Is Counting Calories The Key To Staying Fit!

For decades, counting calories was seen as the key to staying fit. There are a few—actually a trillion—little problems with that.

- Tom Philpott

More than 120 years ago, a scientist named Wilbur Atwater launched what would become an enduring dieting trend: He started meticulously counting calories. In a series of experiments, Atwater set fire to hundreds of foods and measured the released energy. In another experiment, he and his team planted a grad student in an airtight “room calorimeter” and passed him portions of bread and beans and determined how much heat, carbon dioxide, and waste he generated. To this day, when the food industry lists calories on labels, as required by federal law, it often relies on Atwater’s calculations.

Atwater’s work helped give rise to the nutritional dogma that your body weight is governed by whether you burn off all the calories you eat. Just ask chips-and-soda giant PepsiCo. When “the amount of calories you take in equals the amount of calories you burn,” the company insists on its website, “you maintain your body weight.” Excess calories will stick around as “body fat and weight gain,” warns the Department of Agriculture’s Weight Management webpage. This is true whether they “come from protein, fat, carbohydrate, or alcohol.”