You Don't Need to Count Calories or Change Your Portion Sizes to Lose Weight
Stop Counting Calories or Measuring Your Portions
After I graduated with my Master’s in Engineering, there were hardly jobs anywhere in the NYC metropolitan area so I did like most engineers do and moved to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has a very different demographic makeup than the NYC metropolitan area. The majority of people I lived by and worked with were from somewhere in Asia. I had always assumed that Asian people must be thin because they ate smaller portions. When I started spending my time eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with new friends and coworkers, I saw that this was the farthest thing from the truth.
My coworkers brought their breakfast, lunch and dinner in (sometimes the workdays are long) and the portion sizes were actually pretty decent in size. I couldn’t believe it. Whenever there was free lunch at work, everyone went crazy and grabbed an insane amount of food. Nobody cared about portion control. Hardly anyone at any age was overweight. The biggest difference was everyone was predominantly eating healthy home cooked meals. No one was eating any processed or prepared foods. No one was eating a Snickers bar or Lays potato chips. Whenever someone compares the US to anywhere abroad about portions they are usually comparing going out to a restaurant in the US to a restaurant abroad. No one talks about comparing a typical home cooked meal. Since most medical devices are early clinically tested or manufactured outside the US, I have spent an insane amount of time traveling globally. The restaurant portions are not astronomically different globally as people love to say they are. I was consuming more than average calories at the time since I was training for marathons, half marathons and triathlons and I never felt I was not given enough food when I ate out at a restaurant or at a manufacturing facility’s cafeteria. It’s unfair to only compare a place like Claim Jumpers to everything else. After living and working in Silicon Valley, along with extensive global traveling, I started to question the portion mantra people constantly use to explain why Americans are overweight.
I have spent a considerable amount of time in Europe since medical devices are first tested there frequently and engineers are sent to support this. There is also a lot of medical manufacturing there that I had to support. When I was spending months on end there, I also noticed people were eating a normal healthy amount of food and not the small portions “experts” say we should be eating. I started to wonder why it’s easy to stay healthy abroad but more challenging in certain parts of the US. For example, if I was sent out to the Cleveland Clinic for an extended amount of time, my weight would change pretty fast.
The energy unit of the Calorie (or the Joule) hasn’t been around that long. The unit Calorie was first discovered in the early 19th century by a French physicist named Nicolas Clément, who used it to measure the amount of heat generated by an electrical current. The unit Joule was discovered in the mid-19th century by the English physicist James Prescott Joule, who is also known for his work on the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. Prior to this, no one knew how much energy was in food. No one was able to count calories prior to the 19th century. Calories are just the measured heat energy given off something that is burned. Everything has calories. If a human tried to live off a plant based diet of eating leaves and grass, they’d die of starvation, even though grass is a high calorie food (look at how big cows are). It’s obvious how we process foods goes beyond calories. Humans survive off an extreme range of diets. The types of foods we eat, not the calories, play a major factor in our weight.
Humans have also consumed more calories in the past than we do now for tens of thousands of years. Farmers and factory workers needed twice as much calories as us to do manual labor. It wasn’t until the mid 20th century that humans have adopted a sedentary lifestyle. Besides jobs not needing as much physical labor, the invention of cars, modern appliances and climate controlled housing reduces our need for calories. Our bodies need a lot more calories to regulate our body temperatures when it’s very cold or hot out. Women don’t need to beat a rug outside anymore, or go walk down to a well to fetch some water. Historically, portions would have been much bigger that what we eat now. In the bulk of the world now where people are sedentary, humans have adapted effortlessly to this and not gained weight since eating non-processed foods allows the body to self regulate itself. It’s only in the US, where food is heavily processed, where we struggle.
If you don’t want to count calories or do portion control, stop eating processed foods. Make your food from scratch. If you want bread, buy some wheat (ideally European), get some yeast, salt, water and make it. I make pasta with my Kitchen Aid. I make ice cream with an ice cream maker so I have total control over the ingredients. When I’m craving more sweets, I make a cake or cookies with ingredients I can pronounce (good luck even understanding some of the ingredients in a store bought dessert). If I want potato chips, I slice a potato with my food processor or by hand and fry them in tallow, coconut or avocado oil. I don’t have time to train for half Ironmans and other endurance events anymore since I’m a busy mom with not much help and I have not ballooned in weight since my body self regulates from eating home cooked meals. Even though I was consuming 3-4X the amount of calories when I was training, my body didn’t struggle with adjusting to eating a lot less food. It came very naturally. Our bodies can regulate themselves. The #1 problem for most people is going out to eat too much or buying packaged foods. People did not count calories for the majority of human existence and we don’t need to either.