No Place to Hide: Why You Need to Count Calories

Weight loss is difficult. Yes, even on the LEVITY Program. Although following the program will reduce your need to eat for comfort and lower your carbohydrate cravings, it will not transform your eating habits overnight. Nor will it change the fact that you live in a culture that has made overeating its national pastime. If you have a significant amount of weight to lose or have had great difficulty losing weight in the past, we recommend that you add another weapon to your arsenal: counting calories.

Yes, counting calories is tedious. Yes, you have to keep some kind of food log and then laboriously convert the food into calories (or buy a software program that will do it for you.) Yes, it is especially difficult to count calories when you eat so many meals away from home and on the run.

Yet, as irksome as this task may be, it is not the main reason people hate to count calories. The heart of the resistance lies much deeper. Here's the deal. If we were to record every morsel of food that we ate, we could no longer deny our routine over-consumption.

Most overweight people eat far more than they realize. The statistics are sobering. A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (1) revealed that obese women were eating a whopping 47 percent more calories than they were aware. They truly believed that they were eating modest amounts of foods and that their obesity was caused by a physical problem, such as a slow metabolism or other disorder. When their physical tests came back normal, they were forced to take a closer look at how much they were really eating.

Virtually all of us—even those without weight problems— underestimate how much we eat. In one study, a researcher was working with a group of lean, healthy young women. Part of the study involved having the women live in a metabolic ward where they would have no access to food other than their hospital meals. The researcher wanted the women to maintain their current weight, so she asked each one to estimate how much she normally consumed. Later, when she served the women the amount of food they thought they had been eating, they lost weight. The researcher had to add as many as 1,000 calories a day before they stopped shedding pounds.

Why do we all eat more than we realize? It's simple, really. We know full well that eating too much will make us fat. But we also have a very strong and understandable desire to comfort ourselves with food. Food tastes good. Food triggers soothing brain chemicals. But, above all else, eating is one of the most basic, primal ways to feel loved. When the road gets rocky— you've been turned down for a job, your lover doesn't call, you've been snubbed by a friend—that chocolate bar or plate of pasta will always be there for you, faithful, rewarding, and soothing.

So in order to be comforted by food and still maintain the illusion that we are eating moderately, we hide our food intake from our conscious minds. We become stealth eaters.

There are a multitude of ways to keep from knowing how much we are eating. For example, many of us judge our food intake by how much we eat at sit-down meals when other people are present. So, we eat by ourselves. We eat standing up. We nibble while we are cooking dinner and cleaning up. We keep food in our desk drawers, glove compartments, and purses. We eat in the living room while the TV drains away our attention.

Portion size is another way we fool ourselves. We eat three huge slices of pizza and convince ourselves we've eaten just one serving. We gobble down mega-portions at restaurants and tell ourselves we've eaten normal-sized meals. We keep adding small spoonfuls of food to our plates at the dinner table and pretend we're not going back for seconds.

We cling to these strategies because they allow us to eat for comfort, yet hold on to the fantasy that we're trying to lose weight; we get to have our cake and "diet" too.

The problem with this nearly universal strategy is that calories do count. Eat just 350 stealth calories a day and ten days from now you will have gained one pound. A year from now you will have gained 36. In three years, you will weigh 100 pounds more than you do today. Inevitably, all our luscious private consumption shows up under our chins, around our bellies, and magnificently displayed on our behinds. We may remain in denial of our secret eating, but the resulting fat is there for all to see.

The solution? Come clean with yourself. Although this may be a rude awakening, it can bring stupendous rewards. In a landmark study, Kaiser Permanente enrolled 2037 overweight people in a year-long weight loss program.(2) All the volunteers were advised to eat 500 fewer calories a day and exercise for 30 minutes. But in addition, some of the volunteers were asked to count calories as well, either once a week, 2-3 days a week, 3-4 days a week, or 5 days a week.

As you can see by the graph below, counting calories made a stunning difference in how people fared on the program. (The higher the line, the more people lost.) After a full year of dieting and exercising, the people who did not count calories at all (represented by the orange line on the graph) weighed more than they had at the beginning of the study, a heartbreaking outcome. This is the fate of most people who "go on a diet" but continue their secret eating. The people who counted calories only one day a week (the green line) ended up about where they had started. Those who counted calories three to four days a week (the pink line) faired much better and lost, on average, about ten pounds. But the real winners were those who counted calories five or more days a week, represented by the black line. This group shed an average of 23 pounds!

Why was counting calories the key to success? It left the dieters no place to hide. They had to acknowledge that the extra piece of bread at breakfast and the three o'clock candy bar had racked up 450 calories. That left them only 400 calories for dinner. They would have to forgo the buttered roll and take a smaller helping of the main dish. Because they had the information they needed to to stay within their caloric limits, they began losing weight. Losing weight made them willing to stay on the program. Because they kept on the program, they kept losing weight.

Being on the LEVITY Program and becoming a more conscious eater can make all the difference in your ability to lose weight. So, don't resist any longer. Get out a piece of paper and pencil and start tracking down those fugitive calories. When you are faithful to the LEVITY program and also count calories, you, too, will reach your goal.

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Note: We offering a new software program called "Weight by Date, LEVITY Edition" that was developed by the creators of the highly regarded "Weight by Date" software. Load it onto your computer, and you will be able to keep track of all three LEVITY activities, chart daily changes in your symptoms, record additional exercise, take personal notes, and keep a daily food log. We are excited about this new, all-in-one package because we believe it will greatly enhance people's ability to lose weight and keep it off.

1. (Lichtman, S. W., K. Pisarska, et al. (1992). "Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects." N Engl J Med 327(27): 1893-8.)

2. Streit, K. J., N. H. Stevens, et al. (1991). "Food records: a predictor and modifier of weight change in a long-term weight loss program." J Am Diet Assoc 91(2): 213-6.