Calorie/macro trackers: Explained, ranked

And an explanation of the post-calorie model of weight loss

I posted this photo and people asked me about what calorie tracker it was

Physique’s complicated enough that any academic interviewed on it can’t give more than a measured response. It’s frustrating. People eat every day, gain weight, lose weight, keep it off, put on muscle. It’s a big data pool. But if you want answers from an expert all you’ll hear/read are qualifiers: that science is inconclusive… that at best we should count calories, watch what we eat, move… and maybe we’ll get results. (Sometimes, we won’t.)

But if you watch a video you’ll get stuff like this, the Durian Rider/Cole Robinson sugar fast argument:

Or go on Twit and see something like this:

ancient tweet but whatever

Both arguments and ideas here… feel counterintuitive. No more counting calories? Sugar? But they’re more satisfying and have more information for normal people regarding FOOD than any clipped expert talking anywhere.

Calories? in a voice that rustled

The non-expert diets don’t mention calories right away and therefore feel off. Since in the press/for many scientists, physique and weight gain/loss is based around calories. But for influencers and dark nutrition folks… it sometimes is not.

Still, what’s mostly true is for superficial (not pejorative) weight loss/gain, the calories in/out relationship matters, especially in healthy populations*. Almost as a rule. And since this caloric concept is so kinda true it explains, narratively anyways, how weight loss/gain can occur for people, without a chemical or experiential explanation of how it all works. Most people who read things don’t have that. It’s a shorthand.

*People whose thyroids work, people who aren’t post-surgical, people who are thin enough to support their own body weight, people who haven’t been on severe caloric restriction for years etc.

The very rough one-sentence calorie explainer is this: a person has a basal metabolic rate (coma energy, kinda), and on top of that a total daily energy expenditure (cals burned a day… walking, lifting, involuntary movements) and from this TDEE number comes their caloric requirement… Very simply, over the TDEE, gain weight, under, lose.

It’s more complicated than that (protein matters, nutrients), but the rest is just kind of details—important ones, though less important. But the post-calorie videos are still much more satisfying and specific even though calories are mostly true. It’s not because they’re loose with facts, but because they contain more detail than an expert shrugging their shoulder.

Since while the calorie concept explains how weight loss/gain works, mostly, it isn’t specific or descriptive. Questions like: How? What kind of weight gain or loss? Over what time? There are lots of different ways to gain and lose weight… and the model doesn’t answer that right away. Other factors need to come in.

So calories don’t matter?

So the video (it’s great) explains/frames a diet protocol (sugar fast, actually mostly fruit*) as something kind of beyond calories. These kinds of revolution diets happen every few years. This one’s like a month old. In the vid, Robinson and Bell talk about how their sugar diet spurs the metabolism and lets people eat more than a traditional mixed macro diet, while losing weight**.

*A few different variants: Noah Ryan (Substack) has a version of fruit til noon with one high fat day a week, Anabology (has a video with Mark Bell linked above) does honey during the day and protein at night, Cole Robinson (Snake Diet) has a version that includes canned fruit… a few others that come to mind. For the most part these are geared towards trained individuals with muscle mass, and not meant to be done for more than a few days at a time, though people have. More of a fast than a diet. But many things are true at once

**More here is in terms of volume—some apples, or a gallon of juice. And the how is: FGF-21, a hormone that regulates sugar intake and signals glucose uptake, among other things, can be manipulated/perfected by this sort of single-macro timed eating. The hormone is the subject of a recent Nature study and it and the sugar diet are explained in fine depth in this video.

The “post-caloric” explanation—what’s special about the diet—is that the high carb, no protein/fat (and no starch) limit tricks the body into burning off fat (b/c of FGF21). It’s a break from the calorie model: it does something other diets don’t.

Beyond calories?

Does it though? The sugar diet will probably be put in the crosshairs by some magazine or website soon, just like the trad diet in the above tweet has been over the past couple of years. (The tweet’s prescriptions are innocuous now.) But despite the video’s…. informal headline, there are serious ideas and rigor here, even if they’re not spelled out in normal english. Despite the post-calorie headline here, there’s a … caloric respect to the diet, a framing of the diet as a caloric thing… and, most importantly, an understanding that calories can truly be played with.

This is because the thing is about calories… is, if you know how they work and look and function, then even the most double-blind, pro-science, calorie-is-king lifters, guys like Layne Norton who have PhDs, express them in very flexible, non-verbal ways:

biolayne

A post shared by @biolayne

(A crazy set of sentences above, on face contradictory.) To someone who knows how calories work (more on that in a sec), the above statement isn’t complicated. To someone who does not, it is Greek. This is because calories, though precise, are, in practice, confusing. The concept is simple but it’s expressed, in the real world, in oppositional ways. For example…:

• nutrition labels that show cals can vary, up to 20% per FDA)

• People underreport what they eat and actually eat more than they think

• People sometimes can’t visualize actual calories logically: Dr. Marion Nestle, when I interviewed her, said her students could not conceive a 64 oz. red Coke had 8x the calories of a can

• the satiety index for foods—how filling a food is, per cals—is kind of unbelievable, since per the index a potato or an orange is more filling than steak

• A can of red Coke is equivalent to a normal/difficult cardio workout… which itself becomes less effective over time and burns off less fat

Which is aggravating. The lessons here—labels are shorthand, food needs to be seen to be understood, things beyond calories help explain fullness, cardio in a vacuum has diminishing returns—if taken as individual data points, feel endless, but for someone who knows how calories work… they’re just the fine print.

So what does it mean to know how calories work? I suppose it’s a spatial, mobile understanding of how they exist going in and going out of the body, how they are in the real world, how they show up in food. You get that knowledge… by weighing and measuring your food. Honestly, really. Do it for long enough and you gat a Predator/Robocop visual literacy… in which you look at a burger patty (or potato) and know exactly the macronutrient split. It’s done with time, a kitchen scale and a calorie tracking app. Traditionally it’s been something only bodybuilders do.

How calorie balance explains even the craziest diets

But it’s not just for lifters or athletes. Having this knowledge allows someone, since they’re strict about food, to be loose with language. It helps as much with mathing out a Coke as it does with ideas. Specifically, the weighing/measuring things will show you how macros work and that any new diet you read about have to be mostly explained by calorie balance. This is why the sugar diet is uncontroversial to me. It’s another new diet, following every other diet’s rules. There might be something extra to it, but it also follows the rules.

So how to explain the sugar diet? Well, because fat’s zeroed, calories are cut drastically since that macronutrient has more calories per gram than carbs or protein (9 cal per g vs 4 each, respectively). (Plus, since the diet’s context is post-keto/carnivore, lots of its users may “overuse” fats/their bodies might be used to them.) Additionally, with protein is kept low (for the fast portion), even more cals are cut. I’m half bullish on the FGF-21 thing myself, but even without that working, this diet is strict (no candies with FAT) enough to consistently have still a big cal cut.

The energy out argument is also mostly true. In the video they talk about how pounding OJ and gummies might take someone from let’s say 7,000 to 15,000 steps a day—that kind of step uptick burns fat in a very peer-reviewed way. Just walking!

It’s a generous read by me here, for sure, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Plus, it should be mentioned, my points here were made in passing by the hosts in the video authors. Calories are a big key to this diet, they’re just not said very loud.

Actually if her ass was fueled by Maynard’s Wine Gums she would have been inspired to run wind sprints and do some landmine work.

Headline vs. story

Ultimately the diet’s headlines are kind of disproved in the fine print or between the lines. This is why there’s some rigor here, and why it’s for now pretty real. It’s also a bridge between the “experts” and folks like Richardson/Bell doing clinical things. Calories are approached less rigidly here than in a rigid paper or article, but in these videos they’re still a thing people can measure easily and repeatedly… even if the video says you don’t have to measure cals! The nice thing about knowing how calories work is that when diets like this come up, anyone with Predator vision can see, in a couple of minutes the… “Oh, this is where the deficit comes from.” It’s just something you understand.

How to measure

How to do it? One, buy any kitchen scale (this one’s fine; literally any will do). Two, weigh your groceries (everything you eat) for three weeks to a month. Three, put those numbers into a tracker and compare it against your TDEE.

That’t it. Measure and weigh food every day. Everything. For a month. Even if you don’t have superficial weight gain/loss goals—you don’t need them unless you want them—you’ll come out with a real visual/spatial/tactile understanding of how “calories and macros” show up on a plate… and, eventually, how physique and weight gain/loss works…

Very basic ideas like red meat has fat and protein and no carbs, dairy has protein fat and carbs, starches are a type of carbohydrate, a pound of strawberries is 120 calories, three ounces of meat is 25g protein and is palm-sized. five oz. is a fist and like 35g. And so on forever. It’s nice.

Understanding how food is physically expressed as proteins, fats and carbs is not some magical birthright accorded to bodybuilders but a facility one builds up after weighing things and looking at it for reps. The Predator vision stays for life. Anyway I’ve been weighing food and using every calorie tracker there is for a decade. There’s one good free one and one good paid one. Locking in this habit has been the key to it all for me. Full recommenation, review, explanations below: