Why Calorie Counting Makes you fat

Daily Mail. July 21, 2009.

I got very excited when I saw this headline. At last, I thought, someone else has realised that calorie counting is the cause of the obesity epidemic and not the cure. But no, the article was about a new report by Dr Geoffrey Livesey, one of a “growing band of scientists” who think we have got the way we calculate calories wrong. Wilbur Olin Atwater’s original ‘calorimeter’, from over 100 years ago, is apparently inaccurate (surely not!) and a glass of wine may actually have ‘only’ 115 calories and not 120, whilst a bacon sandwich may have 18 calories more than we thought it did.

When are we going to see calories for what they are – fuel – and not the enemy to be avoided?! I wrote in my Harcombe Diet Club newsletter for April about the Kekwick & Pawan article in The Lancet (view newsletter here). As far back as 1956 we had all the evidence we needed that it is what we eat, not how much, that is the key to weight and weight loss.

If you want some calorie inaccuracies – how about this: The calorie theory “To lose 1lb of fat, you need to create a deficit of 3500 calories” is always noted as “an approximation”. The closest I can get to this is 3,555. Close enough you might think – however this would add up to 170lbs difference in 30 years, according to this mad formula! (And the difference is ‘in our favour’, so we should be, on average, c. 12 stone lighter than we were in 1979)! The body simply does not follow a mathematical formula in this way – if it did – every person on c. 20 weight watchers points would lose 7½ stone each year, every year!