If you do decide to use calorie tracking regularly, as Gaviria stated, it's important to know when to stop.Įxperiencing feelings of guilt, shame or anxiety is a sign that calorie tracking is becoming harmful and you should stop immediately. It's likely that at some point, you may try calorie counting either out of curiosity or to lose weight. tommaso79/Getty Images When should someone stop calorie counting? ![]() "Not to mention that it's just very time-consuming, it takes up a lot of brain space to be like, 'Okay, well, if I need to have this meal, I only have 500 calories left, what meal can I build that is going to be 500 calories?'"Įxperiencing feelings of guilt, shame or anxiety is a sign that calorie tracking is becoming harmful. "You have to essentially know precisely what the calorie content of the food is that you're eating and that gets difficult to do without getting even more meticulous by weighing and measuring things out," Gaviria said. It's even harder for fruits and veggies - if there are 110 calories in a banana, how big is that banana? With so many different sizes, each is going to have a different amount of calories. For instance, if you're looking up the calories in a half-cup serving of rice, that number will be different if the rice is cooked or uncooked. While there are several online directories of calorie counts for foods, getting precise numbers is still not straightforward. For starters, it's hard to know how many calories are in the food you're eating. Tracking your calorie intake accurately is notoriously difficult. To find the truth, I spoke to an expert, David Gaviria, a doctoral student in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Depending on where you look, research can rebuff or affirm the effectiveness of calorie counting. Self-proclaimed health experts on social media sites like Instagram and TikTok say that weight loss boils down to calories in versus calories out. Like with many trends that emerge in the health and wellness realm, we need to critically evaluate both the promised benefits and the potential hazards. But is calorie counting really a healthy practice? ![]() Apps like MyFitnessPal and Noom built their brands around determining exactly how many calories were in that Starbucks Grande Vanilla Latte (250) or that banana you had for breakfast (105) for the stated purpose of helping users lose weight or make changes to their body shape by maintaining a calorie deficit. I was eager to make changes to my body shape and improve my health, and I'd read that calorie counting was the best method.Ĭalorie counting has often been considered an effective way to quantitatively measure your nutrition. There was a time in my life when I wouldn't eat a meal without carefully documenting exactly how many calories I was consuming and how many I had left over for the rest of the day.
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