Logging What You Eat and Drink Instead of Counting Calories

Most food items we buy have their calorie content, including the amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, fat, etc listed on the packaging. Many popular coffee-shops and fast-food joints now do the same for the food and drinks on offer and some countries even have legislation mandating a mention of the calorie content of every food item sold or dish served.

The premise is that listing calories gives us an idea of what we are consuming, based on the principle that controlling calorie intake can help us control our weight.

Weight loss is a subject I haven’t touched upon in the last 18 months since I started this newsletter, which morphed from MatkaMedicine to Atmasvasth, simply because weight is just one component of healthful ageing.

Obesity is a worldwide challenge and those who are obese (BMI > 30 kg/m2) (BMI is weight in kg divided by the square of the height in metres) clearly live shorter, more diseased lives [1]. In settings of severe obesity (BMI > 35 or 40), weight-loss medications and bariatric surgery help improve healthspan and lifespan. However, even after these interventions, some form of a long-term sensible eating plan is needed to sustain that weight loss.

It doesn’t help that socially, most people think of svelte and thin as healthy and round and heavy as unhealthy and focus on weight loss and the outward physical appearance as surrogates of “health”. This thinking has permeated into all of us to such an extent that when people over 50 meet, the first thing we comment upon is the person’s shape and apparent weight with statements such as “you’ve lost weight, you look good, what is your secret, you’ve put on, you look well-fed and healthy, is everything fine…”

While keeping a stable, reasonable weight is part of our quest to live long healthy, focusing solely on weight and weight loss, which most people do these days, as parameters of healthy living negates the concept of healthful ageing, which involves so much more than just your weight.  The use of BMI as a marker of weight and health is also quite flawed [2] and many who fall into the so-called “overweight” (BMI between 25-30) category are often healthier when it comes to cardiovascular risk and other health parameters than those of normal BMI…ergo, weight cannot be the singular parameter defining health. Most healthy people will fall within a range of underweight to overweight as defined by BMI, given that for health parameters, there is a spectrum of normality (remember vitamin D and B12) rather than a single cut-off number.

By extension therefore, popular, advertised diets, free or otherwise are just not sustainable, nor is there any data that they make any difference to your health (e.g Atkins, Dixit, etc) and to pay thousands or sometimes even lakhs of rupees to dieticians and nutritionists who claim to be able to reduce your weight and therefore improve your health, is just a waste of good money.

Sensible eating moves away from the concept of just how many calories you consume, to a more qualitative approach…my father and grandfather never needed to count calories, because they just did not have this sudden explosion of food choices, especially ultra processed foods (UPFs) to deal with.

A predominant plant-based diet with as few UPFs as possible, with nuts, fruits, vegetables and a control over salt and sugar is what we need…in sensible portions. A 60-years old person who weighs 70 kg needs an average of 2000 calories per day, if sedentary and 200-600 calories more depending on how active they are. Older people may need fewer calories and younger people more.

Sensible eating implies that we consume whatever is the ideal calorie intake for us plus minus 10-20%, without obsessing over every calorie that goes in. It also means not being outliers, consuming 3000 calories or just 1200 calories each day. A one-off situation is irrelevant…e.g if you binge on a weekend or during a wedding or if you fast once in a while.

Many people believe that if “calories in minus calories out” is equal or negative, the resultant calorie deficit will help us control or lose weight. This by and large does not work for a variety of reasons.

• Most people are bad at estimating the calories they consume.
• Often the calories listed on packaged foods are incorrect by 10-20%.
• Many foods are not absorbed to the extent of their listed or estimated calorie content, thus making us overestimate the calorie consumption (e.g. almonds).
• The quality of the calories does not get addressed - e.g. alcohol has “useless” calories as compared to fruits and vegetables [3].
• The gut microbiome, which is different for each individual also handles different food items and calories differently in different people [4].

A daily calorie deficit does lead to short term weight loss, but is usually not sustainable and eventually the body adjusts its “set-point” and the weight creeps back in. The quality of the food we eat is far more important than “how much”, with the caveat that the “how much” should be within a reasonable range.

I log what I eat and drink for a week or two every couple of months. I use MyFitnessPal on the phone, but you can use whatever works for you, including pen and paper.

Why do I do this?

1. It helps me reassess what I am eating. I have found that over time, I tend to slip into an over-eating pattern and very often when I start logging food after a break, I find that I have been over-consuming, especially sugary and salty foods. I, therefore prefer to call it, “logging” what I consume, rather than “counting” calories.

2. This over-consumption is often due to the small snacks I keep picking up between meals. Despite my 16-8 time-restricted eating (TRE), I find that I can still land up gorging on chocolates or cookies or chips or “chewda”, especially while watching television and logging what I eat and drink allows me to exercise better control over these snacks. A recent study validated this approach…those who used a logging app like MyFitnessPal were able to reduce their consumption of sugary foods, just by being aware of what they were eating [5].

When I speak to friends who believe they have control over the food they eat, I usually find that they underestimate their sugary-snack and UPF intake significantly…using a logging app or even an analog diary helps them understand their daily eating pattern better.

3. After a week or two of realigning what I eat,  I find I don’t need to log for a few more weeks or months.

Counting calories as a weight-loss method does not work over the long term for the reasons I have mentioned. However logging food and drink items makes us aware of what we are putting into our bodies and helps us understand our eating and drinking patterns, which we can then balance as needed. If we find that our fruit intake is low or missing or that we are not consuming unsalted nuts at all or that our red meat or alcohol content is too high, being conscious of what we put in our mouths can help us mindfully reassess our eating patterns. It is similar to long-term investment in the stock market, where every month or quarter, you reassess your holdings and rebalance shares and funds to improve the health of the portfolio.

That is how food and drink logging helps, not to agonize over and count every calorie that goes in, but to understand your food and drink habits better, which in turn can help you improve and better balance them, in our atmasvasth quest to live long healthy.

Footnotes

1. Flegal KM et aI. Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and obesity using standard body mass index categories: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA. 2013 Jan 2;309(1):71-82.

2. Mechanick JI. "What if" being overweight was good for you? Endocr Pract. 2013 Jan-Feb;19(1):166-8.

3. Mozaffarian D. Foods, obesity, and diabetes-are all calories created equal? Nutr Rev. 2017 Jan;75(suppl 1):19-31.

4. Dahl WJ et al. Diet, nutrients and the microbiome. Prog Mol Biol Transl Sci. 2020;171:237-263.

5. Slazus C et al. Mobile health apps: An assessment of needs, perceptions, usability, and efficacy in changing dietary choices. Nutrition. 2022 Sep;101:111690.