A Salad or Fries? Quality Counts

I wanted to write a mini post about calorie counting and food quality. I'm sure Jodie can weigh in with more knowledge than me, but here goes anyway.

I read an article recently where it compared salads you can find in local and chain restaurants and how these actually compare to unhealthy options in terms of calories. Taking Chili's Grill & Bar as the example, their Quesadilla Explosion Salad has 1440 calories. You may as well purchase a greasy burger.

Or should you?

Photo Courtesy of article. Article can be found at Shape.com

Yes, you do need to be careful what the restaurant is classing as a "salad". The green part can't be a small addition to the plate.

But choosing a Chicken Caesar Salad (660 calories) is still ultimately going to do better for me than a Big Mac (550 calories). The quality of the food matters just as much as the calories, and I don't just mean eating a better quality burger pattie than what is found in the Big Mac. I mean that a salad or vegetables are going to be a better choice than a Big Mac. After all, vegetables and fruit contain calories. It's not as if the foods that are good for you are going to be 0 calories. Diet Coke isn't great for you and yet it's 0 calories. Many fruits actually contain sugars, so even those you still have to eat in moderation. But they are still a better choice than their sugary alternatives at the same calorie count.

It is important to consider what you are eating if you are calorie counting. A great app for that is Calorie Count. This is app is free but it also gives you an idea of how good your choice is, which My Fitness Pal does not do. When you select a food, it gives it a grade from A - F, and then you can judge for yourself whether the choice is going to be good for you, regardless of the calories.

As Jodie has often told us, use calorie counters as a guide, but not as your God. Counting calories is not the be-all-and-end-all of healthy eating. There are many other factors to consider which can considerably speed up and aid your weight loss.

Calorie Tracker Apps

It may surprise you that although there are thousands of apps for healthy living and diets and a few hundred directly related to weight loss and weight management (Breton, Fuemmeler and Abroms, 2011, p. 2) there has been very little study about how well these apps actually work in terms of accuracy and assistance in actual weight loss. Various magazines like Good Housekeeping and personal blogs let you know the author's "favourite app" for tracking weight, but barely any actual research findings are mentioned. As a higher education student I think about these kinds of things and so am a little skeptical about their real utility.

Image courtesy of WithingsBlog

The app I am currently using is MyFitnessPal which Jodie had me download at the start of our pact. It's simplicity is what really appeals to me because my knowledge of calorie counting is incredibly limited. I like the fact I can search for foods and more often than not what I am searching for has already had its data inputted in the app. I love the bar code scanning feature which automatically finds the product I am looking for. When you finish uploading for the day the app will tell you what your weight would be after 5 weeks if you ate everyday the same as you had that day. On days where I had stuck to my goals it was encouraging, and on days where I given myself free reign it would take me aback and I give me a boost to go back to my original course.

The selections for Strength and Cardiovascular exercise are somewhat lacking in variety, for example I searched for High Intensity Circuit Training and other similar variations and found no results for any of them. Also, you can see your protein, carbohydrate and fat intake from the day in terms of a pie chart but it does not track you sodium or sugar intake which can make a big difference. For this reason Jodie uses a different app which she may write a review on at some point. Eventually I may move on to another app, especially as I should probably manage my sugar intake better...

However, for the moment, this app will do. Having an app on your phone does make things easier on your diet. Originally I thought I would find it irritating, but actually I've found it very useful.

The best approach is to search for the items of food you want to eat before you purchase/order them. Say you're in a restaurant, Olive Garden for instance. Before ordering the Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta appetizer, plug it into your app. You may be shocked (as I was) that the entire plate contains 970 calories. Eating half of this plate would have taken up a good chunk of my calorie limit for the day. You can, of course, still choose to eat it. Nothing is really stopping you except your own motivation and willpower, but maybe finding out the details of the dish will make you rethink your choice. The same happened when I stopped at a gas station and wanted an Icee and a creme egg. I plugged them into my app and weighed up whether it was worth it too consume the calories. On a day where I plan to eat very healthy meals with few calories there may be some room for a creme egg. That day I decided to forgo both items. And I actually came away feeling very proud of myself, because my willpower is seriously terrible (I totally ordered the Fonduta anyway that day).

Image Courtesy of Olive Garden At Home

As to how accurate these apps are, that it somewhat up in the air. I have scanned something inaccurately before and the app told me that they had no record of the product so far, so asked if I could input the information myself. Therefore, the app clearly has had user input, and as long as those users were honest and accurate then there is no problem. Without knowing the statistics and research which so far is lacking, it's hard to say how accurate everything will be, so I would definitely double check yourself if you have the information in front of you.

I would still definitely recommend downloading an app. Download a few and see which ones work best for you. Don't rely on it as an exact and completely accurate portrayal of your calorie intake, but use it as an aid to give you a general idea. Hopefully soon research will catch up with technology and we'll see just how useful these things are.

Source: Breton, E., Fuemmeler, B. & Abroms, L. (2011) "Weight loss - there is an app for that! But does it adhere to evidence-informed practices?" in Transitional Behavioral Medicine, 1(4), December, pp. 523 - 529