Does Counting Calories Lead to Weight Loss?
Just last night, I was Googling how many calories are in one peach. I don’t necessarily care, but since peaches are in season and I’ve been consuming them with a voracious fervor every meal and I’m consistently surprised by how filling a single peach can be, I’d thought I’d look up their nutritional value to satisfy my own curiosity. The top Google results varied, ranging from 50 calories to 68 calories to 100 calories in a single fruit. After sifting through more than 10 articles that all touted a slightly different figure, I simply gave up on getting a solid answer.
For years, I was a firm believer that weight-loss and overall health was simply a matter of eating less calories than you burn. With last night’s internet search in mind, I’ve realized that it’s not quite that simple.
Calorie counting has often been considered an effective way to quantitatively measure your nutrition. Apps like MyFitnessPal and Noom built their brands around determining exactly how many calories were in that Starbucks Grande Vanilla Latte (250) or that banana you had for breakfast (105) for the stated purpose of helping users lose weight or make changes to their body shape by maintaining a calorie deficit. But is calorie counting really an effective practice?
Excerpted from CNET
