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

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

31–40 of 78 posts

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

#31
Note that this is calorie counting (i.e. just tracking calories consumed), not calorie restriction (trying to consume fewer calories). The study population was mostly normal weight (average BMI of 23.1).

You can read the full study here: https://sci-hub.se/uptodate/S2212267221007346.pdf

edit: Also: an interesting fact. 1 member of the (100-person) intervention group dropped out of the study because the app "made them feel bad" (p. 3) and was thus excluded from the results. One wonders if that would happen in a larger sample size--if 1% of people have to drop out because calorie counting affects their mood so badly, that'd be an important result.

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

#32
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fine.

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

#33

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.

In my whole life I've known like two people with eating disorders (the not eating enough kind). Almost every single other person aside from those two eat too much, and I'd say mostly they eat way, way too much.

Now, those two people definitely had a problem, but knowing them it was one I knew couldn't begin to understand, and I can't imagine that any of the pithy things people say all they time to express concern about not "developing anorexic" if I (while carrying a slight gut myself) skip a meal would make any difference to them. You might as well being telling someone in the grip of an oxy addiction to "just say no".

Conversely almost nobody has ever told me I was eating too much. I never see it addressed in "movies with an important message" or any other pop culture PSAs. Nobody said anything during the COVID pandemic where people are literally dying of COVID from being overweight and not able to get enough oxygen with their damaged lungs to keep their whole body alive. Instead they euphemistically called it "co-morbidity" and left it at that. All this concern for eating disorders I think it's mostly just a smokescreen.

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

#34

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…

> Mass production isn't inherently bad

Mass production is inherently corner-cutting, and, given that nutrition is an unsolved problem, natural is inherently wholesome in a way that artificial can, at best, only attempt to duplicate.

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

#35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair warning everybody: vegetables are packed with nutrients.

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

#36

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…

It's like the popular line,

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

My behavior definitely looks like an eating disorder sometimes. But holy hell, they're still putting unhealthy-at-any-level trans fats in regular food, and the label can say "0g trans fat"!

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

#37

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.

Obesity is an eating disorder. It's one that's killed orders of magnitude more people than anorexia or bulimia ever have.

> People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like

That's in large part because even healthy people can't agree on what that looks like. Regardless, many people don't seriously care about eating healthy because otherwise they'd simply use the internet and quickly find some diet that actually works (pretty much any of the "fad" diets are better than the Standard American Diet).

> 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.

This effect can't be totally discounted, but is it really that or is it because being fat actually kinda sucks? The average person is not attracted to obesity, and obesity can lead to trauma that then leads to things like anorexia. Ironically, obesity is also caused indirectly by poor mental health.

Contrary to this idea that thinness is somehow this societal evil, obesity is more normalized than it's ever been. That's only going to do the opposite of getting people healthy. When was the last time an unhealthy image of thinness was promoted in the mainstream? Besides the fashion industry, which most people don't take seriously or even pay attention to, I can't think of even one.

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

#38

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…

It’s true, but an eating disorder doesn’t mean eating scantly, or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make. Eating disorders are compulsions, and those that suffer from them aren’t able to choose not to do them. This is similar to how alcoholism doesn’t mean drinking a lot. Alcoholism is a complete dependence on alcohol, making it nearly impossible to stop.

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

#39
post #24

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…

[deleted]

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair warning everybody: nuts are incredibly calorie dense.

Fair warning everybody: vegetables are packed with nutrients.

Unfortunately we have bred a good chunk of them away over the last century. Median 5 to 40% deline in mineral content as of this 2009 meta analysis, likely even worse now.

https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...

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