If you’re convinced that your health and weight problems stem purely from eating too many calories, reconsider your food choices. When it comes to keeping the pounds off and keeping healthy, it’s the quality — not the quantity — of your food and calories that make the difference in well-being.

Lunch With The Proper App

A friend of mine recently gave me an earful about a new app she downloaded to her iPhone. Now, I’m not really technologically current, so my antiquated cell phone is just a phone that does email and takes photos and sends texts. I think my phone does plenty. She thinks I need to update my phone so I can surf the Internet, watch videos and, wouldn’t you know it, lose weight.

The app she was excited about is a quick reference for the calories contained in just about any food imaginable. She was thrilled to demonstrate it.

She typed in an all-beef hot dog on a roll with ketchup, and up flashed the calorie count. Amazing. She was so thrilled that she feels that she now has no excuse not to lose weight. Before she orders at a restaurant or take-out place, she types in her menu choices and compares the calories: “Now that I can count my exact calories in the moment, I can stay within my daily number and lose weight!”

True. But I don’t like this oversimplification one bit.

Health And Weight

There are two different important considerations you should make when it comes to food choices. The first centers on weight loss or weight maintenance. The second concerns what it means to be healthy. Although being overweight indicates poor health and puts you at risk for various diseases, being trim or skinny is not necessarily an indicator of good health. Therefore, counting calories may keep calories low enough to help you lose weight, but it does not prevent you from becoming ill or unhealthy.

In other words, healthy weight loss is not a simple matter of “fewer calories in and more calories out.”

If you doubt this, think of all the people you know who suffer from depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, heart disease, high cholesterol, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome and other flagships of poor health. I’ll wager that many of these folks are what you would consider at normal weight. That is, they’re neither too thin nor heavy. Skinny people and even people who look physically fit (sculpted) are not immune to illness. Body shape (fit or fat) and a fit lung capacity (the marker of being in shape) are not always indicators of good health or of being protected against becoming sick.

Consequently, a discussion about weight loss based solely on calorie restriction or portion control has no real bearing on your health. In reality, diets that are calorie-restricted (based on staying within a certain number of calories per meal, per day) can make you sick and prone to disease if those calories are not nutritionally dense, low glycemic (don’t raise your blood sugar too fast) or alkaline based (mostly fruits and vegetables).

Therefore, any strategy for weight loss must include plans for eating whole, largely unprocessed, foods. If you are going to make a change and restrict yourself, you might as well make a positive change with the most healthful benefits.

Food Choices

Consider two unhealthy food products that have roughly the same calorie count: a single blueberry breakfast tart and a hot dog.

In this instance, even though the hot dog contains 20 fewer calories than the blueberry tart, it contains more than three times the total fat, 40 times the cholesterol, 560 times the sodium and no dietary fiber. Clearly, having fewer calories does not mean being healthier in this case. Although, in terms of balancing blood sugar, the hot dog’s 6 grams of protein offers a better option.

Now let’s compare a regular-sized candy bar and one serving of an average chili con carne canned entrée.

In this case we find the canned chili entrée to be 18 calories more than the candy bar. By the calorie-counting weight-loss method, one might choose the candy bar over the chili. However, close examination finds not all else is equal. In fact, the candy contains more fat, less protein and less dietary fiber, making it less desirable if you want to keep down your blood sugar, control hunger-craving and work toward losing a few pounds. Conversely, we also find the chili to have a whopping 32 mg of cholesterol and 560 mg of sodium, two things that must be watched and limited for healthy living and healthful weight loss.

The message in both of these comparisons: The best food choice is to almost always choose something else besides these particular offerings.

Restrictions

I could give more examples, but I think I’ve made strong points: A weight-loss program based on calorie restriction is not necessarily healthy, and even skinny people can be unhealthy. There is more to food quality than calorie quantity.

To be healthy, we need an adequate intake of fresh, whole foods. In the grocery store these are easy to find. They are the foods located around the walls of the store — not in the middle aisles. Whole fruits and vegetables, meats, fish, and low-fat dairy products should be the mainstays of your meals.

Overall, some source of protein is desirable every day, if not at every meal, to provide energy and help balance blood sugar.

Dietary fiber is essential for good health. It cleans the blood and creates bulk for toxin and stool elimination.

Plenty of fresh or filtered water is essential for keeping the body hydrated while eliminating toxins and purifying the body. Without adequate water, digestion, elimination and other organ functions can be compromised and point you in the direction of poor health.

Phoning It In

After a day had passed to allow my colleague time to relish her new app, I approached her with some of this nutritional information. I told her that weight loss alone did not cause one to be healthy and could actually be harmful. I told her that not all calories are created equal and that calorie restriction was not as important as the quality of the calorie being consumed. I advised her to first consider including whole foods in her meal or snack, focus on several options and then plug them into her calorie-counter app. In this way, the app serves a more realistic health purpose for weight loss and not one based on wishful thinking and ignoring the source of calories.

I hope you do the same. Remember, food quality is more important than the quantity of calories in the food.