A lot of the time when people want to lose weight, they think that calorie restriction is the best/only way to go about it. We’ve been told our whole lives that the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. However, that is all untrue. Calorie counting is not only an unproductive way to lose weight, but it can also cause serious issues with your overall physical and mental health.

Not All Calories Are Created Equal
A calorie is one unit of energy. Your body either uses calories to perform tasks such as regulating body temperature or keeping organs functioning, or they are stored as fat. Whether your body uses the calories you eat or stores them depends largely on the type of calories you eat. Calories from processed foods, such as chips and crackers, tend to be stored more often than calories from whole foods, such as fruits and vegetables.
2. The 2,000 Calorie Diet is Unrealistic
The 2,000 Calorie diet is supposed to be the amount of calories one person should eat in a day in order to remain healthy. Because the number is an average, men tend to assume they need a little more than 2,000 calories and women tend to assume they need fewer. It turns out, however, that the 2,000 calorie number is completely made up.

When the FDA was trying to come up with an average daily intake of calories, they used studies conducted by the USDA to gather their information. In these studies, women reported eating 1,600-2,500 calories per day, men reported eating 2,000-3,000 calories per day, and children reported eating 1,800-2,500 calories per day. Using this data, the FDA decided that the average amount of calories a person should intake in a day is 2,350. However, some people thought this number was too high and would encourage people to overeat, so they decided to lower the number to 2,000 calories per day instead.

According to Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, the average non-overweight adult man needs 3,050 calories per day to maintain a stable body weight and the average woman needs 2,400 calories per day to maintain a stable body weight. These numbers can still fluctuate from person to person depending on their height, weight, and amount of physical activity.

3. You Can’t Accurately Measure the Amount of Calories You’re Eating
The common theory is that weight gain/loss = calories in-calories out. However, unless you bring every single thing you eat to a laboratory, there is no way to know how many calories you are actually eating. In one study, a woman thought she was only eating 1,100 calories per day, but after her food was measured with calorie counting machines, it was found that she was actually eating over 3,000 calories a day!

One reason for this is inaccurate food labels. USDA law allows for the calorie count on food labels to vary up to 20% from the actual number. This means that your 100 calorie granola bar could actually contain as few as 80 calories or as many as 120 calories, but there is no way for you to know which one it is!

Calorie count on restaurant menus can also be very inaccurate. One study showed that the number on the menus could be off by hundreds of calories. It was found that foods that were considered healthier tended to have higher calorie counts than reported on the menu, and foods that were considered less healthy tended to have fewer calories than reported.

4. Low Calories Does Not Equal Healthy
A lot of people tend to assume that if something is labeled ‘low calorie’ it is good for you, but this is not true. For example, let’s say someone decided that they were going to have a smoothie for breakfast. This smoothie would be made of strawberry, banana, spinach, and chia seeds. Then, they go to the grocery store and see that they can get a breakfast drink that contains fewer calories than the smoothie they were originally going to make, so they drink that instead. However, while the smoothie contained unprocessed fruits and vegetables, the breakfast drink contains ingredients such as maltodextrin, polydextrose, canola oil, and sucralose; all of which are not very good for you. So, just because something has fewer calories doesn’t necessarily mean you should put it in your body.
5. It Can Slow Down Your Metabolism

Restricting calories means you are eating less than you normally would (and maybe not as much as you should) which, in theory, should cause you to lose weight, right? Wrong.

One of the things your  body uses to regulate weight is the metabolism. The metabolism can fluctuate by 200-300 calories a day depending on a number of things such as the amount of muscle versus fat in your body, the size of your organs (bigger organs use more calories), and how much you’ve eaten that day. Sometimes when you don’t eat enough your body thinks that you are starving, so it slows down your metabolism. This causes it to preferentially store calories as fat rather than burn them,so you don’t lose any weight. Some people even gain weight because their metabolism stores almost everything they eat.

6. It Makes You Hungry
When you decide to go on a diet, you usually expect to feel hungry because you’re eating less. Because of this, you are more prone to feel hungry after you eat, even if your stomach is full. This can lead to overeating, which is exactly what you don’t want to do.

One study by HealthCast showed that the way a food is described can affect how hungry you feel after you eat it. In this study, they gave people a chocolate-raspberry protein bar to eat. For some people, they described it as a “new health bar” and for others they described it as a “chocolate bar that is very tasty and yummy with a chocolate raspberry core.” They found that those who had the bar described to them as being healthy felt hungrier than those who had it described to the as a chocolate bar.

In another study by sciencedirect.com, 10 calorie restricting women and 10 non-calorie restricting women were given either a high calorie or low calorie drink. Some of the drinks were labeled incorrectly, so a high calorie drink has a low calorie label and vice versa. All of the participants felt more full after drinking the high calorie drink, but those who restricted calories hunger was greatly influenced by the label on the drink.

7. It Causes Stress
A study published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health found that calorie restriction can lead to major stress. In the study, they observed four groups of people: monitoring, who tracked but did not restrict their calories; restricting, who were on a 1,200 calorie per day diet and were delivered prepackaged meals; monitoring and restricting, who were on a 1,200 calorie per day diet but had to plan their meals; and control, who did not monitor or restrict their calories. It was found that those who monitored their calories had increased perceived stress, but those who restricted calories had increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, even if they didn’t feel like they were stressed.

8. It Can Cause Eating Disorders
A lot of the time when people want to lose weight they follow the motto “Eat less, move more”, so they significantly decrease the amount of calories they eat and significantly increase their amount of exercise. When you exercise for the sole purpose of burning calories, you are more likely to cross the line into compulsive overexercise. Compulsive over exercise can cause metabolic issues and overuse injuries, and can eventually begin to feed into eating disorders. Sarah T. Hubbard, James J. Gray, and Scott Parker, all from the Department of Psychology at The American University in Washington DC, studied people who compulsively over exercised and found that “the ‘food related’ exercisers exhibited more symptoms of obligatory exercise, eating disturbance, body dissatisfaction, and lower self-esteem, than did the ‘non-food related’ exercisers.”
9. It’s Only a Short-Term Solution
Unless your body slows down your metabolism, calorie restricting does cause you to lose weight. However, after you end your low-calorie diet, you will gain back all the weight you lost and then some. Long term, it is better to lose 30 pounds by eating whole foods and working out to be healthy, thus keeping that weight off than it is to lose 40 pounds by restricting calories, over-exercising, and then gaining back 50.

Calorie restriction is not a way to lose weight. It can slow down your metabolism, cause you to become stressed, and lead to unhealthy habits. However, there are many healthy ways to lose weight and become healthier overall. Start by eating breakfast. Studies show that those who eat breakfast feel more full throughout the day and are less likely to overeat in later meals. It is also a good idea to eat smaller meals more frequently throughout the day. When you go longer than 3 hours without eating, your cortisol levels start to rise. High cortisol signals to the body to store fat in the abdominal region. Eating more frequently helps to keep cortisol levels down and prevents that from happening. Lastly, don’t eliminate your favorite foods completely from your diet. If you eliminate unhealthy foods completely you are more likely to fail in eating healthy. Instead, indulge in your favorite unhealthy foods every once in a while to keep yourself balanced and satisfied. It’s alright to have your cake and eat it too.

Works Cited
"All About Calories, Part 2: Top Ten Reasons Not To Count Calories." Paleoleap.com. Paleo Leap, LLC, n.d. Web. 19 Jan. 2016.
Healthcast. "Calling a Food 'Healthy' May Make You Hungrier." Thehealthcast.com. TheHealthCast.com, 2 Apr. 2010. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Hubbard, Sarah T., James J. Gray, and Scott Parker. "Differences among Women Who Exercise for ‘food Related’ and ‘non-food Related’ Reasons." Onlinelibrary.wiley.com. Eur. Eat. Disorders Rev., 8 Jan. 1999. Web. 24 Jan. 2016. .
Johnson, Chalene. "10 Eating Habits of the Highly Successful and Fit." Women's Health. Women's Health, 25 May 2012. Web. 24 Jan. 2016. .
LE, Urban. "Result Filters." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 20 July 2011. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Nestle, Marion. "Where Did the 2,000 Calorie Diet Idea Come From?" Www.foodpolitics.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Nestle, Marion. "Why Calories Count: The Problem With Dietary-Intake Studies." Www.theatlantic.com. N.p., 28 Mar. 2012. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Ogden, Jane, and Jane Wardle. "Cognitive Restraint and Sensitivity to Cues for Hunger and Satiety." Cognitive Restraint and Sensitivity to Cues for Hunger and Satiety. Elsevier B.V., n.d. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Tomiyama, A. Janet, Traci Mann, Danielle Vinas, Jeffrey M. Hunger, Jill DeJager, and Shelley E. Taylor. "Low Calorie Dieting Increases Cortisol." Psychosomatic Medicine. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 5 Apr. 2010. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.