Counting calories: does it really work?

Many people who are trying to lose weight have started to “count their calories.” Counting calories is a great way to make sure you’re getting the right amount of calories. Some people find that they need to drastically reduce their calorie intake, while others find, surprisingly, that they actually need to increase their caloric intake. Hooking up their numbers to a site like myfitnesspal.com or caloriecount.com is all the rage as people start to really care about what they are putting on their bodies.

But is counting calories really enough? When you go to eat something, you think, “How many calories is this?” Or do you think, “Is this a healthy food that I want to feed my body with?”

In my opinion, the number of calories your body takes in each day and the number of calories in a particular food is important, but much more important is what makes up those calories!

Let’s use some common foods as an example of what I’m talking about. Let’s say you have a little hunger pain in your stomach around 3 in the afternoon. In your kitchen cabinet there is a delicious Oreo cookie that calls out to you. If you can contain yourself to eat just one, which I personally find almost impossible to do, then you will have eaten around 70 calories. So now you’ve fed your body 70 calories from sugar, fat, chocolate, high fructose corn syrup, and a bunch of other ingredients that I can’t even pronounce correctly.

Now let’s have an apple. Again, you get a little hungry in the afternoon while you wait for dinner to arrive. So you decide to go up to the kitchen. (Jumping is a great form of exercise, by the way!) But this time you go to the fridge where you keep a well-stocked fruit crate, I hope. That juicy red apple is calling out to you, so you chop it up (not forgetting to save the seeds to eat with the apple, but I digress, that’s for another blog post) and you enjoy that delicious, crunchy goodness. By the way, I never seem to have a problem stopping at a single block because my tummy feels full. So now you are back to feeding your body 70 calories. But this time, the calories come from healthy fiber, antioxidants, and a host of body-good vitamins.

So does counting calories really work? Yes! But only if you do the calories you are counting good! Here’s a little secret: In most cases, foods that have a lot of “bad” calories are not as filling or satisfying as foods that have “good” calories.

Here’s your homework: commit today to trading at least one of your “bad” calorie foods for one “good” calorie food. Your belly will thank you and your body will too!