Although participants reported enjoying the meals equally, there were some important differences in how they responded to the meals: Participants who consumed the ultra-processed foods ate their meals more quickly and ate 500 more calories per day, or about 20% more.
After two weeks on an ultra-processed food diet, there was a 1.8kg difference between the groups – just imagine what years of making poor food choices could do to your waistline.
When trying to reduce their calorie intake, many people unknowingly choose foods labeled “low calorie,” but most of these foods are ultra-processed.
This causes people to become more hungry and sets them up for failure – and hunger is the third reason why calorie counting doesn’t work. Hunger is a powerful force, and it wins most of the time.
Over countless generations, our bodies have evolved systems that allow us to burn enough energy to survive periodic periods of scarcity, but we have yet to adapt to the modern environment where nutritious, delicious food is available on every corner.
So when our body senses that we’re restricting our energy intake, like we do when we count calories, it slowly but relentlessly increases the hormonal signals that make us feel hungry. This is why we start to think obsessively about food.
The longer you try to limit your energy intake, the stronger the intrusive thoughts of something tasty become. This makes it harder to avoid the “cheat” of reaching for that biscuit. This is how appetite suppressants such as Wegovy work: Wegovy blocks hunger signals that are hard to ignore.
People who eat whole foods have been found to have higher levels of hormones that suppress appetite and lower levels of hormones that increase appetite. In other words, eating healthy, unprocessed foods helps to suppress overwhelming hunger signals.
The fourth and final nail in the coffin of calorie counting is your metabolism acting as an energy management system. After a session at the gym, your body tells you to relax, and your metabolism slows down to regain lost energy. When you restrict calories, the same thing happens: your metabolism decides you’re starving, so it slows down your metabolism, so you burn fewer calories.
So the more you restrict your calorie intake, the slower your body uses calories. When hunger signals finally overwhelm you, your body is primed to store fat even more easily to save you from the starvation you’ve been enduring. This is why many people who try calorie restriction end up overdoing it and ending up fatter than they were before.
In fact, even after two years of calorie-deficit dieting, very few people are able to keep the weight they’ve lost, even with clinical support. Two powerful and ancient forces of nature are working against you: hunger and metabolism.
So if calorie counting almost always fails, what’s the answer? Needless to say, losing weight is incredibly difficult. As we’ve seen, our bodies are programmed to store energy as fat and are reluctant to release it. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, there are some tips that can increase your chances of success.
Your best bet is to replace ultra-processed foods with whole foods wherever possible, starting with snacks, which account for a quarter of your energy intake: research by nutritional science company Zoe found that even people who eat healthy diets are still likely to choose unhealthy snacks.
People who tended to eat poor quality snacks reported feeling hungrier than those who ate good quality snacks. Conversely, people who ate mostly minimally processed or unprocessed snacks had less abdominal fat, lower body weight, and lower levels of fat and sugar in their blood.
So avoid low-calorie snack bars, ready meals and shakes, ignore “high protein” and “added vitamins” labels, and eat more fruits, nuts and seeds.
This is why approaches like the Zoe program have been so successful: it ignores calories entirely, and instead of just cutting back on your favorite foods, it encourages you to add healthy foods to your diet.
We need to think about food in a whole new way – it’s more than just energy intake or fuel, so stop counting calories and focus on the quality of the food you eat.
