calorie counting, it doesn’t add up

Calorie counting and endless food math added up to anxiety and subtracted a lot of joy.

There’s a million ways that “food math” shows up in most people's lives, some more constructive than others. I remember one of the older girls that I lifeguarded with during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school telling me that you could in fact only eat ice cream and still lose weight, as long as the calories in your ice cream were fewer calories than you burned during your workouts. This was not the first time the concept of a calorie deficit entered my mental space, but it’s one that stuck out to me. I think that she’s actually correct, but there’s probably not many people who would say that was advice that 14 year old me, or really anyone should be taking to heart. While the numbers added up, the actual principles didn’t hold up at all.

Unlike the older girls in the lifeguard locker room back in 2004, I’m not here to tell you what does and doesn’t work, whether it’s good or bad, whether you should do it or not. I do feel good about asking questions (and I sincerely want your answers! Send ‘em my way!) Is the math you’re doing around your food intake actually doing anything for you? What exactly does calorie counting do for you? Are you sure that your serving sizes are exact and your calculations are precise? Is the time and effort that it takes to invest in calorie or macro counting providing returns to you that you yourself find valuable? Is this approach sustainable? If not, is doing it in the short term helping you for your long term goals?

For me, there are some times when I do like to track my foods, and I find it really helpful. When I get a migraine, I try to jot down everything I ate in the day or so before the migraine struck me down like a bolt of lightning hitting directly behind my eyeball. This was great, because it taught me the craisins + white chocolate + almonds snack mix i was loving was definitely a food I ate 4 out of 5 times I got a headache. When I did my first few marathon carb loads with a registered dietitian, I wrote down all the stuff that I ate and how many grams of carbs it had because the idea of eating HUNDREDS of grams of carbohydrates actually blew my mind, and I probably would have grossly undercounted had I not. Now I just amp up my sports drink intake and have a few staple high carb meals in the days leading up to a race. Pancakes syrup and orange juice the morning before I race are as much a part of my training and preparation as running actual workouts is now. When my iron was low and not coming up despite supplementation for almost a year, I started tracking how many days a week I was eating a leafy green and citrus, and how many days I had coffee within an hour of my iron supplement- vitamin C helps with absorption of iron, and coffee can make absorption worse. I wrote before about how tracking my feelings and thoughts going into a meal taught me a lot about how I thought about food in general. All of this is to say that tracking with intention has been powerful for me, and tracking out of anxiety has not. The rigidity and complication of food math cost me joy, mental space, and the ability to just be flexible and present.

In lieu of a rigid and complicated process around food math, I’ve tried to narrow my approach down to more of a cute acronym, order of operations or checklist of things for when I’m tempted to track or obsess, my own personal food PEMDAS perhaps?

B.A.R.S 🍻

B — Balance the Equation

Every time I find myself wanting to count calories or macros, the first thing I remind myself is that the magic number is 3: 1 carb, 1 color, and 1 protein. As long as most of my meals and snacks have a carb, a color (by a color I just mean a plant based food!) and a protein, I can usually trust that I’m eating a pretty balanced diet, and I don’t need to do much more mental math or critical calculating to have the confidence that my body has got what it needs.

A — Addition: What Can You Add?

Adding nutritious stuff doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, and doesn’t have to be a supplement or a potion with an ineffective level of active ingredients. Throwing some hemp seeds into a yogurt bowl or a smoothie or salad can give you a boost of Omega-3s and protein. Adding some frozen vegetables to a box of mac and cheese? There’s your color! Add some rotisserie chicken and you’ve got your protein too. Feel like you’ve been eating a lot of salty snacks and feeling pretty bloated? Try adding a piece of fruit or some pre-cut veggies to get a bit of fiber in. Treat yourself to an overpriced bottle of water and make sure you’re actually hydrated enough. Eating a huge dinner that makes you feel yucky come bed time? Try adding a balanced snack in the afternoon to see if your appetite at dinner changes. Asking myself what I can add might be as easy as grabbing a protein shake from the fridge, or a handful of nuts before I run to pick my kid up at school, or it might mean taking the time to prep a batch of superhero muffins so I can add a second breakfast, but there’s almost always something I can add to my diet that will make me feel better, and make some of my ‘problems’ subtract themselves.

R — Replacements Aren’t the Real Thing

I actually like a pretzel/date/chocolate energy ball more than I like a real Snickers bar, maybe it’s because I made it myself and am proud of it, maybe it just tastes better, who knows!? But- I would also consider screaming at the top of my lungs and throwing things an almost appropriate reaction if someone told me to eat dried tart cherries instead of some Nerds Gummy Clusters. There’s room in our diets to swap some foods sometimes, but you shouldn’t expect spaghetti squash to fill you up your heart or your belly the way that a bowl of pasta would. It’s okay to just eat the candy, or the fruit, but don’t tell yourself a date is going to give you the fix a Twix would.

S — Subtraction Is to Be Avoided

I’ve never had great luck with eliminating entire food groups or types of food from my diet. I mean, I have successfully completed hundreds of days of “Whole30,” but I can’t say I felt my best, ran my fastest, or did anything other than spend a lot of money on ghee and arrowroot flour when butter and corn starch probably would have done just fine. At least one study¹ has shown that nearly half of adults who think they have a food allergy do not in fact have a food allergy, another study² reports that nearly 25% of people follow a gluten free diet while only 1% of the population is likely to have Celiac disease, and another 3-6% of people having a non celiac gluten sensitivity. Three pounds of gluten free flour from King Arthur costs $10.95, while five pounds of All Purpose Flour from King Arthur costs just $6.95. I only have to do the math once to know that flour costing more than 2.5x more per pound is not going to make it worth subtracting gluten from my diet without the guidance and support of a registered dietitian.

I know there’s an entire generation of us traumatized by MyFitnessPal, and I hear people just younger than me reporting that Cronometer is so much better. I know about that kid who made the AI app that calculates your calories from just a picture of your plate or whatever. There are so many options out there for someone to make money off of your desire to calculate every gram that goes into your body. I can write and rant about this stuff endlessly (And I probably will!) but I also really like to give myself something actionable to do instead of just raging and avoiding the internet, so I sometimes challenge myself to eat 20 plant based foods in a week. You obviously don’t need an app to track this for you (but I built one if you want to use it!), and there’s no real exact science on what you’re going to get out of eating more vegetables and fruits, but just like we can all agree that eating a diet of pure ice cream is bad advice from one teen girl to another, I think we can all agree that eating more fruits and veggies is generally good advice from one fan of food to another.

PS: If you check out Plate Palette, let me know!

1.The study on adults who believe they have a food allergy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30646188
2.The study on gluten free diets and gluten intolerance: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ageconfacpub/210