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Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#21

Post by knaik94 »

ericmcer wrote: post #19

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 1…

Moderation in eating isn't equivalent to a minor eating disorder. I agree though that some behavior you need to do today might have been seen as symptoms of a type of disordered eating in the past.

But by definition, if it's keeping you healthy, it mostly shouldn't be considered disordered.

I know in the past cutting up food into very small pieces was seen as a symptom of disordered eating because the thought was that you're intentionally slowing your eating so you eat less. Today's portion sizes in the US make it mandatory to break up a pre-prepared meal or a snack into smaller pieces so each bite isn't so calorically dense. In fact, in certain contexts, cutting up food is seen as proper and having manners. If you're eating a big piece of meat, you don't grab it in your hands and chew on it, generally. You cut it up into bite sized pieces.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#22

Post by acchow »

ericmcer wrote: post #19

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 1…

The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#23

Post by dghughes »

engineer_22 wrote: post #18

Monitoring my calories was one of the best things I have ever done.

Weight, finances, like anything tracking it makes you aware. I started counting calories eight years ago (Jan 11, 2014) I do it at the end of each day. I did find that tracking my weight (or my spending) makes me modify my behaviour. Even eating the crap I do I am more aware it it's made my weight stabilize. I can even see a bump in the graph of my weight after I buy groceries or a dip when I go for bike rides in the summer. I also see patterns of same weight for multiple days then a weight change up or down; trends.

I'm not female and not obese but a slightly overweight middle-aged male with hypothyroidism (synthroid pill #1 Mar 12, 2013). So not the typical person most people would think of. But I never had an eating disorder just curiosity.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#24

Post by Spivak »

armchairhacker wrote: post #15

This may be a hot take, but I think the obesity crisis and that most people are overweight actually increases the prevalence of eating disorders. People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like, and thinness (even extreme, unhealthy thinness) is popularized and praised as a sign of beauty and willpower because so many people are trying to lose weight and so few are trying to gain.

Anorexic here. I think this misses it a bit. People with ED’s know what a healthy body looks like. You’re talking about a population that is unhealthily obsessed with food and their body in one way or another. Like I can name the calories and macros for basically any food off the top of my head. I know the calories burnt by most common exercises and what muscles they work. I don’t even need MFP to count anymore. It’s a fun party trick.

What complicates things is dysmorphia. I don’t “see” myself correctly. It’s really hard to explain but it’s kinda like something in my brain is wired wrong where my internal rendering of myself gets distorted. So then when I look at a healthy body and look at myself — even when that body is heavier than mine — my brain goes “ahh the path to go from where you are to there is to lose weight.” And I’ve had it as long as I can remember. My recovery has been learning to develop strategies to deal with when dysmorphia is particularly bad. Lotta sweatshirts, removing mirrors, and doing things in the dark along with safe foods that don’t trigger my anxiety on days when I feel disgusting.

I don’t want to look underweight. I see other underweight women and know that they’re unhealthily skinny.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#25

Post by hiptobecubic »

kixiQu wrote: post #4

doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this

Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#26

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

acchow wrote: post #22
ericmcer wrote: post #19

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 1…

The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.

Fair warning everybody: nuts are incredibly calorie dense.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#27

Post by marticode »

uninstantiated wrote: post #6

It's not surprising that merely counting calories has no effect. The idea that all calories are the same is flawed. In fact, obesity is the result of the wrong types of foods i.e. sugars which are metabolised differently by the body than other types. Sugar triggers the insulin response which leads to overeating and detrimental fluctuations in cognitive capacity and concentration. What would be more beneficial than ca…

> What would be more beneficial than calorie counting would be dietary education.

Both are needed in different ways. Stuffing yourself with avocado and nuts might be "healthy" but is also gonna be a calorie bomb that will lead to weight gains.

Calorie counting is simple (albeit somewhat tedious) and makes sense and naturally leads people to healthy food.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#28

Post by joe-collins »

ericmcer wrote: post #19

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 1…

Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth.

There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index foods simply because they're a cheap way to feed a population, ground subsidence due to unchecked dependence on slow-filling aquifers, native habitat destruction... off the top of my head.

But all of that doesn't make "natural", on its own, better for human nutrition.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#29

Post by shusaku »

kixiQu wrote: post #4

doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this

So? That seems like exactly the population you’d want to study if your worry is that calorie counting will induce eating disorders.
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