Delete Your Calorie Counter. What Matters is WHAT You Eat: Study

Calorie crunching will get you nowhere. What matters in the long run is not quantity but quality of food you eat.

You really need to tone down on the calorie mania.

(Photo: iStockphoto)

What’s your first reaction to weight loss? Cut your calories? Count calories of every single morsel you put in your mouth and make dutiful entries? Right?

Wrong!

A new study published in JAMA concluded that people who ate a good amount of vegetables and whole foods and reduced their intake of added sugars, refined grains and processed foods - without continuously counting their calories - lost a good amount of weight over the course of a year.

So what the research indicates is that it is the quality not quantity that counts.

This plan worked for all people irrespective of what type of diet they followed - low in carbs or low in fat, as per a report in the New York Times. The study stated that the weight loss numbers weren’t influenced by the genetics of the participants or the insulin-response of their bodies to carbohydrates.

This clearly is a strong rebuttal to the notion that people with different body types or tolerance levels must be recommended different diets.

So stop your number crunching, replace all the processed and pre prepared meals in your fridge, visit a vegetable market, pick up fresh organic food and cook!

Avoid refined starches and sugar - ditch your white bread, cakes and sugary snacks and beverages.

Delhi based Nutritionist Kavita Devgan agrees with the findings. She says not all calories are created equal. So just number crunching will get you nowhere.

Some calories are metabolism boosting, some fattening, some detoxing and healing, others addictive. That’s because food doesn’t just contain calories, it contains other nutrients too and it is this interplay that decides the quality of the food – not calories alone.

So guys, delete your calorie counter and just eat healthy.

(With inputs from New York Times)