On Counting Calories

Though I’ve made an app that does calorie counting, today I think counting calories alone is not enough. It matters whether those calories are coming from carbohydrates, fat, or protein. And contrary to popular belief, eating fat does not make you fat. Eating sugars and starches (which are easily converted to sugars) will make you fat. And you need to eat protein to build muscle.

The whole counting calories thing is based on the idea that to lose weight, you burn more calories than you eat each day, which at a very basic, thermodynamic level is true. But it doesn’t deal with the question of why your body is telling you to consume more calories than it needs. Why do you feel hungry all the time?

I would have a bowl of cereal and then less than an hour later feel hungry again. Or I would go through three bowls of brown rice in one sitting. But I still felt hungry, and worse, if I worked out, I felt tired the rest of the day. I was doing what most people would consider healthy: a low-fat diet, mostly vegetables, and with a little meat.

The problem is that all calories are not the same. If you eat a bowl of sugary cereal with sweetened soy milk and it’s 450 calories, all that sugar in the cereal is going to initially make you feel energized, but then an hour later, you get the sugar crash and you’re hungry again. But if you eat 450 calories of grass-fed beef and a salad with olive oil, you’re going to be feel satisfied for at least 5 hours, or even more if your body has been weened off of the high-sugar and high-starch diet that is what most people eat.

What’s worse is all the advertising, the US Food Pyramid, and even the American Heart Association telling you to eat lots of grains and cereals and little meat and fat. The AHA is in particular very suspect, since their logo is emblazoned upon cereal boxes, despite the fact that these sugary cereals are not helping your heart.

I was feeling tired every day and felt even worse after working out, so I did some research which led me to two diets. One is the “No Sugar, No Starch” diet from the Duke University Medical Center, which I just started a week ago. The other is the Paleo Diet, and I’m currently reading a book by Robb Wolf about it. They both limit carbohydrates to those you would get in salad greens and non-starchy vegetables, and limit or ban sugars, starches, and sweet things like fruit.

Like any good engineer, I’m going to test these diets before I come to any conclusions. For now, what I like is that I can eat meats and vegetables whenever I feel hungry, and I’ve actually been losing weight. It’s probably the initial adaptation causing some loss of retained water, but I do feel much better since I’m not always hungry and tired.

Some people suggest eating only half a plate of food at each meal, but I already have pretty small plates and therefore already have small portions, and if I didn’t change what I was eating, I would have felt even hungrier and more tired than before. The diet I’m on now seems to be working pretty well without my having to give up anything except starches and sweets, which I love, but now that I know they’re bad for me, I can avoid them. I even went as far as throwing away all the sugary foods in my home, because if the temptation is no longer there, you won’t accidentally eat it.

I might switch to a more strict Paleo diet later, but I’m gonig to stick to a fairly strict no-sugar, no-starch diet for at least the next 3 weeks, and then I’ll evaluate it. It might be hard to stick to the diet since I’m traveling to SXSW next week. I can easily stick to it when I buy all the ingredients and cook them myself. It’s much harder if you’re going out to eat or drink and have to make special orders.

Here’s a couple books:
Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes.
The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf.