Unpound

Counting calories, and keeping it up

Counting calories is simple arithmetic. The hard part is doing it on an ordinary Tuesday, and again the week after. These habits make a food diary quick to keep, which is most of what makes it last.

What do you need to count calories?

Less than it seems: a diary — paper works, an app is faster — and a daily target to count against, ideally set from your own maintenance. Packaged food gives its energy on the label, per 100 g or 100 ml. For loose food, a kitchen scale in the first few weeks teaches your eye what 150 g of rice looks like; after that, most days you can estimate.

Research on food diaries keeps finding the same link: keeping one goes with losing weight. The reviewers call the evidence weak, because most studies are small and rest on what people report themselves. What does seem to matter is that the diary gets kept.

When should you log a meal?

As close to the meal as you can: straight after, or before you eat. A meal logged at once is a meal you still remember. By the evening the small things — the milk in the coffee, the oil in the pan, the biscuit at the meeting — are easy to lose. Studies of food records find, consistently, that what people write down falls short of what they ate.

How do you make logging fast?

Make the usual case quick. Most weeks repeat themselves more than they seem to: the same few breakfasts, a handful of lunches.

It gets faster with practice. In a six-month study of an online programme, people spent about 23 minutes a day on their food records in the first month and about 15 in the sixth. What went with their results was how often they logged, not how long they spent on it.

Is a rough estimate better than nothing?

Yes. A restaurant dinner logged as about 900 kcal may be 20% off. Left blank, it is 100% off: it counts as nothing. Blank meals make a day look smaller than it was, and a week of them makes your intake look lower than it is, which skews everything worked out from it, your measured maintenance included. When in doubt, estimate, round up rather than down, and move on.

Does it help to decide meals in advance?

It can. In a set of field experiments, VanEpps, Downs and Loewenstein compared lunches ordered ahead with lunches ordered at lunchtime. In a study at a university, lunches ordered in advance came to about 100 kcal less, roughly 11%, than lunches ordered to eat straight away. In a workplace canteen, where even the lunchtime orders waited a while, the difference was smaller, about 5%.

The researchers link it to how we weigh now against later: a choice made for later gives the longer-term aim more say than one made with the food in front of you. They looked at that one meal only, not at what people ate later in the day.

In practice: decide dinner at lunchtime, or tomorrow's lunch tonight. Then log the meal as eaten once you have eaten it.

What if you miss a day?

Then you missed a day. There is nothing to make up, and no reason to eat less tomorrow to balance it out. If you remember roughly what you ate, a rough entry is enough; if you don't, leave it and start again with the next meal. A diary with gaps is still a diary, and one kept most days tells you more than a perfect one given up after three weeks.

How should you read the scale while you count?

As a trend. Your weight moves by half a kilo or more from one morning to the next for reasons that have nothing to do with fat: water, salt, glycogen, the food still in you. One weigh-in tells you little; the average over a week or two tells you what is happening. Why the scale jumps has its own guide. Give a new target at least two weeks before you judge it.

What if counting makes you anxious?

If counting starts to feel compulsive, or a number decides your mood, it is fine to stop, and worth talking to someone. Beat, the UK's eating disorder charity, has a helpline and web chat at beateatingdisorders.org.uk, and your GP can help too.

How does Unpound help?

Unpound is built around these habits. You type a meal the way you would say it, scan a barcode, log a saved meal or repeat yesterday's, and a tap on + adds your usual portion. What you log without signal is sent once you are back online. You can plan meals up to a week ahead in pencil, and they count as eaten only once you say so. There are no streaks and no scores: a missed day counts against nothing.

Sources

  1. VanEpps EM, Downs JS, Loewenstein G. Advance ordering for healthier eating? Field experiments on the relationship between the meal order–consumption time delay and meal content. J Mark Res 2016;53(3):369–380. doi:10.1509/jmr.14.0234
  2. Harvey J, Krukowski R, Priest J, West D. Log often, lose more: electronic dietary self-monitoring for weight loss. Obesity 2019;27(3):380–384. doi:10.1002/oby.22382 · PubMed
  3. Burke LE, Wang J, Sevick MA. Self-monitoring in weight loss: a systematic review of the literature. J Am Diet Assoc 2011;111(1):92–102. doi:10.1016/j.jada.2010.10.008 · PubMed
  4. Ravelli MN, Schoeller DA. Traditional self-reported dietary instruments are prone to inaccuracies and new approaches are needed. Front Nutr 2020;7:90. doi:10.3389/fnut.2020.00090 · PubMed

Unpound is a calorie diary for iPhone, made to be quick to keep.

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