Speaker 1: We're gonna chack one almond, see how much it weighs. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not happy with the size of this almond because
Speaker 1: it's touching the edges of the capsule. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take a smaller piece, once smaller. So I'm standing in
Speaker 1: a government laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland with Teresa Henderson, a
Speaker 1: scientist with the US Department of Agriculture. She's sizing up
Speaker 1: a zip block bag of almonds that I brought here
Speaker 1: with me as a snack. I've just asked her if
Speaker 1: we could do a little experiment to figure out how
Speaker 1: many calories are in my almonds A half one, because
Speaker 1: that might be too small where I can be cut it.
Speaker 1: Calories are everywhere. They're listed on the packaging of your
Speaker 1: favorite junk food and on the menus at chain restaurants.
Speaker 1: Apps like my fitness Pal and new exists mainly to
Speaker 1: track exactly how many calories you eat each day. There
Speaker 1: are numbers that a lot of us spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time considering. I know I do. A banana has
Speaker 1: about a hundred calories. A slice of bacon, haste, if
Speaker 1: you can eat just one. These numbers are treated like gospel,
Speaker 1: But have you ever stopped to think where do they
Speaker 1: come from? Figuring that out is what brought me here
Speaker 1: to this U. S. D A lab. This was the
Speaker 1: start of a journey into the world of diets, where
Speaker 1: I quit clely learned that a lot of the things
Speaker 1: we think of as fact are a lot more complicated,
Speaker 1: including the calorie. But first, back to our little science
Speaker 1: experiment with Teresa. She's about to explode my almond literally
Speaker 1: to figure out how many calories are in it. A
Speaker 1: little chap. Teresa is chopping up my almond to prepare
Speaker 1: it for a machine called a bomb calorimeter. It's this big,
Speaker 1: boxy gray thing about the size of a printer. Put
Speaker 1: my two thirds of an almond in there, and it weighs.
Speaker 1: Teresa puts the almond in a small, shallow tray called
Speaker 1: a combustion capsule. The tray gets connected to a fuse
Speaker 1: wire and the whole thing is lowered into a metal
Speaker 1: container inside the machine. This is the bomb part of
Speaker 1: bomb calorimeter. The bomb is surrounded by water. The water
Speaker 1: is going to heat up, and however hot it gets
Speaker 1: will tell us how many calories my almond has. And
Speaker 1: now it's starting so it's equilibrating and going through its process.
Speaker 1: For a few minutes, it's quiet. All I can hear
Speaker 1: is a low hump. The beeping means an electric current
Speaker 1: is going to pass through the fuse wire and explode
Speaker 1: my snack. You might expect blowing up an almond to
Speaker 1: make a big bang, noise or something, but it actually doesn't.
Speaker 1: It should be. We'll find out if it worked correctly,
Speaker 1: the almond would be gone. Ah, temperature is going up.
Speaker 1: That's a good sign. But what does blowing up my
Speaker 1: almond have to do with calories? So it's just basically,
Speaker 1: if you throw a log of wood on a fire,
Speaker 1: it's going to burn and give off heat. Right, it's
Speaker 1: the same concept. You're throwing, you know, a measured amount
Speaker 1: of food or whatever and burning it, and it's going
Speaker 1: to give off heat, and you're measuring the amount of
Speaker 1: fuel energy in that food bomb. Calorimeter prints out a
Speaker 1: little white paper that looks like a receipt. Teresa tears
Speaker 1: it off and reads the result. My single almond contains
Speaker 1: about seven calories. She opens up the machine. There's nothing
Speaker 1: left but a few black smudges. You can see that
Speaker 1: almond burnt very nicely, my snack is gone. But don't
Speaker 1: write that number in your food log just yet. Calories
Speaker 1: are way more complicated than our little experiment might suggest.
Speaker 1: I'm going to get into that soon. First, let's start
Speaker 1: with a more basic question. What is a calorie anyway?
Speaker 1: And where do the calorie counts on foods come from?
Speaker 1: What's the calorie? Calorie? Is something that makes it belly fat?
Speaker 1: How they figure it out? I don't know. You just
Speaker 1: read the can and that's how much calories is in
Speaker 1: the food? I have no clue. I used to think
Speaker 1: that there was a method where they I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I could only guess. Calories represent how much
Speaker 1: energy there is in food. Energy your body then uses
Speaker 1: to do all the things it does in a day.
Speaker 1: I think of it like fuel in a car's gas tank.
Speaker 1: Calories power your walk to the off this, cooking dinner
Speaker 1: when you get home, even reading your kids a bedtime story. Wow,
Speaker 1: the only thing I like. I'll X I'll google it.
Speaker 1: How many calories is in one egg? How many calories
Speaker 1: isn't one slice of turkey? Vegans? These are the voices
Speaker 1: of some nice strangers who we interviewed while they were
Speaker 1: shopping at a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, and there are
Speaker 1: pretty good representation of well all of us. Everyone's at
Speaker 1: least heard of a calorie, and for many of us,
Speaker 1: they actually play a pretty big role in our decisions
Speaker 1: about food. Calories have this incredible power over us. We're
Speaker 1: obsessed with calories because we're obsessed with being thin, but
Speaker 1: most of us have no idea what a calorie really
Speaker 1: is or how they're calculated. And here's the thing. People
Speaker 1: like to say a calorie is a calorie, but the
Speaker 1: calorie isn't actually that straightforward. The number of calories in
Speaker 1: a food can change depending on how we prepare it
Speaker 1: and who's eating it. Calorie counts on foods can even
Speaker 1: sometimes be wrong, like our almond from earlier. Scientists are
Speaker 1: still to this day figuring out the best way to
Speaker 1: measure how much energy the food that we eat has.
Speaker 1: It's not just calories. Calories are the start of everything.
Speaker 1: We still don't know about gaining and losing weight and
Speaker 1: what weight has to do with being healthy anyway. But
Speaker 1: that hasn't stopped people from telling you exactly how to
Speaker 1: finally drop that last ten pounds or bragging that they
Speaker 1: still fit into their high school genes or doctors from
Speaker 1: telling you to lose weight. It also hasn't sat people
Speaker 1: from making tons of money off of totally unscientific advice.
Speaker 1: I'm am a court healthcare reporter for Bloomberg News. This
Speaker 1: is Losing It a podcast from Prognosis. We've been trained
Speaker 1: to think of dieting as a weight loss solution, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the science actually suggests the opposite. Dieting
Speaker 1: may work in the beginning to bring that number down
Speaker 1: on the scale, but as the weeks and months turn
Speaker 1: into years, the reality is that people usually don't keep
Speaker 1: the weight off. This series is about how and why
Speaker 1: we've been going about weight loss all wrong, and whether
Speaker 1: we should even be trying to lose weight in the
Speaker 1: first place. I'm also going to look for a better
Speaker 1: solution for us away out of this whole mess. But first,
Speaker 1: let's talk some more about the humble calorie. Let's go
Speaker 1: back in time to when the calorie as we know
Speaker 1: it was born. Calories got popularized in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: century by a guy named Wilbur olin Atwater. Wilbur was
Speaker 1: a chemistry professor at Wesleyan University who also worked for
Speaker 1: the U S d A. He's actually considered the father
Speaker 1: of nutritional science in the US. Years earlier, European scientists
Speaker 1: had come up with the idea of using calories to
Speaker 1: measure energy. Remember, calories are a unit of energy. Scientists
Speaker 1: began using them to talk about heat powering machines like
Speaker 1: steam engines. Later they started measuring calories in food. Wilbur
Speaker 1: was drawn to this new way of thinking and got
Speaker 1: really serious about figuring out how much energy was in
Speaker 1: different foods. Wilbur was also worried about people over eating.
Speaker 1: He wanted to know how much food people really needed.
Speaker 1: The calorie looked like a great way to do just that,
Speaker 1: so he tries to get the word out. He also
Speaker 1: came up with a formula for calculating the caloric value
Speaker 1: of food based on how much of it is fat, protein,
Speaker 1: and carbohydrates. That's actually how most calorie counts on foods
Speaker 1: get calculated today. The bond calorimeter we used earlier to
Speaker 1: blow up my almond is a more old school method.
Speaker 1: The calorie is an attractive measure because it is a
Speaker 1: simplified number in which you can sort of put in
Speaker 1: front of an item of food. This is Giles Yo
Speaker 1: scientist with the University of Cambridge, and people think the
Speaker 1: higher the number the worst of food. In very but simplistically,
Speaker 1: in the environment, the lower number the better, the food,
Speaker 1: healthier it is for you. But that is not true.
Speaker 1: Giles is not a fan of the calorie. He actually
Speaker 1: wrote a book with a pretty blunt title, why Calories
Speaker 1: Don't Count. And about a decade ago, scientists at the
Speaker 1: U s d A also start asking big fundamental questions
Speaker 1: about calories. Their names were David Bear and Janet Navatni,
Speaker 1: and they became interested in nuts, specifically. Yes, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk more about nuts in this episode. Anyway, they
Speaker 1: noticed that in some studies where people were fed nuts,
Speaker 1: their bodies weren't fully breaking the nuts down. That's the
Speaker 1: politest way of putting in. What we started to think
Speaker 1: about was if the fat isn't being completely digested this
Speaker 1: is David, and it's coming out in the waste and
Speaker 1: the faces, then the calories from the fat aren't being
Speaker 1: completely absorbed as well. And it made us wonder whether
Speaker 1: we were getting accurate calorie values for tree nuts. So
Speaker 1: David and Janet put this theory to the test. They
Speaker 1: did a series of studies looking at almonds, pistachios, cashews,
Speaker 1: and walnuts, and it turned out their hunch was right.
Speaker 1: The typical calorie counts the numbers listed on labels at
Speaker 1: food stores were too high for those nuts. The fat,
Speaker 1: the stuff that makes nuts so high calorie, wasn't being
Speaker 1: fully digested. The scientists were able to see this right
Speaker 1: in people's poop, and like David said, if people weren't
Speaker 1: digesting all that fat, they also weren't absorbing the calories
Speaker 1: from that fat. The nuts turned out to have anywhere
Speaker 1: between five and fewer calories than their nutrition label set,
Speaker 1: and the nuts with the biggest difference almonds, like the
Speaker 1: one we blew up in the lab. Nuts, like all
Speaker 1: plant material, have a cell wall, and that's where we
Speaker 1: find the fiber that's also resistant to digestion. We can
Speaker 1: ferment it and break it down, but plant cells are
Speaker 1: surrounded by the cell wall, and until you can open
Speaker 1: up that cell wall, you can't get to what's inside
Speaker 1: the plant cell. In the case of nuts, they're relatively
Speaker 1: high in fat, so there's a lot of energy stored
Speaker 1: within those cells. With whole nuts, that means unless you're
Speaker 1: a really thorough chew er, you're probably pooping a lot
Speaker 1: of fat out and that means fewer calories. So in short,
Speaker 1: nutritional labels have been telling us for years that a
Speaker 1: bunch of different kinds of nuts are more caloric than
Speaker 1: they actually are, and that could be the case for
Speaker 1: other food too. We've been trained to take calorie counts
Speaker 1: on food incredibly seriously. We count our calories so we
Speaker 1: don't eat too many. We we food to make sure
Speaker 1: we're counting exactly how many calories were eating, or we
Speaker 1: buy prepackaged food because those numbers seem like they're more accurate.
Speaker 1: But as I dug into this all of that, it
Speaker 1: started to seem like a giant waste of time and effort.
Speaker 1: Wilbolan Atwater intended calories to be a tool for making
Speaker 1: better decisions about how to fuel ourselves. Instead, we've wound
Speaker 1: up in this world where somehow a hundred calories of
Speaker 1: nuts seems equivalent to a hundred calorie pack of chips.
Speaker 1: We're focusing on the number over the quality of food,
Speaker 1: and we're also focusing on the number way too much.
Speaker 1: We've taken it way too far. Somewhere along the way,
Speaker 1: calories went from a guide to navigating food to some
Speaker 1: sort of holy infallible thing, and in the process they've
Speaker 1: also kind of become misinformation. These issues with calories go
Speaker 1: way beyond nuts. Processing food, including by cooking, it also
Speaker 1: changes the amount of calories we get from it. Why well,
Speaker 1: For one, digestion is work and how hard you are
Speaker 1: working affects the end calorie count of a food. Processing
Speaker 1: or cooking food makes for less work for your body.
Speaker 1: Is it a carrot, Is it a steak? Is it
Speaker 1: a donut? That our body has to look to differing
Speaker 1: degrees hard or not as hard to extract the calories,
Speaker 1: and this cost energy And so therefore you have to
Speaker 1: take this into account when you're try and account the
Speaker 1: calories within the food. It's your body has to work
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot harder to put out calories
Speaker 1: from a carrot than it needs to from a donut.
Speaker 1: The calories and a food can even depend on who
Speaker 1: is eating it. If you and I ate the same sandwich,
Speaker 1: we might get different amounts of energy from it. That
Speaker 1: has to do with how different bodies processed food differently
Speaker 1: because of genetics and factors like the gut microbiome. So
Speaker 1: even though nutrition labels make it seem like calories are
Speaker 1: a fixed value. They actually aren't. Calorie counts on food
Speaker 1: are misleading at best, and food companies are playing their
Speaker 1: own games. Okay, so a serving as q cups, which
Speaker 1: is decent. It's there's there's of it allegedly seven servings
Speaker 1: in this spect a hundred and forty calories per serving
Speaker 1: and seventy for a cup. Okay, So is this food
Speaker 1: good or bad for you? I have no idea. That
Speaker 1: was me and the editor of this podcast, Christin V. Brown.
Speaker 1: We're back at that Whole Foods in Brooklyn where we
Speaker 1: interviewed people about calories. We wanted to check out calor
Speaker 1: counts in the wild to get a sense of how
Speaker 1: helpful this tool for evaluating food really is. One of
Speaker 1: the things we looked at was a bag of Musely,
Speaker 1: a quarter cop as a hundred and forty calories. You know, Musely,
Speaker 1: the breakfast cereal that's kind of like granola. So that's
Speaker 1: the same as our thirteen potato chips and our popcorn? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why is a hundred and forty the magic number? Most
Speaker 1: foods we looked at were around hundred and forty calories
Speaker 1: per serving and hundred and forty doesn't sound like that
Speaker 1: many calories. Feel like everything has had the same amount
Speaker 1: of calori. See also a hundred and sixty is anyone
Speaker 1: going to a serving size with more than two hundred calories?
Speaker 1: According to the Food and Drug Administration, a serving size
Speaker 1: isn't a recommendation, it's actually how much people usually eat
Speaker 1: or drink that product. So when you see thirteen potato
Speaker 1: chips is a serving size that's supposed to be how
Speaker 1: many potato chips people eat in a sitting. Potato chips, Yeah, right.
Speaker 1: And don't even get me started on how many servings
Speaker 1: are in a container. Often you buy something small that's
Speaker 1: obviously meant to be a single serving, and yet somehow
Speaker 1: the label claims it's two or three or even four servings.
Speaker 1: The more servings in a container, the fewer calories companies
Speaker 1: have to list on the label, and the better it
Speaker 1: looks when you compare it to another food. You're just
Speaker 1: relying on calories. You would say, okay, I could have
Speaker 1: popcorn for breakfast, or I could add usely and it
Speaker 1: would be the same amount of calories. And so why
Speaker 1: should I choose the thing that seems kind of gross
Speaker 1: and healthy? Our field trip to whole Foods left me
Speaker 1: wondering are calories fundamentally broken. I'm pretty much leaning yes
Speaker 1: at this point, but many of the experts I spoke
Speaker 1: with said they're working to improve calorie counts, not get
Speaker 1: rid of them. Here's their argument. Sure, calories aren't perfect,
Speaker 1: but they're essentially accurate, if not precisely. So they give
Speaker 1: you a number you can compare with other foods, and
Speaker 1: that can help you decide whether to have, say a pizza,
Speaker 1: or a big salad for dinner. Here's Rachel Carmody, an
Speaker 1: assistant professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, saying,
Speaker 1: you know, these food labels have been horribly wrong, and
Speaker 1: we're just going to now revamp them all, which could
Speaker 1: lead to a lot of confusion. So I think this
Speaker 1: has to be done responsibly. We're trying to make the
Speaker 1: tool more useful. The problem with this, though, is that
Speaker 1: we all know the salad is the healthier choice for dinner,
Speaker 1: not pizza. Sadly, people still use calorie counts to make
Speaker 1: decisions about what they buy and what they eat. We
Speaker 1: want to believe the calorie is this highly accurate measure,
Speaker 1: down to a single calorie or two food labels lead
Speaker 1: us to believe the same, but calories really shouldn't be
Speaker 1: used like that. Calories give us the illusion of control
Speaker 1: over diet and weight, but it's just that an illusion.
Speaker 1: Giles Yo, the University of Cambridge researcher, who is anti calorie,
Speaker 1: says it would be better instead to communicate a few
Speaker 1: key measures of nutritional value, specifically the amount of fiber,
Speaker 1: protein added, sugar and fat in the food. My argument
Speaker 1: is to move away from the calorie per se, but
Speaker 1: actually to consider the quality of the food, and I
Speaker 1: think that is far more important. Now. It happens to
Speaker 1: be related to the calorie, but the calorie is a
Speaker 1: blunt tool in terms of trying to measure the quality
Speaker 1: of a of any given food you're trying to eat.
Speaker 1: When Giles talks about high quality foods, he means those
Speaker 1: that have more protein and fiber, like beans or chicken
Speaker 1: nuts count two. His point is a good one. Calories
Speaker 1: can be deceptive. A can of coca cola and a
Speaker 1: pint of strawberries both have similar numbers of calories, but
Speaker 1: they definitely do not have similar nutritional values. It's easy, though,
Speaker 1: to think that low calorie means healthy. We talk about
Speaker 1: weight loss in the same way too, Like anyone who
Speaker 1: goes on a diet and loses fifteen pounds is going
Speaker 1: to be in better shape. But if I went on
Speaker 1: an all coca cola diet and lost weight, would I
Speaker 1: be healthier? That's why we shouldn't make weight loss equivalent
Speaker 1: with good health. Something will get into leader in the series.
Speaker 1: We also now know that calorie counts on labels don't
Speaker 1: actually tell us how many calories of food has because
Speaker 1: how you prepare food and how you digest it and
Speaker 1: a lot of other things can change the number. And
Speaker 1: yet calories are still being treated as the truth. There
Speaker 1: are labels as fact when they probably need at least
Speaker 1: an asterisk. Diets are being sold to people based on
Speaker 1: the science behind these numbers. That's a global industry worth
Speaker 1: a hundred and ninety two billion dollars a year. And
Speaker 1: people are relying on calories deciding whether they buy or
Speaker 1: eat food because of them. They're meticulously counting them, measuring
Speaker 1: their foods to make sure that no calorie goes unaccounted for.
Speaker 1: The crucial moment for me was when you know, we
Speaker 1: had a holiday event at work and I didn't like
Speaker 1: my photos I didn't like it, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I really have to make change for myself because I
Speaker 1: didn't like the way. You know, I look, this is
Speaker 1: Danny Cologne. She's talking about photos from a Christmas luncheon
Speaker 1: her company through in two thousand and six. I thought
Speaker 1: myself on the thicker side and you know, I have
Speaker 1: my little double chin, and I didn't like it. It
Speaker 1: was just like, I don't like seeing myself like that.
Speaker 1: I had never gotten to that that point before, and
Speaker 1: that was the turning point for me. Deeany says she
Speaker 1: first started battling the scale about twenty years ago after
Speaker 1: having her second child. She's now forty three and a
Speaker 1: mother of five. I was never a big girl, but
Speaker 1: I had gained a little bit and I was always
Speaker 1: trying to lose it, you know what I mean. And
Speaker 1: as when I had my third child, so that was
Speaker 1: a little bit. You know, then it just starts adding
Speaker 1: up and you're trying. But it's you know, as the
Speaker 1: older you get, the harder it is. Plus I was
Speaker 1: a full time employee, plus I was at home. I
Speaker 1: had to a sense to the kids and for me
Speaker 1: to the thought of even having to make two wheels
Speaker 1: as in a diet meal for herself and another meal
Speaker 1: for her family was very very hard on me. So
Speaker 1: it was just something that was always on the back burner.
Speaker 1: At the time, Danny was working as a project coordinator
Speaker 1: in Tampa, Florida. She now lives in Puerto Rico. You
Speaker 1: want to get on this weight lost journey, but there's
Speaker 1: so much out there an aesthetic. I need my carbs,
Speaker 1: so it was very hard to reay, be like, I
Speaker 1: can't just eat need the vegetables, and it's hard to
Speaker 1: cut out a whole book group. So to take out
Speaker 1: that completely, Yeah, that wasn't gonna work for my household.
Speaker 1: Danny tries out a couple of different programs. Some even
Speaker 1: helped her lose weight, but they all had some kind
Speaker 1: of downside. The costs, in particular, were an obstacle for her.
Speaker 1: One program cost five dollars just to sign up. I mean,
Speaker 1: every time you go to a weight loss program, you're
Speaker 1: paying money. And I was like, Okay, maybe I'm ready.
Speaker 1: Now I got the tools that I need, and maybe
Speaker 1: i'll I can do this on my own and I
Speaker 1: don't have to invest in that money. Danny knew from
Speaker 1: her previous experiences with weight loss programs that tracking the
Speaker 1: food she eats really helps, so she starts calorie counting
Speaker 1: with the help of some free online tools. There are
Speaker 1: all these random calculators out there that you can use
Speaker 1: to decide how many calories to eat based on how
Speaker 1: much weight you want to lose. Danny uses one and
Speaker 1: decides she needs to eat less than calories a day.
Speaker 1: This time, the diet starts working almost immediately. She loses
Speaker 1: twelve pounds in twelve weeks. The program is simple, eat
Speaker 1: less and move more. It's free, and Danny can see
Speaker 1: the results. I'm like more of a harder to lose weight.
Speaker 1: Maybe I have a flower metabolism. But once I started
Speaker 1: seeing that my clothes was, you know, sitting a little
Speaker 1: bit more loose, and I started getting on the scale
Speaker 1: and the numbers were going little by little, I was
Speaker 1: like very, very motivated, and to think, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I'm being successful was just amazing. So it just makes
Speaker 1: you strive for more. Danny is currently allowing herself about
Speaker 1: twelve hundred calories each day. That's pretty low. A woman
Speaker 1: her age really needs around two thousand calories. But for
Speaker 1: what it's worth, government guidelines say most women can safely
Speaker 1: lose weight eating twelve hundred to fift hundred calories a day.
Speaker 1: Danny uses this app called lose It, which keeps track
Speaker 1: of her calorie budget. If she has a hundred calorie
Speaker 1: cup of plane Cheerios, then she has eleven hundred left easy.
Speaker 1: She also likes the flexibility. The good thing about calor
Speaker 1: a counting is that you're not excluding any food groups
Speaker 1: at all. Like let's say that Danny plans on having
Speaker 1: salmon and potatoes for lunch, but it doesn't end up happening.
Speaker 1: You just stand. You just put in your app. You know, hey,
Speaker 1: I had a pizza, cheese, whatever, and that's it. Other
Speaker 1: diets are more rigid. In other words, that's the good
Speaker 1: thing about it is like people don't have to over
Speaker 1: stress on oh my god, I've failed because I had
Speaker 1: a slice of pizza. You can have your slice of pizza,
Speaker 1: just you know that you wake this much amount of
Speaker 1: kellys on that pizza, so have a smaller amount for
Speaker 1: your dinner. Danny loses weight calorie counting until she doesn't.
Speaker 1: It's hard to keep it up. Life happens. Her mom
Speaker 1: gets sick and Danny travels to see her in the hospital,
Speaker 1: where she's stressed and sad, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: fast food. One time, I want to be donald thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's the healthiest thing on the menu, And I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: chicken nuggets. That's what I thought. Chicken nugget, chicken nuggets
Speaker 1: of fries and you know so of diet soa, and
Speaker 1: I thought that was the healthiest staying on the menu
Speaker 1: at the moment because I'm looking at Okay, it's not
Speaker 1: for it, it's not a burger. Let me just seek
Speaker 1: a couple of nuggets. No, it was like a thousand
Speaker 1: four until it. I was like most people have this experience.
Speaker 1: Losing weight works until it doesn't. Several studies have shown
Speaker 1: that many dieters will regain most or even all of
Speaker 1: their lost weight. In some cases, they'll even gain more weight.
Speaker 1: Between her mom's health issues and travel, Danie isn't calorie
Speaker 1: counting as much. She ends up gaining back the weight
Speaker 1: she lost. But Deanie is trying to calorie count again
Speaker 1: and it's still a big fan of the approach. She
Speaker 1: helps manage a Facebook group We're about twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: people gathered to ask questions and trade tips. When her
Speaker 1: daughter gained some weight, after having her first child, Danny
Speaker 1: recommended calorie counting. Her daughter lost nearly twenty pounds in
Speaker 1: a few months. When we talk, Danny runs me through
Speaker 1: the caloric value of precisely everything she has eaten that day.
Speaker 1: So today I haven't had lunch yet, so but this
Speaker 1: morning I did have coffee. I had a Starbucks pumpkin
Speaker 1: pie creamer and that was for a two hours. It's
Speaker 1: a lot, but I'm gonna invite it a little bit,
Speaker 1: a little. And then I had the rest was in coffee,
Speaker 1: So coffee zero calories. So just on my coffee alone,
Speaker 1: I had a hundred because of the creamer. It's mostly
Speaker 1: the coin, it's all there. And then I had a
Speaker 1: little bit stody like a little cookie study and that
Speaker 1: set that was a hundred and thirty cows, So I
Speaker 1: just counted a hundred dark We're on a zoom call
Speaker 1: so I can actually see Danny's app and then right
Speaker 1: here on the very top it shows it shows you
Speaker 1: my actual budget and what I had, and it's subtracted.
Speaker 1: So for the rest of the day, I have nine.
Speaker 1: I asked Danny about the studies that have found calori
Speaker 1: accounts may not be so accurate she doesn't seem too concerned.
Speaker 1: Even if the numbers aren't exactly right. The scale tells
Speaker 1: the truth at the end of the day. She also
Speaker 1: tells me that since her mother's illness and all that travel,
Speaker 1: she hasn't been as consistent with calorie counting as she
Speaker 1: would like. She's a little mad at herself about it,
Speaker 1: but she's more resolute than ever to stick to her
Speaker 1: calorie goals and to lose more weight. I started getting
Speaker 1: back on track, but then there was days work, So
Speaker 1: I would track for about a week consistently, and then
Speaker 1: mess up and then just and then try again, and
Speaker 1: then just mess up and then try again. It's just
Speaker 1: it's that since that point over, um, it's kind of
Speaker 1: really hard for me to like consistently keep it up.
Speaker 1: And the stakes are higher now. I just found out
Speaker 1: that I have diabetes and it's in the starting stages
Speaker 1: and high clipso and so I'm I've really started taking
Speaker 1: the seriously. To me, it felt like Danny had been
Speaker 1: misled by calories and weight loss in general. She'd used
Speaker 1: calorie counting to lose twelve pounds several years ago, but
Speaker 1: it hadn't been working very well for her since she
Speaker 1: called calorie counting flexible, but it didn't really seem to
Speaker 1: accommodate her actual life. Again, She's trying to eat twelve
Speaker 1: dred calories a day, which is very restrictive. Danny likes
Speaker 1: the precision that calorie counting seems to offer, but a
Speaker 1: very precise method that's hard to stick to isn't very
Speaker 1: precise at the end of the day. And Danny didn't
Speaker 1: blame the system or even calories for the problems she'd had.
Speaker 1: She blamed herself. So I'm thinking to myself, I really
Speaker 1: have to start when I'm supposed to lose the weight,
Speaker 1: to start feeling better and manage my health as best psyche.
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of it has to do
Speaker 1: with my insects. I'm not eating the white things. I'm
Speaker 1: not want to feel good. Danny's story isn't unique. It
Speaker 1: isn't even a modern story. Really, people have been marketing
Speaker 1: super restrictive and even silly weight loss plans for a
Speaker 1: long time. I mean that the classic story is that
Speaker 1: until the late nineteenth century, if you were a little
Speaker 1: bit plump, it was probably a sign a that you
Speaker 1: were healthy because you had an of to eat and
Speaker 1: be you were successful because you had enough to eat,
Speaker 1: and that just begins to drop off and the fashion
Speaker 1: begins to emphasize slenderness. Dieting in the truly modern sense
Speaker 1: didn't take off until the nineteenth century or around the
Speaker 1: time of the Industrial Revolution, and the real start of
Speaker 1: diet history begins even further back than that. From chewing
Speaker 1: your food a jillion times like Nancy Reagan to Keto
Speaker 1: and scamm me weight loss pills, It turns out that
Speaker 1: diet history definitely repeats itself. So Janette says that after
Speaker 1: taking apple side of vinegar she felt less blown because
Speaker 1: before and after on her and Michelle says she saw
Speaker 1: a major improvement in her energy throughout the day. Fun fact,
Speaker 1: the poet Lord Byron was super into vinegar as a
Speaker 1: weight loss strategy too. Next time, on Losing It, we
Speaker 1: take a trip back into time through diet history. First
Speaker 1: stop Renaissance Italy. My physicians declared there was but one
Speaker 1: remedy left for my eels. That remedy was the temperate
Speaker 1: and orderly life. Losing It is written and reported by
Speaker 1: me Emma Court and edited by Kristin V. Brown. Magnus
Speaker 1: Hendrickson is our senior producer Stacy Wong our associate producer,
Speaker 1: and Blake Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was
Speaker 1: composed and performed by Hannis Brown thanks to Francesco Leavie
Speaker 1: and Tim Anette. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if
Speaker 1: you haven't already, and if you like our show, please
Speaker 1: leave us a review that helps others find out about it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next time.