Counting Calories: The Problem, Approaches, and Best Calorie Counting Tool Ever Developed

The laws of physics don’t lie: if you accurately measure the energy going in and out of your body, you will be able to plan— and achieve— your body weight and composition goals. Calorify is not magic, nor a shortcut. You still have to do the work, but we’ll make sure you stay on track.

The Framework 

Energy is life. Metabolism is the sum of all chemical reactions needed to sustain each of your 37 trillion cells. Your metabolic rate or total energy expenditure is your personal gas mileage—the rate at which you burn fuel (in calories per day). In order to fuel this burn, we eat foods containing energy.

This calories in vs calories out is referred to as energy balance. Eat more calories than you burn and you’re in positive energy balance and will gain weight…eat less than you burn and you’ll lose weight. At Calorify, we know there’s more to healthy living and good body composition (the amount of lean body mass you have vs fat) than calories, but it’s simply true that energy balance perfectly explains weight and plays a huge role in overall health.

The Problem

Energy balance comes down to calories in vs calories out. Despite the enormous value of knowing each, accurately determining calories in or out is fraught with problems. Let’s tackle issues with measuring each:

Calories out

Until Calorify, there have been no actual measurements of how many calories you burn in a real world setting available in the marketplace. Let’s take a look at some ways people have approached energy expenditure:

Guessing with an equation. Online calorie calculators offer several equations (such as Harris-Benedict, Mifflin-St. Jeor, Katch-McArdle) that estimate energy expenditure based on your age, height, weight and sex. Unfortunately, many of us lie far off this estimate of the average person…sometimes by thousands of calories per day.

Using a smartwatch or activity tracker. These add no more than 5% accuracy to the above estimates. At best, a smartwatch is 55% accurate. Simply put, your watch is lying to you!

Living for days in a metabolic chamber. Welcome to food jail! This is the most accurate measurement of your metabolism. It works by measuring the amount of oxygen and CO2 entering an airtight room. This can only be done in an inpatient setting in a research study. While this measurement is extremely accurate, you are essentially a lab rat. You can’t eat your normal diet, do your normal exercise, or live your lifestyle.

The Calorify approach: Doubly labeled water . Let’s break down this revolutionary technique starting with the term itself: doubly labeled water. This is literally 100% water (H2O) where both (hence the ‘doubly’) oxygen and hydrogen atoms have been labeled. This is done by swapping the most common forms of oxygen and hydrogen with much rarer, but completely natural and safe, forms of oxygen and hydrogen. Specifically, they have a higher number of neutrons in their nucleus making them heavier than normal.

The process is simple: take a sip of doubly labeled water and collect some urine samples. By tracing these special water molecules through your body and out through urine, Calorify can tell, to an extraordinary degree of accuracy, the amount of carbon dioxide you breathe out, and therefore calories burned. Think of Calorify as a sensor hooked up to the exhaust pipe of a car. By measuring the amount of exhaust (in your urine), Calorify measures the amount of gas (calories) you’re burning.

Calories in

Don’t want to count calories? We’ll do it for you! Just take a Calorify test, weigh in regularly and we’ll accurately tell you the calories you’re eating. More specifically, we’ll tell you the calories that are actually absorbed in your body. We’ve noticed with some clients, including professional athletes, a discrepancy between their food intake and what they were able to get into their system.

You can *try* to count your calories. But it’s hard and tedious! Not only do you have to log everything you put in your mouth, but you need to weigh it. And you still are at the mercy of inaccurate food labels. At Calorify, we’ve worked with folks who religiously track calories (it’s often their job!) and still struggle with this brute force approach.