Counting calories
Does the 400-600600 diet work?
It’s been just under a week since Public Health England told us we are all too fat, and ordered the entire country to go on a diet. And speaking as a newspaper columnist constantly banging on about the obesity crisis, I’m delighted that healthy eating is finally on the menu.
From the perspective of a wife, mother, sous-chef and cook, however, I feel dismayed that calorie counting has been decreed (in my house decried) as the recommended route to collective weight loss. Really? Is that the best they can do? I’m all for cutting back but I have no idea what a 400-calorie breakfast looks like, or how to make a 600-calorie lunch or dinner, as the new PHE guidelines ordain.
How many calories are there in a medium potato? In fact, how big is a medium potato? I googled this, obviously, and I swear if I see one more food blogger recommending we start the day with a ham and cheese frittata or herbed ricotta and tomato toast, I’ll have to club them with a box of Coco Pops.
Because here in the time-poor real world, rustling up perfectly calorific breakfasts and textbook 600-calorie suppers is a heck of a lot more challenging than posting photographs of a buckwheat pancake artistically strewn with fresh berries on social media.
I am highly sceptical of calorie advice, not least because not all calories are equal, children; bad ones are deep fried and ultra-processed. Good ones are, generally speaking, green and leafy or oval and eggy, and look like food.
What is frustrating is the abrupt change of tack from the five-a-day message, which experts now say we should be upping to 10 pieces of fruit and vegetables a day, as kids or indeed adults who eat this many have neither the time nor inclination to snack, the logic goes.
As it is, every day overweight or obese boys in England consume 500 excess calories. Girls in the same weight category overeat by 290 calories per day.
No wonder more than one in five children in England who started their first year of school in September 2015 was obese or overweight. What chance do they have of managing their weight when, from such an early age, they have been overfed, or fed the wrong sort of calories, either through ignorance or neglect?
Is the answer to this public health issue to turn us into a nation of meticulous calorie counters? I suspect the very last thing the decidedly uncatchy 400-600-600 diktat will do is instil a healthy attitude to food.
Whether I like it or not (I don’t, but then I never asked to be nit-comber in chief or verruca guru either), I have become de facto custodian of my family’s calories.
Hence for the past four days,
I have endeavoured to feed my family the correct calories. Spoiler alert: cooking by numbers is horribly stressful.
Day One Breakfast
Raisin and cinnamon bagels (215 calories)
With butter (52 calories) and a banana (89) Total: 356. Well done me. Lunch
I have no control over what my family eats for lunch so I eat scrambled eggs on toast and a fistful of spinach (still only 300 calories), and spend an hour virtuously boning up on recipes. Dinner
I scrupulously weigh out the lamb chops (323 kcal per 100g), add broccoli and carrots (34 calories and 45 calories a cup respectively) then get anxious about the mash, which is 30g a forkful, 10 forkfuls each and we’ll be over the 600 limit! I serve eight forkfuls. Everybody complains. Pudding is home-made fruit salad without cream, but nobody notices. I make a note to serve it more regularly.
Day Two Breakfast
The children go rogue and eat huge bowls of Honey Nut Clusters, which are 402 calories per 100g. With full fat milk. Cripes. I eat my usual porridge with soya milk and sultanas. Under 200 calories. Am I a health guru now? Lunch
I rifle through ancient cookbooks with horrid photographs of anaemic food. All the recipes are conveniently annotated with a calorie content. I earmark a few for later, lunch on homemade leek and potato soup and rebelliously refuse to calculate the calories. Dinner
I decide to serve “One-pot cheesy pork and potatoes” from a BBC Goodfood book for no good reason other than it is 580 calories per serving, and hilariously beige. My family make me promise never to make it again. My husband wonders aloud if it might qualify as a hate crime.
Petit Filous for pudding; 48 calories a pop, breaching the 600 limit by 28. Oops.
Day Three
Breakfast Bagels again. Sorry, but not being a giddy millennial I don’t consider breakfast to be a crushed avocado Instagram opportunity. Lunch
I am getting exasperated at how much head space this whole calorie thing is taking up. At this rate, I’ll morph into one of those Weight Watchers obsessives who can recite the calorific value of a mushroom, Jaffa Cake or a single Matchmaker.
For lunch I have three orange Club biscuits (348 calories), a pot of Greek yogurt (124 calories) and a tablespoon of honey. Not a healthy combination but at 64 calories in a tablespoon it brings me up to 536 calories, well within my 600 lunch limit. Dinner
I am weighing pieces of chicken and handfuls of pasta on the kitchen scales in a very bad mood. Surely PHE realise this way of living is neither fun nor sustainable? I serve a chicken, pasta, mushroom and broccoli melange with a dollop of half-fat crème fraîche instead of cream, which is delicious.
Calorie count? A mere 390 per person. But my husband’s 100g of tagliatelle adds 371 calories. Shame on me.
And him.
Day Four Breakfast
I think we all know by now. Lunch
I skip lunch so I can carry the extra calories over to supper. Is this allowed? No idea. Dinner
Pizza. Shop bought. A tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Calories? I don’t give a monkey’s. This is madness, not least because I only just realised I haven’t included wine in the totals. Gulp.
However, I have stumbled across a nifty Know Your Portion Sizes guide on the Waitrose website. It’s great and effortless: a mug of crisps, a tennis ball of rice, a computer mouse of potatoes.
My conclusion is this: calorie counting makes a person neurotic. As a nation we are already using food as an emotional crutch to combat everything from boredom to loneliness – we don’t need more psychological pressure.
As the old saying goes “you eat first with your eyes”, so is it any wonder that we can best gauge what we eat visually rather than attaching some abstract numerical value? Incidentally, I was at Champney’s in Tring recently where the sumptuous buffets are astonishingly tasty and moreish. But the portion control plates are measured out so you only put protein in one segment, carbs in another and so on. I stacked my plate high at every meal – and still lost weight.
Despite my criticisms, the last few days have taught me to be rather more circumspect about piling unnecessary fats, proteins and carbs on to the family’s plate (I’m Irish so any meal without a potato must be a wake) and to swap double cream for crème fraîche where I can.
But kitchen number-crunching is just not for me and nor, I suspect, for the majority of us, and filling our plates with fruit and fresh vegetables is a far more realistic route to good health. As far as a strict 400-600-600 calorie regime is concerned, you can count me out.