Tracking Calories and Controlling Portion Sizes
In the big bad world of sports nutrition and weight management, there are certain buzzwords thrown such as calorie and portion size. What does it really mean for our body and which methods should we be choosing to ensure we are eating the right amount of energy to fuel our body or reach our goals?
In today’s blog, we are going to chat about what calories are, how to track them, and other options of controlling and recording your energy intake.
In this blog you will learn about:
- What is a calorie?
- Energy balance in the body
- How accurate are calorie trackers such as MFP?
- Alternative methods of tracking energy intake
- Realistic tips for energy intake tracking going forward
What is a calorie?
The word calorie is thrown around so often and yet, there are very few people who could explain exactly what one calorie is.
One calorie is the energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree.
What on earth does that mean?
To find out how many calories are in a burger, scientists use a method where they put the burger in a closed chamber with water pipes around it. They light the burger on fire, and as it burns, it heats the water. The number of degrees by which the water would rise once the burger was completely burned away would indicate how many calories are in it.
For example, a leaf of lettuce burns quickly and doesn't heat the water much, meaning it has few calories. On the other hand, dense foods like donuts burn slowly and heat the water a lot, indicating they have more calories.
Through trials such as these, scientists were able to determine how many calories are in one gram of each macronutrient (carbohydrates/proteins/fats). These are the estimations we use today to calculate how many calories there are in the foods we eat.
Similar to the chamber method for determining calories in food, we can also find out how many calories we burn during times such as at rest or exercise. By exercising in a closed chamber surrounded by water pipes, the heat our body produces heats the water. The number of degrees by which the water would rise would indicate how many calories we have burned during that exercise. However, there are now more modern methods to determine how many calories we burn either at rest or during exercise.
These two methods demonstrate that food is just energy. Energy that can be used as fuel for exercise when ingested correctly, or energy that will be stored in the form of fat to use as fuel for a later time if ingested in excess.
In this blog, you will learn how to track how much energy (food) you put into your body. Tracking your energy intake can help you to make sure you are:
- Fuelling your exercise/training correctly
- Avoiding energy deficiency syndromes such as relative energy deficiency syndrome (REDs). Click this link to find out more about REDs
- Controlling weight loss and weight gain
Energy Balance
Energy balance in the body is simply a term to describe the ratio of energy intake to energy expenditure, and how that affects our body composition.
A negative energy balance is when you use more energy (through movement and exercise) than you take in (in the form of food and fluids). So, less food, more movement. We call this being in a calorie deficit, and it usually leads to weight loss.
A positive energy balance is when you take in more energy (in the form of food and fluids) than you use (through movement and exercise). So, more food, less movement. We call this being in a calorie surplus, and it usually leads to weight gain.
An equal energy balance is when the amount of energy you take in, matches the energy you use. We call this maintenance calories, but also “fuelling the work required”. It usually leads to weight maintenance.
Calorie Trackers
Calorie trackers are handy tools, often apps or wearable gadgets, that help people keep an eye on how many calories they eat and burn each day. Users can input what they eat and their physical activities and the tracker estimates their calorie intake and expenditure. This information helps users make informed choices about their diet and exercise. However, there are pros and cons to tracking your energy intake this way.
Advantages of Calorie Trackers:
1. Accountability:
Tracking calories makes individuals more aware of what they eat and the nutrients in their meals. This awareness encourages them to stick to calorie goals and make healthier choices. Plus, knowing they have to log everything can stop overeating and steer them away from foods that don't fit their health aims.
2. Support:
Calorie trackers often come with additional features such as nutritional information, meal planning, and community support, providing users with comprehensive support in their health journey.
3. Behavior Change:
Tracking calories can facilitate behavior change by identifying patterns and areas for improvement, empowering individuals to make sustainable lifestyle changes.
Disadvantages of Calorie Trackers:
1. Inaccuracy:
Many calorie-tracking apps have been reported to show signs of inaccuracy. For example, if you put a generic white bagel into My Fitness Pal, Nutritics, and Cronometer (all calorie-tracking apps) you get 3 different results!
The calorie results appear as 310kcal, 291kcal, and 346kcal! This may not seem like a lot, but it only takes 100-200kcal of error built up over the day to put you into a calorie surplus, which would then lead to weight gain. There are other nutrients such as fibre and protein that appear to differ in results also. Calorie tracking also relies on user input, which can be inaccurate or incomplete, leading to unreliable data and skewed results.
2. Obsession:
Constantly tracking calories may lead to an unhealthy obsession with food and numbers, potentially contributing to disordered eating habits. It can be easy to become hyper-focused on every single calorie.
3. Overestimation:
People might think they've burned more calories during exercise or misjudge portion sizes, which can mess up their calorie tracking and slow down progress toward health goals. A good example would be inputting “1 tablespoon of peanut butter” and the tracker displays the calories of a levelled tablespoon of PB (94kcal) but you have actually consumed a heaped tablespoon (253kcal).
Tips for making calorie tracking as accurate as possible:
- Try to be as specific as you possibly can! Even better try to record the exact brand you used to get exact readings.
- Don’t “buy back calories” in these apps. Let’s say you log “spin class” on the app and it says that you can buy back 300 calories for example. How does it know how hard you worked in that spin class? You could have given 20% effort or 100%, it doesn’t know – it’s just a guess. Take out the guess work and stick to your normal calories.
- Allow for errors of anywhere between 100-500kcals. Trial and error with the app and find out what works best for you.
What can we use with/instead of calorie trackers?
To ensure we eat the correct levels of energy for our age, sex, and activity levels we can follow the plate method and hand-size portion sizing.
The Plate Method
The plate method is a very easy way to make sure you are tailoring your macronutrients to your training without getting too specific with calories. As you can see from the graphs below, the higher the intensity gets – the larger the our portion of carbohydrates becomes!
The Hand-Sizing Portion Sizes
Our hands are a great way of measuring how much food we need. Why?
When we are children, we need smaller portion sizes, and we also have smaller hands. As we grow our energy needs increase and so do our hands! They are a quick and reliable method of measurement. The following infographic displays how much of each type of food we should have measured out by our hands.
Summary:
To conclude this blog, it is important to note that digital calorie trackers can be useful if used correctly and the user allows for a certain margin of error. They can be great for getting a general idea of what your daily calories look like, and to see the structure and patterns in your food. But once you have educated yourself on general estimations of your calorie intake, it could be a good idea to switch to portion sizing and plate methods to reduce the risk of obsession but more importantly increase your chances of not giving up! Calorie tracking can be tedious and time consuming, portion sizing is a habit that can kept up for a lifetime!
Key Take Away Points:
- Calories are units of energy that can be taken into the body or expended from the body through activity. Eating more energy than we use will lead to a calorie surplus, eating less energy than we use will lead to a calorie deficit, and eating the same energy that use for activity will result in a calorie maintenance.
- Calorie trackers can be beneficial for staying accountable, gaining insight, and providing nutritional support. However, they can also cause calorie-counting obsessions, display certain inaccuracies, and not account for human error such as overestimation.
- The plate method distributes macronutrients into different sections of a plate to ensure we are meeting our energy intake needs.
- Portion sizing using our hands can be time-efficient and a reliable measurement source as our hand size doesn’t change!
