Waste of time?
Calorie counting, it can take over your life, enjoyment of food but if we do it correctly, we’ll lose weight and gain muscle right? We’re going to have a look at all the pros and cons that come with calorie counting and work out just how accurate our figures are if this is something that we already do.
Personally we couldn’t think of anything less attractive then weighing our food and counting the calories that each food contains but that’s us. Lets talk about the things we need to think about when looking at calories. We’ll paint a nice picture for you and tell a cracking story to go with it (okay, a mediocre story) to keep you reading along with us. You sit down at a restaurant and open the menu, you’re trying to stay as healthy as possible but the meals popping off the page scream heart attack. Once turning the page you find a nice range of meals that are relatively healthy….it even says so in the menu, so you select a nice steak that comes in at lets say 800kcal. This will be perfect (you think to yourself) and it will leave you just enough room for a small desert if you feel like it! Okay, we need to put the breaks on this story for just a second. Whilst 700kcal will help you fall within your calorie allowance for the day, can you think of anything that may be a reason for the meal to come out and be any more than 700kcal? Here’s a small list of reasons below.
Livestock: What was the cow being fed?
Age of the cow
Size the cow
Transport: How long was the cow being transported?
How long was it in the freezer?
Kitchen: How was the meat prepared?
Size of the steak served
All of these factors add up and it can be quite scary to see the difference that it can make to the Calorie content of your meal, in fact it can be anywhere from 18-25% either side of the actual listing in the menu. Not as clear cut as it seems on the page is it?
With this being said, what is the correct number of calories that is acceptable for our body you may ask? Even this is a little all over the place and to date there are no exact formulas that can be provided to measure a persons required calorie intake within 10%. This means that if the predictive equation comes back at 1700kcal per day, you’d be lucky if your Resting Metabolic Rate comes in anywhere between 1530-1870kcal per day.
Over the course of the program we’ll go through ways to manage your intake for both weight loss and weight gain but if you can find anything from the information above to suggest that calorie counting is time well spent, we say go for it, otherwise, sit tight and we’ll talk to you about some alternative measures that will not only save you some time but hopefully generate the same results you were looking for when calorie counting.
Justin Beard Pn1