I am cutting down my calories at the moment to lose a bit of weight. I had an apple last night for a snack and when I tracked it on my calorie tracker app I realised it was pretty much the same amount of calories as a small chocolate bar. Does this mean that if I’m trying to lose weight I might as well be having the chocolate bar instead?
Obviously there is more fat in a chocolate bar but when I Googled it it said you should focus on calories more than fat
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Calories are good to look at for weight loss.
Nutritional value is for health.
So yes, a chocolate bar with 80 calories and an apple with 80 calories will have basically the same impact on weight. But the apple will also provide other nutrients that your body needs to function while the chocolate bar will not. So given the option between the two you are better off with the apple.
At the base level, no, it doesn’t matter. Calories are calories.
But here’s the thing, that apple you ate is far larger, and far more filling, than the small chocolate bar.
If you had eaten the small chocolate bar instead, do you think you would have still been hungry afterwards? And if you were still gonna be hungry would you have the discipline to go to bed hungry? Or would you have eaten more.
Because that is another big part of the equation, sure, on an item to item basis they have the same calories. But for your overall diet, which is going to help you succeed more.
Because sure, you can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate, but you will have to have the discipline to stop when you hit your calorie limit, and to go about the rest of your day and night being hungry still. Some people can do this. Other people can’t.
Raw calories are the big thing to track for weight loss, but it is important to remember that there are other things in food besides sugar and fat, like proteins, vitamins, and minerals. An apple might have just as many calories as a chocolate bar, but it will also (hopefully) have other things in it that are good for you, like fiber and various vitamins.
There was a professor in 2010 that went on a diet that involved less than 2000 kcal per day of mostly snack foods (plus multivitamins, celery, and protein shakes to round things out). He did lose weight over the 2 month period. (searching for “twinkie diet” gets you articles like [this one](https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html))
But.
This was a professor with access to tools that could check his overall health. He stuck to it very specifically for a (relatively) long time. And in the end, he said that this one instance just isn’t enough data to know if this is a ‘correct’ diet.
So in some ways, yes counting calories is what makes weight loss happen. But weight loss isn’t the only purpose of eating, so you should consider the other reasons to eat an apple (fiber and vitamins, for example). And further, the habits people build around eating tend to be a bigger issue with dieting than just calories; eating a chocolate bar in 10 seconds instead of an apple in 5 minutes cause many people to want a second candy bar instead of sticking to the ‘diet’.
Calories-Weight
Nutrition-Healthiness/Body health.
Weight loss can be simplified as using more calories than you intake in a day.
Also the whole ‘fat is evil’ thing was a ridiculous myth half-inspired by the sugar industry to take pressure off of sugar being so bad, as extra carbohydrates such as sugar tend to be stored in the body quite easily. It’s wild we still have a lot of things labeled ‘Fat Free!’ Meanwhile a single serving can still casually have your entire sugar intake for the day covered. The body needs fat, there is such thing as healthy fat aha.
One thing as well when you compare an apple to a chocolate bar, is that the apple will keep you more full for longer as the body kinda processes through the chocolate bar fairly quickly and will spike insulin levels. Natural sugar in things such as fruit are less of a sugar-shock to the body and wont have your insulin explode.
Plus eating something like a chocolate bar vs an apple, both may have similar calories, but those calories are wasted with the chocolate bar since you don’t really get anything else out of it like important vitamins.
For weight loss in particular some foods make you feel full longer and some foods make you hungry fasts. That’s due to the glycemic index. You see, the higher the food is on that scale, the more it tends to raise your blood sugar rapidly. And when your higher goes up too fast and too high, it crashes with the same intensity and that makes humans hungry. However these things can vary person to person. Some people won’t be affected by it as much and some will. Notice how hungry you feel after eating a 300 cal steak vs 300 cal sweet.
There are a lot of good points made already. To add to them: Dependent of the type of energy (Sugar/fat/Protein), it takes different times to completely absorb the energy. Raw sugar can be processed incredibly fast. If you consume longer chains of sugar, like flour, it takes much longer. So by drinking a coke with lots of sugar, you will get hungry really fast again, as al of the energy is gone.
If a non-contextualized total caloric number was the sole thing needed to lose weight, lotta folks would be grabbing a chocolate bar instead of an apple.
But food contains more than a single caloric number. The apple will give you fiber to keep you fuller longer (less snacking) and help with your digestion and blood sugar (which can also affect weight gain and satiety). It’ll have vitamins and minerals your chocolate bar won’t and it’s a healthier overall habit to reach for a piece of fruit instead of candy if you’re trying to lose weight.
If you get in the mindset of “the food doesn’t matter beyond a calorie number” eat nothing but your daily caloric goal worth of M&Ms for a few days and see how you feel 🙂 It ain’t gonna be great.
for weightloss it really does not matter where exactly you get your calories from.
For health it matters a lot.
The problem with eating junk food on a weight loss diet is that it is very very difficult to keep yourself within your calorie goals. Junk/unhealthy food just has a lot of calories and doesn’t fill you up that much, so you will end up being very hungry if you just eat unhealthy and stick to a calorie goal. Therefore it is much easier to eat food that is very filling for its calories, which is typically healthy foods like fruits veggies, salads but also some other things like lowfat high protein dairy products and lean protein sources like chicken breast.
You should eat the healthy food first but essentially yea it is the same amount of energy. Macros will be different but that’s if you are trying to hit a certain percentage of carbs, proteins and fats.
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