Counting Calories...Just a Start Not a Trend

Diet professionals constantly tell me to "Eat less calories than you expel in energy and you'll lose weight! It's really that easy." Well great but what kind of foods am I supposed to eat? "Anything low in calories." was always the answer. However the calorie count on packages is an estimated count, and technology that I use to track my calorie usage during excercise are also estimated. What about all the other ingredients in food (salt, potassium, fat, cholesterol, vitamins, minerals, etc.). How do those not help in losing weight?

Counting calories can be an effective start to losing weight, but it's not going to get you farther than most other diets that are easy to follow. Take into consideration that other things, such as salt, can cause a fluctuation in weight daily (fun fact: weight can actually fluctuate anywhere from 3 to 12 pounds per day on average...so if you weigh yourself at 190 lbs you could be as high as 202 or as low as 178!). When you consume excess amounts of salt your body retains more water than normal, adding water weight to your daily scale checks. 

How about vitamins and minerals? Well, you could eat whatever you wanted that was low in calories and lose some weight, but will you be healthy? According to http://www.livestrong.com you can develop the following problems due to a low amount of daily vitamins:

- Low Immunity

- Brittle Bones

- Bad Oral Health

- Joint Pain

The last thing I want to consider is the amount of fat in food. Calories and fat are not the same thing and your body does not absorb/digest/store fat and calories the same. This is why food labels have the tiny little section saying "Fat from Calories" to show the difference. Something low in calories can be high in fat. Fat is the hardest energy source to break down by the body, so the body stores it for future use and uses other components that can be broken down easily (carbohydrates as an example). 

Don't believe the hype that you're healthy just by focusing on calories; focus on a multitude of factors such as fat, cholesterol, simple and complex carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, etc. All in all, eat a healthy diet consisting of a variety of foods without the refined sugars and processed procedures and exercise consistently. Losing weight and feeling great has an easy answer but a difficult process to constantly follow on a day to day basis.