Why You Can't Trust What People Say They Eat

How do scientists know how many calories people actually eat?

It sounds like a simple question, but measuring food intake is actually extremely difficult. If someone says they are eating 2000 calories per day, how accurate is that number likely to be?

In this episode, we explore the evidence behind calorie underreporting, why self-reported food intake is often inaccurate, and how researchers verify whether people are truly eating what they say they are.

We discuss:
- Why food diaries and dietary recalls are often unreliable
- The science of calorie underreporting
- How researchers try to verify what people eat
- Why people often underreport intake without realising it
- The implications for nutrition and obesity research
- What this means for anyone trying to lose weight

Rather than blaming individuals, we examine why accurately measuring food intake is so difficult (even under research conditions) and how scientists have developed better methods to study energy balance.

Whether you're interested in nutrition, weight loss, or how research is conducted, this episode offers an evidence-based look at one of the most important (and misunderstood) topics in nutrition science.

P.S., If you want to support us and would like monthly lifting workouts, you can join the Momentum by Sohee fitness app. http://momentumbysohee.com

If you are interested in fat loss science, you can purchase Ben's best-selling comprehensive fat loss book, Everything Fat Loss. http://geni.us/EverythingFatLoss

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I am only eating twelve hundred calories per day, but I am not losing weight. Today we are going to discuss one of the most controversial and I think most misunderstood topics within the fitness industry, which is calorie underreporting.

SPEAKER_03 0:14

Yeah. This is a admittedly controversial topic. I feel like anytime we talk about this, people tend to get pretty heated. And I think at least part of the reason why is that there's a lot of frustration that happens with, I swear I'm only eating this many calories, but I'm either not losing weight or I'm gaining weight. Therefore, I feel like a lot of people want there to be a medical reason or some kind of explanation that is not you're eating more than you think you are, or you're eating more than you want to admit. And and but I I still I we want to be very delicate with how we approach this topic in this episode because we know that a lot of people tend to feel quite attacked when we talk about calorie underreporting. But there's a lot of research on this topic, which I think is really fascinating, so it's worth covering.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah. So if this is a topic that already feels makes you feel like you're kind of getting defensive or you don't like it, hear us out because we are going to do this in a way where you have a much greater understanding of how prevalent this is and why this happens. And I think when people talk about this topic, they often feel very judged and shamed. And that is in some ways the opposite of I think how people should feel, which we will get to later. Now, the reason we're doing this episode now is we mentioned this concept when we talked about this with Spencer in our last episode. So it seems like it was good timing, essentially. And one thing that I want to make crystal clear up front is a lot of people don't like it when we talk about calories. And I think it's because people automatically think calories, weight loss, diet culture, calorie tracking, all of that stuff. And for us, this is not about meticulous calorie tracking. That is not an overlapping Venn diagram. So knowing how many calories you consume and meticulous calorie tracking is not the same thing as eating more than you realized. We are not super pro calorie counters, meticulous calorie counters. Yeah. I would rather shit in my hands and clap than meticulously count all of my calories. I hate the idea of weighing my food. So when we talk about calorie tracking or calorie intake, a lot of people conjure up images of weighing their food meticulously, which is not personally.

SPEAKER_03 2:34

It is an option, but we fully recognize that I feel like it's a level of meticulousness that is unnecessary for the vast majority of people. I mean, unless you're about to step on stage as a shredded bodybuilder, probably not something that most people need to do, but some people like the data, which is totally fine. Anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway. Let's dive in uh and talk about the research.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, so we're going to rewind quickly to the 1980s. So imagine that you're a researcher in the 1980s and you are looking at something like an example that I've given before is do people who eat red meat have a higher incidence of heart disease? That's a popular question in the nutrition world. So you need to know how people are eating and how much people are eating. So back in the 1980s, the most common ways that they would do this are something like a 24-hour recall, which is like me saying, Hey, what have you eaten in the last 24 hours? That's it. You tell me I now have a dietary record of what you ate. You can have a seven-day recall, which is an extra level of detail, because what you eat on a Monday is not necessarily the same as what you eat on a Friday or a Saturday, or you can have a seven-day diary, and this is more meticulous. This is could you weigh what you're eating, or you know, kind of give us some uh some weights of what you're eating, or or ballpark figures, because unless you include weights of some kind or at least estimates, it's really useless. If I say to you, hey, I ate oatmeal for breakfast, you don't know if my portion size is this big, this big, this big, this big. So from a calorie intake perspective, you don't actually really know anything that I've told you other than I ate oatmeal. And there are other ways to record people's food intake, but back in the 1980s, these were what was most common.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

Yeah. So as you can imagine, there is quite a large margin of error with those kinds of methods. But since then, we've come up with more accurate ways to measure calories in, calories out, including indirect calorimetry and another method called doubly labeled water, which is now considered the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure, um using isotopes and measuring carbon dioxide output and things like that. You don't need to know the details. Anyway, but so you'll see basically you'll see doubly labeled water utilized in a lot of the studies since the 1980s. That's it. That's all you need to know about it. That's important.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah, and if you think about this, think about this logically. If I said to you, hey, what did you eat yesterday, and you tell me, is that representative of your diet for the last 365 days? Or most definitely not. Right. If I say, hey, what did you eat this week, is that representative of your diet for the last 52 years? Yeah, right. Probably not. And even if you weigh it, unless you're eating the same thing every single week, there is a large possibility that all of these dietary methods, dietary recall methods, don't give people the full picture. So if I'm a researcher trying to work out whether red meat causes heart disease, if your dietary records aren't very accurate, it means that we can't really fully trust the answers. We could have surveys of 100 people and say, well, we think we know what they ate, but you know, all of these have margins of error. Maybe they ate more than they thought, maybe they ate less than they thought, maybe there's some things they forgot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, fast forward to 1992, and this is essentially the landmark or one of the landmark studies in this space, and it looked at people, women specifically, who were were quote unquote diet resistant. So people who said, I am only eating 1200 calories per day and I am not losing weight. Some of these people reported up to 20 serious dieting efforts in their life, but they were confident that there was a medical reason that they were not losing weight because based on the fact they were barely eating any food, they should have been losing weight, and they weren't.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

Yeah. And so what they did with these people was they did some extensive metabolic testing and they found that relative to their body weight, their metabolic rates were actually fell within 5% of what they expected them to be. Meaning there was nothing wrong uh with their metabolism that would explain their lack of weight loss.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

However, their food intake, they underreported by 47%, and the number of calories they burned via exercise was over-reported by 51%.

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Yeah. Okay. If we put it into actual calorie numbers, on average, if they reported eating 1,028 calories per day, they were actually consuming 2,081 calories per day. So you can imagine that's basically they were eating twice as much as they claimed they were, which is quite a lot, or you know, a thousand calories more than they said they were.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

And the group who were quote unquote diet resistant also tended to believe that there were genetic reasons that they couldn't lose weight.

SPEAKER_03 7:39

So a lot of people will say, okay, people are lying, they're intentionally lying about how much they're they're eating. But at least in this study, we can I feel like it's safe to say they did not believe they were they were not intentionally lying because they would not have gone through all the extensive testing for the metabolisms and everything if they thought, okay, I'm actually I know I'm being dishonest about this.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, and this is one of my biggest bugbears. So this is a study that a lot of personal trainers will use when they're responding to videos online. So let's say, for example, I'm a woman online and I make a video saying, Hey, I I'm barely eating any food, I'm not losing weight, I'm really frustrated, I feel really desperate. And then a personal trainer chimes in and says, You're lying. You're wrong. Yeah, you are definitely eating more food than you think. Here is an example of a research paper where it shows that women who couldn't lose weight were eating more calories than they thought, and they weren't burning as many calories as they thought, therefore you are lying. And part of the reason that's a huge gripe of mine is even in this research paper, it says in the discussion section towards the bottom that participants were distressed when they found out the news. It wasn't a case of intentional deception. They didn't go, Oh shit, you caught me, you're right. I I have actually been eating more, but I was lying. I didn't want to talk about it. People genuinely thought they were eating this much food. And when they were told that actually they were eating this much, they felt distressed. Yeah. So it isn't an intentional, malicious lie most of the time.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

Yeah. And the other thing I want to bring up regarding that example of the personal trainer accusing people of lying, and even if the explanation is correct, especially with something like this, it's really important to be super delicate with how you have bring up those conversations with people when they say, I'm only eating this much, and you you you suspect that they might be eating quite a bit more. Can we can we have that conversation with more tact?

SPEAKER_00 9:38

And further towards the end of the episode, when we talk about this, we will give examples of conversations we've had with clients and why I think it's so important to be delicate.

SPEAKER_03 9:48

I also want to read the conclusion of this particular paper, which drives our point home. The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calorie is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis. Basically meaning it's not your metabolism, you're eating more than you realize and burning less than you realize.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Yep. So this study kind of paved the way for the idea of calorie underreporting, i.e., people are eating more than they think, they aren't burning as much energy as they think. Why is that? Is it just a case that people are lying? In brackets, no. Spoiler alert, no. So, for example, as a follow-up paper, they wanted to test this. Are people being deceptive on purpose? If not, why is it actually happening? So participants recorded their food intake and then were split off into two groups.

SPEAKER_03 10:48

So there was a control group and there was an experimental group. And what they found was that the experimental group only reported 55% of their actual calorie intake. Basically, almost half of what they actually ate didn't even get reported.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Then they were told that a researcher was going to verify their food records. So this is something called a bogus pipeline, which is kind of like a lie detector test. So if you record your food intake for one week, and then I say, just FYI, I am going to measure what you're eating just to see if you're fibbing. Yeah. You might go, oh shit, now I've got to be honest because someone's going to verify this. But that wasn't the case. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

You would imagine that their accuracy would shoot up to 90%, 95%, but it actually only went up from 55% to 61%, knowing that they were going to be, their food logs and everything were going to be, their reports are going to be verified, didn't really do much to improve their accuracy.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

You would think if someone was checking your records, that you'd be like, okay, time to sort it out.

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

But even then, people are missing off close to 40% of what they eat.

SPEAKER_03 11:58

Yeah. And this led the authors to conclude underreporting of dietary intake seems to be entrenched and not easily altered. Now there are lots of reasons why this is the case, which we'll discuss later. But for now, that's what you need to know. Even if you know I'm gonna fact check you, it's very likely that you're still going to be off by quite a bit.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Okay, so we know that people aren't doing this intentionally. People aren't intentionally lying and being deceptive, at least not most of the time. So is it that people don't have the education and the knowledge? For example, if someone doesn't know how many calories are in what they're eating, are they just making mistakes that could be overcome if they knew more about this topic? So then a later research paper compared regular Joe's hour, if you will, food records to food records of actual dietitians.

SPEAKER_03 12:51

And they found that dietitians still underreported their calorie intake by over 200 calories per day. Compared to people like us, non-dieticians, we would under-report by over 400 calories a day. So there is a roughly 200 calorie difference in accuracy of underreporting. Is that wording correct?

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Accuracy and under-reporting.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

200 calorie difference in magnitude of under-reporting. Let's say that. Yeah, that's right. Which uh so on the one hand, you can say, okay, it's very encouraging that dietitians are they are more accurate than non-dieticians um at reporting their calorie intake. However, two it's still 200 calories.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

If dietitians are not accurate at recording their food intake, the likelihood that regular Joes are going to be accurate is a smidge above food.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Basically, nutrition and diet is their actual profession, they're still not fully, fully accurate. Now, oh, granted, of course, being a dietitian does not mean that you are an expert at weighing and eyeballing estimates. That's not the thing that they're necessarily trained on, but they do know about food in general. So you would think that they'd be better at it.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah. Then a follow-up study decided to go one further and they offered financial incentives to see if that improved accuracy. Like, okay, we don't think people are intentionally lying, but but what if we offer them money? Are they gonna be like, okay, yeah, you got me because I want 50 bucks? So in this study, it was like you can have $50 if we enroll. If you are accurate, we're gonna give you another $50. And it didn't work. It didn't work. Financial incentives were inaccurate. Yeah. Meaning, if people are lying, they are one acting distressed on purpose to pretend they're not lying. They are also refusing money. And even if you're a dietitian, you're like, no, I still want to lie. It's not not adding up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:46

I feel like this hints at accuracy of food intake is you can argue that it's a skill. Because people, you can, you know, they're trying, they're actively trying to be accurate with their intake. They're still off by loads and loads. If that is the case, is what is it that they're missing? Is it something that we can teach? I would argue yes. We'll talk about that more later. Okay. With all that said, who is actually most likely to underreport? There are certain types of people. We have uh lots of the research says that females with less education.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

I want to come back to females later. We will come back to females later. Keep going.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

Uh with less realistic weight loss schools and more body shape concern, those are the types of people who are more likely to under-report. I think this makes a lot of sense.

unknown 15:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

You want to go back to the females?

SPEAKER_00 15:41

I think we'll go back to females later.

SPEAKER_03 15:43

Oh, later, later.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Later, later.

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Okay, I was actually gonna talk about this more, but that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Let's do later. Okay. Let's do later. All right. Okay. So now what hopefully you understand by this point is that if you aren't tracking your calories accurately, that is not you are dumb, you are lying. This is a universal, almost universal phenomenon. Almost is actually very important because it's not universal. It's almost a universal phenomenon. Many, many, many research papers conclude that in general people are poor at tracking their calorie intake. So I am poor at tracking my calorie intake. Spencer, who is a medical doctor who is a specialist in obesity and weight management, he said that he isn't good at tracking his calorie intake. So the idea that regular people will all be good at tracking their calorie intake, I just think is it's kind of absurd to have that expectation of people. And in that episode with Spencer, I said when we say that we don't trust people's calorie reports, that is not a judge on the person not being good enough or not being honest enough. It is that reporting your calorie intake accurately is so hard to do well that we should assume people aren't good at doing it. The expectation that people are supposed to track their calories accurately is just it's unfathomable to me that we could do this on a uh grand basis with anyone who wants to lose weight, they should track their calorie intake. I just think it's nonsense.

SPEAKER_03 17:24

I mean, having to log, especially if you have a mixed meal with multiple ingredients, for example, you have to account for every single not only every single ingredient in there, but you really should be using a food scale if you want to be super accurate. Vast majority of people, it's not a realistic option to say, okay, now um you have a chili, right? That's a mixed meal. So you're going to separate all the ingredients in your bowl and then weigh them out.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

So calorie It's not gonna happen. Calorie tracking, I think, part of the reason calorie tracking was popularized so much in the fitness industry, before we get into reasons why this happens, is because bodybuilders and fitness models who consider themselves weight loss experts because they diet down to dick skin levels of body fat, they kind of glamorized weighing your food. So if someone can can diet down to 5% body fat, you can see their glute striations and they're weighing everything they eat. Right. That advice often then goes to their clients. And the industry went through a phase of if you aren't losing weight, you should be tracking your calories. And meticulous calorie tracking was kind of popularized, I think. But I don't think we should forget that most bodybuilders are eating single ingredient foods.

SPEAKER_03 18:35

There is a running joke rice, dry chicken, yeah, steamed broccoli.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

There are many running jokes in the fit in the fitness industry and bodybuilding world that bodybuilders rotate a very small number of foods. Like there was a video?

SPEAKER_03 18:49

Was it was it rice and a fish cake or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Rice and a fish cake. A fish cake.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

Fish fish fish and a rice cake.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

Like, yeah, fish and a rice cake, fish, fish and a rice cake, fish, fish and a rice cake. Like literally two foods all day. Or another one that I remember probably a couple of decades ago now was I think it was the s five or six foods that work, and I can't remember what they were, but it was something like chicken breast, sweet potato, rice, whatever. But the whole the whole thing is a lot of bodybuilders who do meticulous calorie tracking are eating very bland diets. So if you made a Jamaican jerk chicken recipe, which by the way was fucking delicious, if you wanted to track the calories in that, you would have to do every ingredient as you go, weigh everything as you go.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

Then as you divvy up the portion, you would then have to weigh the portion and if we're eating chicken legs, you're not eating the bone. So then do you trip if even if you weigh all a chicken, do you then subtract the weight of the chicken the bones afterward? You know, it's a lot of headache, you can imagine.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Did you track it raw? Do you track it cooked? Do you track the skin? But what if I didn't eat the skin? What if there's more oil in this? What if blah blah blah. There are lots of variables that people aren't taking into account because it's not realistic to take into account. Anyway, reasons why people are not good at tracking their calorie intake. So, number one, forgetting what you eat. I know that's really obvious. That sounds really obvious, and I'm not patronizing you. But imagine that you're a client of mine and I say, Hey, what did you eat yesterday? Most people don't remember everything they eat, they remember the big meals because it's easy. I ate oatmeal for breakfast, but if I had a snack later, that's easy to forget. I forget, did I have something with my coffee? Maybe had a couple of biscuits at work, whatever. It's very easy to forget little details. People tend to remember the big benchmark meals that they do, especially if they're routine.

SPEAKER_03 20:41

Yeah, and then we can actually lump mindless eating in kind of into the same thing. I feel like this happens a lot in, let's say, office settings or where there's communal spaces where there's food left out for people to share. For example, you might have a candy bowl or a box of donuts left out in the break room.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

My mindless eating is with a film.

SPEAKER_03 21:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

For sure. Yes. If there are snacks in front of me with a film, my hand turns into a shovel.

SPEAKER_03 21:08

Yeah, and there's actually there's research too on distracted eating, and you are the research no surprise shows that on average people tend to eat more when they are watching a film while eating, for example.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

And if you if you have a big bowl of popcorn in front of you, do you take your scales and you weigh it in the cinema or do you guess a portion of popcorn? Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Uh anyway, next one, not counting drinks. Now, my best example of this that I had with uh a friend of mine. I've got a couple of examples actually. Same. One friend of mine, uh, I've given this example before. He said he was struggling to lose weight, and I said, Hey, have you ever recorded what you eat? Not necessarily meticulous calorie tracking, but just you often get a better awareness and things jump out at you, even if you do crude food reporting. And he went through a period where he did it for a week. Or so, and he said to me afterwards, I had no idea how much cream I was putting in my coffee. So, to begin with, he said I was having a coffee and I was putting a splash in, just a splash, but then he said one day he weighed out, or he whatever how much cream he was putting in, and he was like, It was a pretty big splash. And he said, if I was doing 15 millilitres of cream, but I was having like six or seven of those a day, you know, he was having several hundred calories worth of cream in his coffee that he didn't really think about because it was like you know, a little bit, little poor. My other example, I don't want to hijack this too much. A client came to me, this is one of my best examples. A client came to me and he was struggling to lose weight. I worked with him for probably a month or so, but normally after the first couple of weeks, you can get an idea of if anything's working because people might see that their weight is slowly trending down, or their waist is trending down, or their jeans fit slightly loose, or what whatever metric you're using as a as a yardstick or a measuring tool. And after about a month, nothing was really changing. And I kept sitting down with him and I said, I feel like I'm missing something, like you've explained your diet. I I I watch you work in the gym, you work really hard. I would expect that you would start seeing or feeling something by this point. Is there anything that you've forgotten or whatever? And I was trying to troubleshoot. He said no, like we went through his food diary again, everything seemed as expected. I was like, What about weekends? What about this? No, no, no. Everything seemed normal. A couple of weeks later, same thing's happening. And I feel bad because he's paying me, and if I'm not delivering results six weeks, eight weeks in, to me, that's could be viewed as a waste of money. So I I want to troubleshoot this guy. And after a couple of months, same thing. I was going through food diary, I was like, Is there anything what am I missing? I am missing something, but what is it? And then one day I said, Is there anything that you that you uh can remember that you might not have told me? And he said, Uh I do drink uh some quite a lot of fruit juice. And I said, How much do you drink? And he has like the concentrated fruit in England we call it squash, it's like the the very sugary one you dilute with water. And he said that he was drinking he guessed at six or seven pints a day. Oh wow. And if if you put this much fruit squash in, like there's a strong possibility that he was consuming probably, I don't know, close to a pint of very concentrated sugary juice. And I said, Oh, but we went over drinks to begin with, and and you said that you just drank water. And he said, and this changed my mind forever, he said, I didn't want to tell you because I was worried you would make me stop. And I find found it startling because that was an example of an of intentionally underreporting. Right. But he was doing it one because he was embarrassed, but two because he didn't think I would agree with him on what the steps were. So he loved his sugary drinks and he thought I was gonna say you can never drink these again. And because of that, he was reluctant to tell me, which I think is actually an example of how you need trust with the person that you're talking to.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Yeah. I have a similar related anecdote regarding a client from years ago who swore up and down she was eating fewer than 1600 calories, which for her body weight was quite low, and nothing, you know, obviously the weight loss wasn't happening. She was had a wedding she wanted to get ready for, was getting frustrated, and I and I kept asking her, what else are you eating? This is your food log. It looks like it's around the 1600 calories you you say, but unless unless there's uh an actual metabolic issue, which I don't think there is, then something's not adding up. Anyway, it took about two months for her to finally mention in passing we were having open conversation, something, something, something drinks. And I said, What? Go back? What do you mean? She said, Oh yeah, I had some drinks with my friends. Anyway, turns out she was drinking quite a few cocktails. And but legitimately, for whatever reason, legitimately did not realize that those had a lot of calories that definitely counted. So I would imagine she was consuming, you know, a few thousand extra calories a week from from drinks that she was not accounting for.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

That actually reminds me of the next point that I was going to make, which is weekend tracking. Yeah. I know I'm skipping one of yours.

SPEAKER_03 26:39

Yeah. Can I say one last point though about the okay? Regarding the liquid calories, I think I feel like a lot of coaches will then take this information because yes, it is easy to never drink anything with calories. They'll then say, therefore, you're never allowed to drink your calories. You always have to have your calories, your your coffee black, you can you always have to do diet sodas, blah, blah, blah. That's not my take. I don't think that's your take either. My take is how much fruit juice be aware. Be aware of the fact that it's it is easier to drink liquid calories, but if there's something that you particularly like, you can still enjoy it, but be again be be aware, be judicious.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

I think a good a good example of that is there are legitimately some big chain coffee shop coffees that are several hundred to a thousand calories because of the amount of sugar they put in the amount of often things like cream or ice cream or or or high fat dairy or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

And a lot of people don't realize that's the case. So if they're going to a coffee shop and they have something tasty, if they found out that that has more energy than one of their main meals, they might be like, oh, you know what? I didn't enjoy it that much. Right. So it's not a case of trying to prohibit joy from your life, it's trying to be cognizant of the things that you maybe want to trim out that you don't care about so much.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

I actually had another client, and then we can move on to the next part, I promise. But so to your point regarding a frappuccino, things like that, she said as part of her morning routine, she would always stop by her local coffee shop and buy a large frappuccino or a large latte. Anyway, those things, as you said, can have up to a thousand calories. And in talking with her, she I discovered that it was a big part of her day. She really enjoyed it. She didn't want to give it up. And I said, You don't have to give it up, but can we can we trade uh from the large size to maybe a smaller size? And she said, Okay, I'm willing to do that. That alone saved her several hundred calories a day. And that was enough for her to see the scale moving again. So she still got to enjoy her drink without having to give it up completely and got to see progress. So for me, it's not about being ideal, right? I don't care about what's ideal for nutrition. I care about what's actually realistic for the for the person.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:51

How can you eat in a way that moves you closer to where you want to be while still m maximizing enjoyment, minimizing deprivation? This was this was something I used to say a lot when I was talking about fat loss a lot more on my platforms. Maximize enjoyment, minimize deprivation while moving the needle. So that that's the kind of intersection that you want to find. So you don't have to give up all your drinks, but can you scale back maybe?

SPEAKER_00 29:15

So going back to the example of your client having cocktails, yeah, moving aside drinks, but that was the same as a client who came to me and she was it she said that she was eating about 1400 calories a day, which is not a lot. Yeah. Most people, if you heard that, you would think, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the burst, that's not right. Like you have to start eating more. But you can only give that advice if the diet r recall diet records are accurate. Right. So I was like, okay, let's go through, tell me what you're eating. Again, very non-judgy. I'm a very non-judgy person. And I said, Tell me what you're eating, just trying to match it with what you're saying. And she was eating, admittedly, very, very little. And then, but one of the things I noticed is she would tell me, so I have this for breakfast, this for lunch, this for dinner, the things that people remember. So then I say things like, Are there any snacks that you normally have or or any drinks? Because I've learned from previous errors. And then I said, How about weekends? And weekends were a shit show. And I don't mind, like people do what they want with their weekends, we're all adults here, you can make your own informed choices. But she was a bit of a party animal. And when the weekends came around, there was a lot of alcohol. Yeah. There was a lot of I don't like the term, but as she would say, junk food. So if someone's like, Well, you know, I'm really strict on my dieting, I'm barely eating any food, I'm struggling to lose weight, I'm only eating 1400 calories a day, but they're having nine to ten pints of beer because they're an alcohol machine and they're seeing off things like whole pizzas, blah, blah, blah. Right. Like the whole point is someone can be on a very low calorie intake for five days, but if or maybe four days, because normally it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, if someone's on a very low calorie intake for four days, but then on a very high calorie intake for three days, they're not on a very low calorie intake anymore.

SPEAKER_03 31:03

Right. Years ago, again, when I was more of a fat loss coach, I wrote a blog post called the weekday diet that's very similar to that, where I said, listen, a lot of people, it's very natural for a lot of people to loosen the reins on their diet on the weekend makes sense from a lifestyle perspective. Instead of going from a binge restrict cycle, which obviously we have a large discrepancy in calories from the week, like the weekends might be three, four thousand calories, maybe more, to 1200 calories or something during the weekday. I feel like that gap is quite large. Can we, can we, can we decrease the discrepancy where you still are consuming lower calories during the weekdays and you are consuming more during the weekend, but we're we're we're bringing the gap from this huge to a little bit less. So you still feel like you get some dietary relief without completely derailing your goal. So I'm not saying that you should do that, but it is a strategy that again, when I was working with a lot of fat loss clients, it did work for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

I think this is especially prevalent for people that believe in cheap meals. So a lot of people are too strict during their dieting, what they consider dieting days, and then their days off are Right.

SPEAKER_03 32:18

So I think it's worth asking yourself, okay, how does my Saturday, Saturday s Saturday eating, Sunday eating compare to my Monday eating? And if there is a huge contrast between what you eat what and how much you eat on Saturday versus what and how much you meet on Monday, I think it's worth asking yourself, okay, is there a way that I can bridge that gap a little bit and make it so that I'm not because a lot of times people don't realize it's the di the the overly restrictive Monday to Friday, Monday to Thursday dieting that actually makes your weekend eating worse. Is that wording? Yeah. It makes it you you'll you'll go off the rails harder if you feel more deprived by the time the weekend rolls around. So something to consider. Another reason uh why people might underestimate how much they eat would be they don't realize their portion sizes are a lot bigger than they actually are, especially if there are simply eyeballing measurements instead of again, we're not saying you have to weigh your food with a food scale, but for example, one tablespoon of peanut butter, this is a classic example, one tablespoon of bitter tablespoon of peanut butter is a lot less than what people realize. It is only 16 grams. When we when we have people scoop out what they think is a peanut butter, one tablespoon, not uncommon for them to measure out what is actually three to four tablespoons instead of one. And they think that's one tablespoon. It's oh, however much I can balance on this on this spoon.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

My so I have never meticulously calorie tracked. I hate the idea of calorie tracking, it's just not my jam at all. I've never done it with clients. I once there was one food that I weighed, and I because I didn't want to do meticulous calorie tracking, even when I was dieting down as lean as possible for a photo shoot, I still would avoid that like the plague. So occasionally I would just do like one meal. So one day, the one food that I weighed was my oatmeal because I would eat it every single day. So I was like, I'm just just want to see roughly what I'm doing. And I was literally eating twice the amount that I thought I was because I was like, oh, you know, I'm probably eating a hundred grams of oatmeal, that's probably this many calories, but or whatever. I don't know, I'm making it up. Yeah, and then I weighed out and I literally I was guessing less than half of what it was. So you you can't really trust your eyeballs. And I'm saying that as someone who was a qualified personal trainer, working with clients, dieting to very lean levels of body fat. I can't eyeball things. Yeah, I still can't eyeball things.

SPEAKER_03 34:52

Now imagine you have let's say half a cup of oatmeal, which is uh I think it's on the label as 40 grams. Let's say you measure out 40 grams of oatmeal, which is I want to say 150 calories, but you said you were eating twice as much as you thought that you were. So that let as an example, let's like let's say he was trying to eat half a cup, but he was actually eating a full cup. That's an extra 150 calories. That's only one food that he actually measured. Imagine he's doing that with every single food he's eating throughout the day. Those calories can add up quite quickly.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

There are some foods that might be more easy to underreport than others. We will come to that very, very shortly. Yeah. One that I think is important to include is rounding on food products. Yes. So I, if you don't mind, I'm going to merge this together with restaurant foods. Sure, yeah. The reason I'm going to merge it together with restaurant foods is because in research, restaurant foods are often not don't contain the the amount of energy that they say they do. Now imagine that you're a chef and you're making something, you tend to make something delicious. So a chef in England, if they want to make carrots, they don't just bake carrots plain because that's boring. They will cook with butter or sometimes sugar or sometimes honey or whatever. And there have been research papers that have identified things that restaurant meals often contain way more energy than they report. Because if someone cooks a beef dish and they test the calorie content, it doesn't mean that every single chef in their chain makes that exactly the same forevermore. There is going to be some natural variance. So restaurant meals and natural nutrition variants on labels, I'm kind of gonna lump together. Just because something says it's 100 calories on a label doesn't mean it's a hundred calories.

SPEAKER_03 36:45

Unfortunately, that is a big part of with restaurant meals, a big part of why you feel like eating out the food tastes a lot better, is that they're using a lot more oil and butter than you probably realize. I actually remember, I can't remember if it was Gordon Ramsay or some, it was some celebrity chef, okay? He was doing a recipe video and he's like, and you're gonna do, I don't know, one tablespoon of oil, but then you watch him go glug glug glug glug glug glug glug and you're like that's basically a half cup. But they're saying it's one tablespoon. So that's a big part of it.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

But yes, it's like when my mum cooks potatoes, if she says you have to add oil to potatoes. I remember the first time I watched her making these because they were incredible, and I I didn't realize that the whole tray is swimming. Oh, I mean, this is yeah, this was like you need to fill the tray with oil so all of the potatoes are covered. But I thought it was like, oh, you know, you drizzle over the top. No, no, no. They it was as close to deep frying as you can get in an oven, pretty much.

SPEAKER_03 37:41

Yeah. That actually also reminds me, I'm not sure if there's a specific category that we put in here, but maybe we'll put it in like forgetting what you ate. I've had clients where they'll log, you know, I ate two eggs as part of my breakfast, and then you do a little bit more digging, and they actually doused the eggs in butter on the pan. They didn't they didn't track the the butter. Yeah. So that's you know, 100 plus, maybe 200, depending on how much butter they put in. That can happen too.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

There was a TV show in England, which I think was quite controversial in some ways. I don't like a lot of the vibe that it was because it was quite shamey, but I do think it is an important lesson. So it was called Secret Eaters, I think. And I remember watching this years ago, and it's actually it was fascinating as a social experiment for how this plays out. So what they would do is they would get a couple who claimed that they were trying to lose weight and they were struggling to lose weight despite eating very few calories, and they installed hidden cameras in their home to see what they were eating, which is their way of verifying rather than using things like metabolic hearts or calorimetry or doubly labelled water or whatever. We're just gonna put secret cameras in their home and uh see what they're doing. And I remember one couple specifically where I think the guy was a chef and he made I think it was this lamb mousaka dish, and they said you were cooking vegetables, but he literally added a block, it was like a block or as close to a block of butter just to saute the vegetables, and then when he had it in a pan, he added a cheese sauce, which they estimated based on the amount of cheese was 2,000 calories just in the cheese sauce. And the reason I remember this so vividly is because when they were watching it back, he looked shocked. It isn't like oh fuck, you caught me. I've been doing this on purpose and I've been lying and I've been pretending my metabolism is broken, but I know that I'm a liar. He was shocked because sometimes you don't realize what you were eating until you see it back. And I've had clients who, for example, when they did a food record, they would come in and say, I didn't realize I was drinking that much alcohol, I didn't realize I was eating this much chocolate or whatever. Sometimes it's just having a little bit of awareness to realize that there are some things that you might be missing out.

SPEAKER_03 39:58

Yeah, and that that takes me back to, I think I've talked about this in a prior episode where I had a friend kept a three-day food log when he was asking me for diet help back in college, and he comes back and goes, I didn't realize how many cookies I was eating every day. I was eating ten cookies a day.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:11

Because I'm studying and the plate of cookies is right there. But obviously, now that he has to track it, all of a sudden he's aware of, oh my god, that's what, potentially two, three thousand calories in cookies alone.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Yeah. So I think it's important to very briefly point out that some foods are easier to overeat than others and harder to track than that. Of course. So if you say, Oh, I'm eating an apple, that's probably 150 calories or or whatever it is, I don't know. That's a big apple. Whatever. Then, well, you know that I do like my big cosmetic crisp apples. Not a plug. They don't sponsor me, but I wish they did. If someone's like, I ate 150 calories of an apple or whatever, that is the nutritional variance is likely to vary a lot less than chocolate cake. Yeah. For example.

SPEAKER_03 40:57

Right. And then the last one is this is something to consider. It does happen. Sometimes people will underestimate how much they eat because they are deliberately omitting certain information, whether it's because of shame or something else. Like as you mentioned, your client who didn't want to tell you about all the squash that he was drinking. That can happen. Yeah. And I think it's really important that you have uh do what you can to develop a relationship with your client where they feel like they can come to you and tell you these things and you're not going to make them feel bad about it. So that can I think that can be quite hard to do.

SPEAKER_00 41:34

I think so. Looping back around to you mentioning women earlier, I think that part of this comes from a social desirability bias. And part of this is because there are some research studies that say actually not everyone calorie under-reports. For example, if you look at women in other countries where diet culture doesn't run as strongly, they don't tend to calorie under-report to the same extent. So the theory is if a lot of people are like, Oh, I feel this pressure to stay slim, and I feel a pressure and people are judging me for what I eat. And if I say I'm eating 4,000 calories a day, people are gonna judge me. So you know there's a kind of peer pressure there. And my example of this is how many men do you think lie on their dating profile for how tall they are? So if a guy is like, women aren't gonna click on me if I'm 5'7, so I'm gonna say I'm 5'9 or whatever, yeah. We all know it happens. We're not saying that it happens for everyone, but some people are going to do that. There is a social desirability bias where, especially if you feel like you're going to be judged by someone else, there is a pressure to massage your answers in one direction or another. So if you hire a personal trainer, especially if you've got a personal trainer who's a real judgy piece of shit who points the finger at you and makes you feel terrible, the likelihood that you're gonna say, Yeah, here's everything I'm eating is very, very slim because if they make you feel like shit, you're gonna feel more inclined to withhold information because you don't want them to Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:05

I mean, personally, I when I was working with coaches you know, a long, long time ago, I went through periods where I would I wouldn't be fully truthful about what was happening, especially when I started struggling with uh dietary adherence because the diets were so restrictive, I'd eventually start binge eating, which by the way is super common because restriction is a predictor of binge eating anyway. And there's a lot of shame associated with binge eating. I wouldn't tell them, they were perfectly nice, but I didn't always trust that they would respond in a way that would make me not feel worse, you know? So for me, it was easier to not tell them what was going on. And then of course you'd be like, oh, that's weird. I guess we should drop your calories more and drop your calories more. And meanwhile, but my prescribed calorie intake was going lower and lower, but my actual intake was probably getting higher and higher. So I think that's incredibly common.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Yeah. So before we finish with some practical takeaways, let's just give a brief list of foods that are more likely to be.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Calorie dense, hyper palatable, hyperpalatable palatables. That's how I read it in my head. I always have to correct it when I say it out loud. Palatable foods. Nut butters, you know, peanut butter, almond butter, those kinds of things, oils, sauces, drinks. I think those are probably the main culprits. What else would you add?

SPEAKER_00 44:21

Uh so I in general, I actually specifically think dietary fats tend to be more because they are more calorie-dense. A lot of people think sugar as an ingredient is it's easy to hide sugar in something because if you put sugar in a drink, it just makes it sweeter and it makes it more delicious, and that's hidden because people don't see the sugar. But I actually think dietary fat is more common as a culprit because if something tastes sweet, you tend to know that there's sugar in there. But a lot of people don't realise how much fat goes into things. So, for example, if if you have potatoes in a restaurant and you're like, oh, I ate beef and potatoes or chicken and potatoes, but if you don't realize that the chef deep fried the potatoes, that is a source of hidden oil that you wouldn't have accounted for. So I think if you went into any chef kitchen, especially a fine dining chef kitchen, I think you'll be surprised how much butter and oil they use to make something taste good. Same reason that if you go to a restaurant and you order a steak, if it comes out completely dry, it's normally not so tasty. But chefs will basically and they will keep basting it as they cook. And say meats in general, people baste as they cook to make sure it's juicy. You might not think of that because you're thinking I ate a turkey, but if someone is eating a turkey and they have been basting it with butter or oil or whatever, you don't think of those because they don't influence the flavor in the same way that sugar does.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Also, sometimes, especially because we're all of us are very visual, when you look at the chicken, it's not like you notice necessarily the butter or the oils that come along with it necessarily. It's not as obvious, it doesn't always stand out as much. Let's wrap up with practical takeaways.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

The thing that I really, really, really, really, really, really want to drive home for this episode is I personally don't like talking about calories this much because I think that it can be a bit I don't know. A lot of people don't like calorie talk because it feels very kind of diet culturally. And I don't even love talking about calories this much because I think the same thing, you immediately associate it with meticulous calorie tracking and eating disorders and all of that stuff. This is not what we're getting at. So the reason why this is so important to go over is calorie under-reporting or calorie misreporting is an almost entirely universal phenomenon. If you are someone who thinks I'm not losing weight even though I'm not really eating anything, the keep it simple, stupid, the KISS principle is Occam's razor, you probably aren't eating what you think you're eating. You probably aren't burning what you think you're burning. If the treadmill says that you're burning a thousand calories from your run, it's probably not right. If you think you're only consuming 800 calories a day and you're not losing weight, it's probably not right. And this isn't a point the finger judgy thing. It's we want you all to feel included that we are all terrible at this, including both of us, including most dietitians, including fitness professionals. The people who are very, very good at meticulous calorie tracking are often the people who have very, very, very rigid dieting behaviors, like hardcore bodybuilders. Right. And those aren't the diets that most people are emulating. So if you think you are only consuming X number of calories, understand that you are probably wrong, but that isn't a finger point at you. It's just calorie tracking is extremely hard to be accurate at.

SPEAKER_03 47:50

Yeah. I also think it's important to emphasize that we are encouraging an increased level of general awareness of food intake, not neuroticism. And there is a big difference between that. Obviously, we know that when you become too obsessive with what and how much you're eating, that can have its own negative psychological consequences, increase anxiety, things like that. We do not want you to get to that point. Yes. However, I do think awareness. You could have you could have a general awareness of what you're eating without it negatively impacting your quality of life.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

You know, one of the things that actually bothers me about this topic is if you talk about food awareness and calorie awareness, is when people immediately associate that with disordered eating, because that is not the case. So for example, we have both talked extensively about the fact that meticulous calorie tracking can, in some people, not only be a sign of disordered eating, but it can actually exacerbate disordered eating symptoms. So some people feel worse when they track calories, which is part of the reason we don't blanket recommend it or recommend it in general. But when you say, Are you sure you're eating that much? people immediately think meticulous calorie tracking. That is not the case. So if I say to a client, record what you eat for five days, just write it down roughly on a notepad, and they come back and say, I didn't realize I was drinking this much alcohol. That is awareness of what they're doing in a very, very informal fashion that didn't require weighing. At no point did I say weigh your food, at no point did I give them a scale. I literally said, Oh, you know, just like write it on your phone or whatever. Yeah. Just when you eat something, just for a couple of days, so I've got an idea.

SPEAKER_03 49:29

And I think that level of awareness is sufficient for the vast majority of people. My goal is for you to be somewhat aware. I feel like we've used the word aware so many times. Anyway, somewhat aware yes, oh, that's a great word. Somewhat cognizant of your diet without f without it taking up a huge chunk of your mental bandwidth every day. You have other things to focus on, you have other priorities. That's fine. But can we know, okay, I'm having, I was having four lattes a day, four large lattes a day last week. Now I've cut it down to one or two. So you can see how if you scale back your intake like that, you don't have to obsess over it, but you can still reduce your calorie intake in that way.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

I think the reason this this is important. There are two reasons for me that I want to drive home why this is important. I'm not going to name names and it's going to sound like I'm tearing shade, so I'm going to try and be vague. A few years ago, there was a popular coach that said, if you aren't losing weight on this number of calories, I will sell you a reverse dieting plan. And the idea is if you are not getting the results you want is it is because your metabolism is broken, but I can sell you something that will help fix that. And that is just a case of taking advantage of people's calorie underreporting. I think later, at least one person I know changed and said, actually, I probably got that a little bit wrong. I probably made it sound like metabolisms were broken when they aren't. So people are because they are not aware of this phenomenon, it means that they often go down uh an incorrect path for how to fix it, which sometimes costs money and it can cost time and effort. Yeah. So it is important to be aware of this because it makes it as easy as possible for you to troubleshoot yourself. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:18

I also want to say this does not mean that there might not be medical conditions that you may have or medications you might be taking that can make diet a lot harder. For example, yes, for example, certain medications or certain medical medical conditions might make you extremely lethargic. Might maybe you have something happening where you have a lot of joint pain, which then makes moving, physically moving a lot harder. Your energy expenditure might plummet. Maybe you're taking medication that is driving your appetite, your hunger levels are through the roof right now. You're hungry all the time. It's going to make you eat more.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Hopefully, if you're at this point in the episode, you will have probably listened to other episodes, but we have talked extensively about reasons that some people do have slightly lower metabolic rates than others. Yes. They do burn less energy through movement than others, they have higher appetite than others. There are many reasons why some people might eat the same number of calories as someone else, but still not get the weight loss results they expect. That's fine. We're acknowledging that and we're reinforcing that and reiterating that. That is separate to most people are shit at tracking calories. And if you're shit at tracking calories, maybe you aren't getting the results you expect. And maybe there's an easy fix if you know how to look for it.

SPEAKER_03 52:36

And hopefully when we talk about this, your response is not getting defensive or not feeling attacked, but you're like, okay, now I know this is a phenomenon. Maybe I can get curious and I can troubleshoot if I feel like this might be happening with me.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Hopefully, the people who are in this position, I saw a TikTok, I won't put it on the screen because I'm not sure if I'll find it again, but I recently saw a TikTok of a video where a woman said something like, Unfortunately, I was eating way more than I realized, but she was happy because she's like, Now I I know what to do to fix it. But there will be a lot of instances with almost anyone who goes through more food awareness, not even necessary necessarily calorie awareness, where they go, I didn't realise I was doing that. I've done it, you've done it, our clients have done it, industry professionals that we know have done it. So maybe to sign off, if you have got to this point in the episode because the talk of calories doesn't freak you out and you panic, yeah. I would love to know if there is anything that you eat more of than you realize. Because I think it's important to try and remove the stigma about calorie underreporting, because the more finger pointy we are at people, the more we accuse them of lying and thinking this is a malicious intent, the more that people are more likely to hide it. So I think if we can openly discuss how hard it is to be fully accurate and things that we forget, then we can make this topic more.

SPEAKER_03 54:05

Remove the shame and make it more of a Oh yes, I also do this.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

Yeah. And high five. Hope you liked it.