Recap: Why you should stop counting calories | Giles Yeo

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Calories. They've been at the heart of dieting advice for decades. Eat fewer, burn more, lose weight. Simple, right? Except it's not that simple. Calories only tells a fraction of the story. To really understand what's going on, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Helping us take this step is biologist Giles Yeo. He'll explain why obsessing over the numbers doesn't work and how we can change the way we approach weight loss. Everybody knows that you need to count your calories. There's a certain number of calories that you're supposed to eat. And as long as you eat less than that, you'll lose weight. And if you eat like one calorie more than that, you'll put on weight. And we're living in this world where, like, counting calories is the way that we understand what happens, and the calorie number is what determines our weight. Mhmm. It's not correct if you deal with it the way we do today. In order to lose weight, you need to eat less. Let's just if you wanna debunk anything, because that's gotta be true. Okay? You need an energy deficit in your food if you want to lose weight, and there is no if, ands, and buts about that because it's a function of physics. So, in other words, if you now have a meal, let's call it a balanced meal, whatever you might actually look at, and if you then suddenly took that meal and says, Well, instead of eating all of it, I'm going to eat two thirds of it or half of it in a balanced way in which I'm going to half the carrots and half the steak and half the potatoes and actually eat that, then ultimately, yes, you will lose weight. So if you calorie count in a perfectly balanced way, yeah, you you you you can actually you can and you will lose weight. The issue is that is not the way life functions, and people begin to sort of take it to extremes and sort of worship the calorie and use the calorie as the only piece of information there. Because ultimately, I think in order to lose weight, you need to continue eating a balanced diet, but eat less of it. The problem with calorie counting is it takes away the nuance of it and you start to just count the calorie. And a calorie does tell you how much food, that is there, but that is all it tells you. It is completely nutrient blind. It doesn't tell you how much fat is in there. It doesn't tell you about sugar content, about fiber, about salt, about anything. Anything about that either makes the food taste good or bad or is good for you or not so good for …