Counting calories might be misleading but it's definitely not pointless. You still want to target a range of calories during the day and not go over it. Even with the inaccuracies of the system, counting calories is still part of keeping healthy.
Absolutely. Counting calories is a fast feedback loop (count each day, compare to your target, increase or decrease your intake as appropriate); you need a slow feedback loop to set the intermediate target against your actual goal (in this case, say, scale weight). The accuracy of the fast feedback loop isn't critical since you have a pretty accurate slow feedback loop to correct it.
The general approach of partitioning problem solving into fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate is very useful, since it's generally hard to make something that's simultaneously fast and accurate.
Note one other interesting thing about this approach: you can do unit conversions! That is, I can measure something with different units than the thing I'm trying to control. Our reference is body weight, but what we measure is caloric intake: the function we use to slowly adjust the calorie target as a function of our weight has units of calories per body mass.
How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck? That the calories you are eating are healthy? I agree with you that it's good to know roughly how many calories are in your food, but literally counting calories during a diet can be counterproductive. Most people won't count calories in the longterm, so it ends up being a bandaid solution that doesn't encourage lifestyle changes. Ultimately listening to your body (for me this includes semi-regularly weighing myself and checking my body fat %) gives a better idea of how much you should be eating and leads to a stable, longterm solution.
>How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck?
A range of 2,500-3,000 seems to be a good fit for me. I'm a 5'9" adult male with a light workout schedule.
I don't expect labels to be 100% on target but I do expect them to be close enough for my rough estimates.
The food truck may not list the calorie count for the burger but I've probably eaten all the ingredients in the burger before. From experience of noticing nutritional content in the past, I can tell if it has more fat (lots of mayo, extra cheese), sugar (ketchup) and overall calories (heavy, overall size of the meat patty) than ones I've had in the past.
The caloric content is not the only tool, it's one of the many tools you should have when trying to keep a healthy diet.
Labels might be 20% off or even 50% off, but still give you ballpark figure, and is better than nothing.
I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare. For example, my intuition tells peanuts are more calory-dense than carrots. But by how much? Oh, 14x! That's good to know--1kg of raw carrots might barely cover one meal, but 1kg of peanuts would power me for 3 days--careful!
I'm not really sure from this comment what your objection to counting calories is.
Is it that you can't do it accurately? That seems to be implied by the second two questions. I haven't found that accuracy actually matter that much; mostly what's important is nominal calories over time vs. weight/other health indicators over time. If the number's not technically accurate, I kind of don't care. All I know is I roughly ate so many calories, my weight changed by x amount, and I can walk x far without getting tired. Over time, I can have a pretty good guideline for the number of "back of the box" calories I should be eating to reach my targets (which addresses your first question of "what range to target")
You mention explicitly that most people won't do it over the long term, which is definitely relevant. But even doing it for a little while can give you a good baseline so you can at least make educated guesses as to what you're eating, which is especially helpful in the "food truck burger" scenario.
I guess my point is that we all agree knowing roughly how many calories you're eating is good, but the only way I know to figure that out is to, at least for a while, literally count them. There's still a huge margin for error, of course, but if I didn't keep tabs on it by looking at the back of the box, I'd have no idea at all.
I think you miss the point of calorie counting in the first place. You count calories so that you become aware of just how excessively you've been overeating without noticing it, and where those calories are coming from. It doesn't have to be that accurate.
I realize the point, I think it's the wrong way to lose weight (and I say this as someone who lost considerable weight and has kept it off for more than ten years).
Counting calories temporarily tells someone how much he is overeating, but the problem is the amount he eats is an ingrained habit. Habits die hard, eating less for a couple months doesn't change anything for most people. There is a lot of evidence that most people who diet put the weight back on because they took temporary measures to lose weight instead of making deep lifestyle changes. [Anecdotal evidence alert]: making deep lifestyle changes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I believe counting calories would have distracted me from that goal.
One can't address a problem until one is aware of it; counting calories is a technique useful for creating that awareness. It's not a diet plan, it's an awareness technique.
Counting calories is a short-term means to an end. It's intended to get you to a target goal. Once there, good lifestyle choices should take over.
Whatever works for you, go with that. But weight and body fat will fluctuate naturally and shouldn't be a huge factor in how you decide to eat. You could eat all kinds of crap that would keep you low-weight and low-fat but wreck your body.
Limiting yourself to reasonable portions of healthy foods 85% of the time is the easiest way to keep a long-term diet. Want pizza and beer? Save it for Friday night. It can't get simpler.
I rely on more of a feedback loop. I eat when I'm hungry, and I monitor simple metrics like my weight, sense of well being, endurance, and physique. I adjust my food intake (but still keying off when I'm hungry), and watch the results.
The problem with relying on hunger is that, for many people, that hungry signal doesn't shut off at the right time. The Hacker's Diet[1] goes into this in great detail, but the gist is that scale weight + calorie counting is a good proxy for replacing a broken hunger signal.
This is one of those things that's really hard to understand unless you experience it, so don't worry if you don't get it.
Nah, I can understand that. I'm actually mildly hungry much of the time; part of tuning that feedback loop is identifying what level of "hungry" to consider, well, hungry.
If you add up all the error margins in the article (and they don't even mention that the FDA allows published calorie counts to be off by 20%) you end up with an error margin that makes the resulting number pointless.
I know the hacker in you wants a number to measure but if you know anything about math at all you should concede that calculating numbers which such a high error margin is indeed pointless.
