins than it does to process carbohydrates and fats. You’ll burn up to 30 percent of the calories in lean-protein foods just to process the food, putting proteins at the top of the list in terms of thermic effect.
The different thermic effect of the 3 different food groups
- Carbohydrates: 5 to 15% of the energy consumed
- Protein: 20 to 35%
- Fats: 5 to 15 %
This means that if you eat 1500 kcal on a high protein diet compare to 1500 kcal on a high carbohydrate diet you will experience a faster weight loss. There are other reasons for why protein works better for weight loss than carbohydrates, I have written about them here below. I do want to emphasize that even though attempting to lose weight on a high protein diet may work you may be jeopardizing your health, especially if you exclude all vegetables and fruits from your diet.
- Not all the kcal you consume in a meal are used for energy so it depends on what you eat and how the body will use it. For example if I have a coke and fries most of the kcal in that meal will be turned into energy, as none of the micro nutrients can be used in any other way in the body. So the only thing the body can do with these kcal is to either burn them right away or store them as fat. Apart from only containing empty kcal, coke and fries do have an effect on your hormonal system, which I will discuss in the next point. If you on the other hand have a meal containing salad, chicken and olive oil dressing you may be eating the same amount of kcal but only portion of the kcal are going to be used as an energy source. The protein may be used to build new cells and tissues and the fat may be used to repair cell membranes, manufacture vitamins, or fulfill any of its many other function in the body.
- The food we eat affects our hormones, which in turn affects our metabolism. For instance, when you drink a Coke you release large amount of insulin as a response to the sudden rise in blood sugar. The quicker your blood sugar rises the more insulin is released into the bloodstream to bring the blood sugar down again. There are many problems associated with too much insulin being released into the bloodstream, some of them are related to an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke due to an increased level of fats and LDL in the blood. When it comes to weight loss, the sudden rise in insulin in the bloodstream shuts down the body’s ability to burn fat. If you are constantly eating food that elevates the blood sugar too much, you are preventing the body from burning fat. To help people understand which foods raises our blood sugar and which foods don’t, a scale has been created that measure the effect the food has on the blood sugar. The first scale created is called the GI index. The goal of this scale is to provide people with guidelines on how different foods affect their blood sugar. There is a small problem with this scale in that it does not take into consideration the portion size. Another scale has therefore been created that takes the portion sizes into account. This scale is called the GI load. Food may also affect other hormones like ghrelin and lectin, which I will not go into here.
- Some food will boost your metabolic rate (your BMR) while other foods will slow it down. BMR is how much kcal your body burns at rest. Whole grains, fibers, good protein and good fats can boost your BMR while coke and fries may slow down the BMR. Raw foods will raise your BMR more than cooked food and whole foods will raise your BMR more than processed food. The water content of the food you eat is also important, so the higher the water content the bigger the impact on the BMR. Apart from boosting your BMR, foods with a high-water content also keep you full longer. The foods with the highest water content are vegetables and fruits.
- Most of the processed foods the market are filled with additives that can be stored in your fat storage and affect the BMR in number of different ways. Eating unhealthy processed food may lower your BMR dramatically especially as you age.
- Counting kcal does not take into account how many meals you eat in a day. If you eat several meals a day you will raise the BMR. If you eat only one meal a day the BMR can slow down. I would like to mention that fasting or eating fewer meals a day can have great health benefits, so it is not for everyone to eat as often as they do.
- When you eat is also important. People who eat their main meal at night are more likely to gain weight than people who eat the main meal during the day. In conclusion you may gain weight on 2000 kcal if you consume most of those kcal late at night. You will lose more weight, eating the same amount of kcal if you eat earlier.
- Working with people for over 25 years has shown me that the biggest reason for people’s weight gain is not that they overeat but rather that they eat the wrong kind of food at the wrong time. Eating unhealthily for long time can dramatically slow down the BMR. In all the years I worked with clients, I only witnessed few that were consuming too many kcal. Most of my clients ate the wrong kind of food at the wrong time and some were eating too little. Reducing their kcal intake further would have resulted in an even lower BMR. What worked better was to change the type of food they ate and shift their kcal intake to earlier in the day.
- Stress can affect BMR in different ways depending on the type of stress experienced. Acute stress can increase BMR due to the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Chronic stress on the other hand can have the opposite effect and decrease BMR. This is because chronic stress can lead to increased levels of cortisol in the body, which can contribute to muscle loss and a decrease in overall BMR. In addition, stress can impact our eating habits as we may be more likely to overeat or under-eat, both of which can affect the BMR.
- Your body gets used to what you eat. I have found that the body gets used to a certain type of diet. People who for example have been on a high protein diet for a long time may benefit from increasing their carbohydrate intake at least temporarily. The reason being that the body gets used to certain kind of food and the BMR slows down as a result. By changing what kind of food you eat can be an effective way to increase the BMR which will induce weight loss. Here is an article about the Zig Zag method that can raise the BMR. Read more HERE
Conclusion:
If you want to shed a few extra pounds or if you just want to feel more energized and healthy counting kcal is not the way to go. Below are suggested guidelines:
Eat “clean” food with no additives or other toxins. Eating food in season and from close to its origin is the way to go here.
- Implement fresh fruits and vegetables in preferably every meal of the day and remember to always include raw vegetables as well.
- Consume foods that contain a high nutritional value, high water content and lots of fibers.
- Consume foods with a low GI load
- Consume a good amount of protein or at least 0.8-1gr per kg lean bodyweight. If your weight is at its optimum and you weigh 60 kg you need 50-60 grams of protein a day. If you are 80 kg carrying 20 kg of extra fat your protein requirement stays the same, you only need 50-60gr.
- Avoid foods that contain trans fats (especially the industrial trans fats), refined carbs and sugar as these foods are the main reason why people gain weight.
- Eat more during the daytime and less in the evening hours.
- Nurture your state of mind by developing a positive outlook on life. Create a stress-free environment and lifestyle for yourself.
- Rest when you are tired and go earlier to bed to get the optimum rest.