Counting Calories Doesn’t Work

How many of you reading this have ever tried to count calories? Measuring each portion of food precisely and logging the numbers, day after day. How did it work for you? It can become obsessive sometimes, even anti-social. I think that more often than not it leads to failure when trying to obtain that physique you’re after. But why is this? You’d think by controlling the amount of food we eat through manipulating the calories and trying to create a calorie deficit to lose weight, we’d be successful, right? What if it turns out that virtually everything we think we know about calories is probably wrong! The science behind calculating the energy content of food is now well over 120 years old. The values obtained from these experiments were only estimates. Over time they have become set in stone and used worldwide when designing diets or labelling food.This has led to our food labels either over or underestimating the number of calories contained in each serve of food by as much as 25%. That’s huge! For somebody trying to stick to a 2000 calorie a day limit, they might be taking in as much as 2500 calories without even knowing it. That’s easily enough to ruin any attempt to get that body you’ve always dreamed of. Recent scientific research has discovered that factors such as cooking, chewing, food preparation methods and the differing textures of food can change the number of calories obtained and potentially stored from each meal. You are probably thinking, what impact is this having on my attempts to get my dream body? Where does all this information leave us? Firstly, if the labels on our food products are over or underestimating the calorie content by as much as 25%, we should probably be avoiding most foods that need one. The best food choices are often the ones with no labels at all.  Secondly, we need to get the nutritional foundations right and actually understand them before worrying about the ratios of carbs, fats and protein. Here at Fitline, all of our trainers are qualified Metabolic Precision Nutritionists.  Using the MP system, your trainer can help you to understand the nutritional foundation principles and keep you on track each day, every day. Metabolic Precision teaches you what foods to eat and when to eat them.