Never Count Calories
I’ve seen a number of fitness accounts and clickbait articles posting content like you see below:

They are missing a key principle, something which should be Day 1-material for anyone looking to get into nutrition, weight loss, and longevity:
Iso-caloric =/= iso-metabolic;[1] foods with equivalent calories do not have equivalent impacts on health and weight. This sounds like a basic idea, but the gospel of “calorie in-calorie out” has obscured it.
I understand the temptation to think in these terms; I lost 50 lbs in 4 months at one point counting calories alone, making no conscious efforts to otherwise change my diet (1500 kcal/day.) This does not indicate that I followed a sound or well-informed strategy; only that we’re ultimately subject to laws of thermodynamics. You can lose weight on an all-chicken-wing diet if you manage to eat few enough, after all.
Three problems remained for me. First, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain meticulous calorie counting as a practice day after day— and, for that matter, it’s a miserable way to live: pining after foods for hours and hours, going to bed stressed out after wrestling snacks out of your own hands over and over (or dealing with the guilt of failing to do so).
Second, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle; it is nearly impossible to maintain a healthy weight by consuming tiny amounts of highly obesogenic foods. “Obesogenic” is an important paradigm discussed by Cronise and others. Refined flours, sugars, and oils would be considered obesogenic, for example, as would all foods using them as an ingredient, e.g. French fries, onion rings, white rice noodles, white bread, ice cream, etc.
Its name is fairly self-explanatory, referring to foods which promote obesity by many means, including but not limited to: high energy density — particularly artificially high energy density — low nutritional density, lack of fiber, and very rapid metabolization.
Third, your health will only marginally improve. Skinny people can remain so despite eating diets that contribute to poor health; we all know (and secretly despise) those people! That leaves the logical possibility that one can become skinny while still eating a poor diet. That, however, is not an excuse to be content with obesity; it is a reason that everyone should focus on eating the healthiest diet possible, regardless of weight. (And if you’re heavy now you will, as a consequence, lose weight as a change in diet content changes your equilibrium.)
With very rare exceptions, high weight is a conspicuous manifestation of poor diet and lifestyle habits that are very likely to contribute to both premature death and disability[2] and even to impair mental health and well-being.[3] That does not mean thin people do not have poor diet and lifestyle habits, only that they are lucky enough that they are not quite so publicly manifested. In other words, they’re still vulnerable in all the same ways; it’s just harder for others to tell. I think of my own struggles with weight in that way. It was always horrible and painful to be at a weight I did not prefer, but that energy and frustration can be redirected into the motivation to achieve greater health. More often than not, it’s not a question of dedication or will to maintain a healthy weight but rather a question of knowledge and access. The alternate version of me who could be effortlessly thin on the all-chicken-wing diet probably wouldn’t have had the motivation to have a truly great diet.
One common foil to calorie counting is obsessive macronutrient tracking. Certain people — some of whom I honestly consider ignorant at best and scam artists art at worst — claim “carbs make you fat” or “sugar turns to fat.” However, in any meaningful sense only fat can make you fat. That is, the process of converting carbohydrate into fat is an extremely inefficient and non-preferential process that requires extreme carbohydrate-only overfeeding over extended periods to trigger in quantitatively significant proportions.[4]
In other words, in the practical course of daily living this does not happen. This is just one example of macronutrient misinformation out there. People also refer to foods like pizza, macaroni and cheese, and pasta with meat sauce as “carbs,” and lament gorging on “too many carbs” over the weekend, even though each of those foods can easily derive upwards of 50% of their calories from fat. (In a related note, many foods restaurants and nutrition education resources refer to as “proteins” also store upwards of 50% of calories as fat.)
For all intents and purposes, “the fat you eat is the fat you wear” in the words of John McDougall. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat fats; nuts, seeds, and avocados are essential health-promoting foods, and this is something I think McDougall gets very wrong. If someone became obese because they only eat caramel candies and peanut butter by the jar, I’d certainly tell them to cut the candies out first, for example, even if the peanuts are technically the source of the fat being accumulated.
That’s why on the issue of macronutrients generally, I agree again with Cronise. While we can understand the mechanics of diet, fat accumulation, and energy expenditure better by considering macronutrients, we ought to drop our simplistic and often baseless obsession with macronutrients as a primary driver of obesity altogether. That is, we need to abandon “low fat,” “low carb,” and “high protein” fad diets. To paraphrase another statement of Cronise’s, table sugar, sweet potatoes, and tree bark all store chemical energy primarily via carbohydrate. Are we seriously meant to believe that because of that fact they have anything in common nutritionally? I’m not here to condemn the other macronutrients, only to say carbs are innocent. Some of the healthiest populations on earth consume a highly starch-centric diet, after all.
In reality, the combination of the chronically-fed state and a hyper-caloric diet ahistorically rich in animal products and refined obesogenic foods has primarily driven the rise of obesity. Another complicating factor is climate control, and this is also a notable shortfall of the TDEE/calorie-myopic approach: thermoregulation is often omitted in popular guides that encourage, by contrast, meticulous accounting of calories expended performing physical activity.
How can one form of energy expenditure matter so much yet the other so little? A person resting in a 50F room is burning far more calories than one resting at 80F; significantly, non-shivering thermogenesis is also a fat oxidation process. To ignore this is such a glaring omission that it is, in my opinion, disqualifying for the entire approach.
Contrary to public opinion, sedentary lifestyle isn’t even as central to obesity as is often claimed. Examination of a contemporary hunter-gatherer society showed its population successfully avoiding physical activity virtually as much as those in post-industrial societies, which is strong reason to doubt that lack of exercise has much of anything to do with the obesity crisis.[5] (Though, to be clear, there are important health benefits to exercise in its own right that justify an emphasis on being active; this is only to say hunter-gatherers did not suffer an obesity crisis despite their lack of dumbbells.)
On top of these concrete reasons we have to reject the calorie as the ultimate factor of analysis in health and nutrition, we also have to consider the possibilities implied by still-poorly understood fields. Take this study from Dr. Matthew Hulver at Virginia Tech as an example.[6] Young men ate a controlled diet for two weeks for baseline tests. Subsequently, they were given a high-calorie, high-fat diet for four weeks with half the participants randomized to receive a potent, medical-grade probiotic or a placebo. Those who received the probiotic accumulated half as much fat mass in those weeks as the placebo group. While the microbiome is not well-understood beyond its importance to innumerable bodily processes, this result implies a profound role in weight maintenance and metabolism. We can safely infer from this and other emerging research another potential mechanism whereby iso-caloric foods are not iso-metabolic and why high-fiber foods in particular ought to be considered vital to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight (as fiber cultivates and sustains a healthy gut microbiome).
Meticulous accounting may yield some sustained long-term weight loss for some individuals, but more than likely it will not. It will certainly in either case never deliver superior health or protect against chronic disease, early death, and disability like a diet rich in nutritionally dense foods and bereft of obesogenic foods. To say nothing of what it’ll probably do to your sanity.
In general I believe the best evidence supports a diet which avoids and eliminates to every practical degree: all refined flours and sugars, oils, and salt, and which severely limits (if not eliminates) animal product consumption.
(This latter point is somewhat ambiguous, though I come down on the elimination side personally for health reasons alone. Ethical and environmental concerns also obviously have merit here. However, due to inorganic cultivation techniques and modern sanitation practices, B12 supplementation is highly recommended if you take this route.)
In any case, I hope you can at least appreciate why I’m driven insane seeing chunks of chocolate, milk, salmon, and fruit held up side-by-side as nutritionally equivalent foods.
[1] Explored beautifully by Ray Cronise et al here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209489/
[2] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqyjVoZ4XYg
[4] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/32072074/5326984.pdf?sequence=1
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-the-hunter-gatherer-workout.html?mcubz=0
