Counting calories is more pointless than even skeptics realize
The science of human bioenergetics is too inexact for that, but so is furiously waggling an ass—taut or jiggly—for the benefit of thousands of remote admirers
I was first exposed to the “burn 3,500 calories to lose a pound” dictum as a young child in the late 1970s. My mom had a pocket reference book showing the number of calories “contained in” specific amounts of a variety of foods and other ingestible substances. The 3,500-calories-in-a-pound “rule” was somewhere in the front matter.
Being a fan of superlatives, I immediately went on a booklet-wide hunt—which didn’t take long—to identify the most calorie-rich food available. This turned out to be lard (later dubbed “The Other White Meat” by reliably hilarious sources in response to a 1990s ad campaign pushing the merits of pork). I recall seeing a number just over 1,000 associated with a 4-ounce (i.e., quarter-pound) serving of unsweetened lard. I thus determined that lard allegedly contained over 4,000 calories per pound.
It allegedly still does.
In addition, despite advances in biochemistry over the past forty years, the “3,500 calories in a pound” “rule” remains extremely common. When even quasi-medical sites like Healthline are properly debunking a popular idea rather than feeding it, you know it’s time for the at-large to broaden its wisdom.
It would be a few years before I learned about the law of conservation of mass, but it’s a hard concept to dodge if you hope to pick up a physics degree without routinely experiencing serious difficulties. One application of the law is that if you could extract enough energy from 1 pound of a substance to add 1.14 pounds of mass to a physical system (4,000/3,500 = 1.143), you would immediately become wealthy beyond measure for a panoply of reasons.
The obvious implication is that bomb calorimetry—the process used to determine how much metabolically useful energy is stored in the chemical bonds of different foodstuffs—is a grossly inexact science. And, as if lard apparently violating a foundational law of physics isn’t enough to convince anyone of this, I also noticed sometime in the 1980s—remember, there was no Internet to help easily verify or reject such ideas in those days—that different reference sources listed the same common foods as “having” different numbers of calories. On top of that, I noticed that calorie counts almost always ended in a 0 or a 5 (still true today).1
What were the chances, I asked my young, not-yet-hopeless self, that this could result from an exact measurement process, compared to the chances that it was the result of rounding and estimating? Probably shitty, something in my brain—then years from being purposeless, unaware that life in 2022 would be far more a septic burden than a daily gift—replied.
Somewhere along the way, I also realized that even if the science of counting the calories “stored in” foods yielded perfectly accurate as well as precise data, there was the related but distinct issue of trying to determine just how many calories a given activity “burns.” Here, scientists can act with extreme cleverness in analyzing exhaled gases (usually, gases exhaled through the face-anus, which for whatever reason rarely feel as warm in their breathy passage as does as gas exhaled through the ass-anus). But again, they’re not getting all that close—not as close, at least, as any dedicated Instagram anorexic-bulimic requires them to be in the modern Instagram era.
Here’s another cool thing: If you become a seriously far-gone drinker of hard alcohol, as I did, you may find yourself consuming daily quantities of booze in the range of 1.75 liters (58.8 fluid ounces) of spirit, called “a handle” within the street-alky sector. Since 80-proof vodka “holds” 64 calories (kcal) per ounce, a handle of vodka offers a robust 3,763 calories. Yet if you manage to track down ten drinkers of this caliber, most, maybe all, will be emaciated. Ethanol has something of a thermogenic effect in the absence of food intake thanks to the hijacking and repurposing of key liver enzymes, but on the whole2, chronic alcohol intoxication is a shitty option for losing weight and keeping it off, unless you’re okay with losing tons of other shit and keeping that off, too.
So if you’re counting calories, don’t bother. You’re not getting a number that means fuck-all even if half of your household appliances are laboratory-caliber scales that read to the nearest picogram. You do get to fulfill the parameters of a body-related obsession, which is where the real value in this shit lies. This is evident in the obvious positive correlation between Instagram calorie-counters and Instagram lunatics whose lives are in a rut thanks to the sadly contagious allure of unremitting calorie-counting, just like mine suffers for enthusiastically tracking and maligning, in words and pictures. the actions of whole armies of gibbering, degradation-driven, and physically misshapen representatives of the running and broader media.3
If you’re genuinely interested in maintaining a public weight-loss campaign, forget the maths (as they say in the U.K.) and just start walking all day, every day, while living on water alone, plus many a multivitamin and multimineral to keep your sex drive pointlessly intact, maybe even cranking right along. Eventually, you’ll lose weight and the capability of making any sense, but you’ll probably gain followers, the only currency that matters as much as weight to the haplessly showboating body-neurotic.
If you like, you can capture hundreds of photos of your display of single-minded determination for millions to see. This would be at least as helpful and sensible as anything else I’ve seen from the various shape-n’-size experts populating contemporary antisocial media—and at this point in the advice session, it’s worth noting that anyone who spends all day cavorting on Instagram about their dietary habits is completely unlovable in the real world. These loons are captive to a toxic obsession that ironically renders whatever gains they achieve through weight loss (ha!) moot, as no one wants to hang around people whose minds are continual prisoners of size and shape.
Imagine the level of self-delusion required to believe that something everyone knows is unconditionally horrible for the psychosocial development and mood states of teenagers could possibly be good for America’s least most emotionally mature adults.
(Food is on my mind more than I’d like lately, because even though I still enjoy the taste of a few items—e.g., Sour Patch Kids, chocolate milk, and meats rich in suspected carcinogens—I resent having to eat, period. Rising prices have made a longstanding, unsettling reality even more acute: Every time I cave in and consume a meal, or anything containing extractable glucose, it implies a conscious commitment of my part to exist for another day or so, and—absent a fortuitous gunshot or car crash—all but ensures that this will happen. Because I am waiting to die with increasing impatience, every of bite whatever I thrust toward my erstwhile booze-hole feels like a wrongheaded and literally unpalatable concession to experiencing needless sensory input. All of this is complicated by the sheer level of ranting and running around I do almost without pause, which requires enormous piles of calories.)
Energy, work, and heat have the same units—in physics and chemistry, the reference unit is the joule (J), 4.184 of which make up a calorie (cal). One “calorie” in the nutrition world, however, is actually a kilocalorie (kcal), so the “calorie” you’re familiar with “has” 4,184 joules. I have trained myself to not think of any of these as tangible things, which is why I’m use scare-quotes “liberally” here. But it’s hard to avoid language implicating these concepts as nouns. Also, when trying to lose weight, I prefer to track calories “burned” in exercise using the kilowatt-hour, a unit equivalent to 3.6 million joules, just to see how many appliances my hyperactivity could theoretically power in a given month.
“On the whole, I prefer Preparation H.” This works much better as a spoken joke.
For more exposure to physics language from lay sources in the running world, see David Roche’s obviously unedited attempted wordpile about the Western States 100-Miler. In a piece in which he uses the word “ton” eight times—that’s a ton—he inimitably scattershot Roche declares, “It’s like the physics principle of the observer effect, when the act of observation disturbs the system being measured.”
This manlike hominid is a geyser of unreadable tripe as well as an unrepentant fraudster, and it’s time we* celebrated this more vocally. First, the correct phrasing of this groaning mess would be, “It’s like the observer-effect principle of physics,” not the other way around. Or he could have just replaced the “of” with a comma. Second, that’s not even close to a proper application of the concept of interest. So, as usual, Mr. Roche should shut the fuck up about his supposed embracing of (for? By? With? To?) science, and rely instead on less easily punctured modalities of advertising his false expertise.
