Common wisdom is “you lose weight by making sure that the energy you consume, is less than the energy you use”. This is true.

However, this is wrong: “you lose weight by making sure that the number of calories you consume, is less than the number of calories you use”. This is false.

Why? There are at least one big problem with counting calories if you want to lose weight.

How much calories are there in 1 kg of fat, meat, potatoes, rice, carrot, apples? You can lookup the calorie numbers, but how do you know the numbers are valid and applicable to your food intake?

How do you measure the amount of calories in e.g. meat? You incinerate meat, and put it to fire and burn it, in a closed environment. Then you can measure how much heat and energy is produced by the fire. From the generated heat, you can deduce how much calories there are in meat.

But here is the point: your body does not extract energy from meat by burning it at 800 degrees Celsius. No, your body use a different chemical process to extract the energy from meat at 37 degrees Celsius.

Burning meat, and digesting meat are different processes. Therefore they release different amounts of energy. Everybody know there are 143 calories in meat – when you burn it. If you eat meat, you instead extract another amount of energy. How much? I don’t know. But I know that counting calories does not apply if you are eating the food. Calories apply only when you burn the food in a fire.

The result is, for some food, you can eat more calories than you theoretically need, and still loose weight. Why? Because the calorie list might say, a certain food has 100 calories – when you burn it. But as you eat it, you might extract 90(?) calories. Probably the amount of energy extracted by digestion, is close to the amount of energy from burning – maybe within 10%? No one knows. Therefore you have some leeway, and you can eat more than the theoretical calorie number and still loose weight – for some types of food.

The diet researchers should update the calorie lists to show the true amount of energy extracted when food is digested. This would be valuable research, so if anyone is looking for a PhD subject within dietetics, here you have one. 🙂

Which types of food gives you less energy than the listed calorie number? Which food can you eat more than prescribed, and still loose weight? If you know this, you can increase your food intake to never go hungry, and still loose weight. There are people that do this. I will write about how to do this, and about correct food in a future blog post, stay tuned! 🙂

Here is a research paper about how counting calories are misleading:
https://www.livescience.com/26799-calorie-counts-inaccurate.html