So you’ve never been wrong. Why do we count calories and not lose weight?

The expert of “Championship” wellness coach Andrei Semeshov explains why we count all the food, follow the BJU and do not lose weight.

You can lose weight in different ways. Banal calorie counting is the most effective method. I put it in second place right after “throw out the refrigerator and sew up your mouth”.

Doing arithmetic along with weighing home-cooked meals or interrogating the waiter “How many grams are there in a salad?” is not the most exciting. However, the first results in the form of minus 1-3 centimeters on the waist give additional motivation. Further calorie counting, especially since today this process is automated almost entirely, takes about five minutes a day. Be patient one or two weeks to make sure that all these manipulations are not in vain.

But what to do if you count all proteins, fats and carbohydrates, write down, observe the required amount of calories per day, but the figure does not change? Or, worse, the volumes increase.

Do not rush to blame the method of calorie calculation or put a cross on yourself because of the “wide bone” and “I have a family all overweight”. 99 percent of the time, you’re just fooling yourself a little bit. And despite the certainty that you’re fixing absolutely all of your food, you’re wrong.

Back in 1995, the American Dietetic Association reported on a curious experiment. For three years, scientists observed ten people who were overweight and dreamed of losing weight. They claimed to eat no more than 1200 calories a day, but nothing worked. That’s the conundrum. However, control observations revealed that the actual level of consumption of all subjects underestimated at least two, and even three times! At the same time, they overestimated their physical activity by the same amount. And it was not a matter of any deliberate deception. Everyone sincerely believed that they ate very little, moved a lot, but nothing worked.

After 20 years, in 2015, New Zealand scientists from the University of Auckland also became curious about how people manage to count calories, follow the recommendations, but at the same time, in the best case, remain in their weight. To help them volunteered 40 volunteers who agreed to wear on themselves video cameras during the day. So when the food diaries of the subjects were compared with the records, it turned out that up to 58% of calories slipped past the diaries. Most often such unnoticeable eating occurred between lunch and dinner (that’s right – “I just had tea with my colleagues”). The lion’s share of unnoticed calories came from snacks, condiments and drinks.

Having a certain practice, I can show with examples how this can happen.

• Breakfast. Scrambled eggs, toast with butter – everything is clear here. No questions. Except that some people take oil into account when frying, some don’t. But it’s literally a drop in the ocean either way. Next, into the car and to work. At the gas station – coffee to go, to wake up for the beginning of the working day. But who drinks black coffee? Cappuccino’s better. But coffee is a zero-calorie product, everyone knows that. That’s why 300 grams of milk with a fat content of 3.2 percent, often with caramel syrup, fly past the cash register – and here they are – the first +244 calories. By the way, if you do drink black coffee, but you just “color” it with cream, don’t be fooled either. 100+ calories with “well, a little more sugar” are assured.
• Lunch. Clearly calculated salad, soup and goulash with buckwheat. But a compote (+100 kcal) or a couple of spoonfuls of honey in tea (~130 kcal)….

Foreign researchers, I remind you, recorded the peak of unaccounted for in the period from lunch to dinner. In our realities it can be tea with sugar (+40 kcal), a couple of “Jubilee” cookies in the meeting room (~200+ kcal), a piece of chocolate broken off from a colleague (+130 kcal). And even a useful, but not written down apple, has its “price” – 60-80 kcal.

• At dinner we tend not to notice, for example, a portion of ketchup (30-50 kcal), a piece of bread (+50-60 kcal).

Separately, it is worth mentioning such risk groups as moms who finish the plate after the child; housewives who take samples from all dishes.

I do not claim that the calorie counting method is suitable for absolutely everyone. Still, it’s a little bit boring, although I’m ready to defend my point of view endlessly in conversations: the pros repeatedly outweigh the cons. After all, there are so many ways to limit calories differently. There are intuitive eating, various diets (keto, Dukan and so on), visual methods (“a portion of meat – with the palm of your hand without fingers”) and a lot of other things. But if you start counting calories and suddenly you’re not losing weight, then… Start counting ALL calories. You’ll likely be very surprised.

The top 5 calorie-counting no-no’s are

• Honey, syrup in coffee;
• nuts;
• sauces and seasonings for dishes;
• morses, juices, compotes;
• candies, cookies, “small” chocolates.