For the past eight-and-a-half years I’ve entered all of my daily food into a computer program that tells me the micronutrients in that food, including calories. The computer program that I choose to use is called DietPower.

I’ve written quite a lot about calories, including the impossibility of achieving a totally accurate calorie count. Below are links to two of those articles:

Do Calories Matter?

Calorie Detective – Lying Food Labels

A calorie is simply a measurement of energy, the amount of heat that something gives off through chemical processes. This is an “inexact” scientific concept which has been simplified for general use. Although there is nothing “perfectly accurate” about a calorie measurement, at this time there doesn’t appear to be an alternative way for Science to better measure the potential energy which is contained inside foods.

For me, “counting calories” is personally helpful as a “general” measuring tool,
while understanding that:

• All bodies are not the same.
  
  
• It is important not to put too much Faith into the exact calorie numbers that “Experts” SAY one’s body burns.
  
  
• It is important not to put too much Faith into the exact calorie numbers allegedly contained in any food item.

Even though it is true that our bodies process different macronutrients differently, … at the end of the day… it still remains that if a body consumes more energy than a body expends, it will accumulate fat.

The article below states the Paleo / Low-Carb position against using calories as a food measurement tool, which is basically: “The concept of the “calorie”, as applied to nutrition, is an oversimplification so extreme as to be untrue in practice.”

There Is No Such Thing As A “Calorie” (To Your Body)
           by J. Stanton, online Paleo blogger, 
         &n...

We live in a world of Unrealistic Expectations.

Like I keep saying:

Being Fat is Hard
Losing Weight is Hard
Maintaining Weight is Hard
Choose your Hard.

Fat Is Officially Incurable (According to Science)
              By: David Wong

Let's get this straight: The number of people who go from fat to thin, and stay there, statistically rounds down to zero.

Every study says so. No study says otherwise. None.

Oh, you can lose a ton of weight. You'll gain it back.
Here's one study running the numbers.
Here's a much larger analysis of every long-term weight loss study they could find. 
They all find the exact same thing: You can lose and keep off some minor amount, 10 or 15 pounds, for the rest of your life -- it's hard, but it can be done. Rarer cases may keep off a little more. But no one goes from actually fat to actually thin and stays thin permanently.

And when I say "no one," I mean those cases are so obscenely rare that they don't even appear on the chart. They can't even find enough such people to include in the studies. It's like trying to study people who have survived falling out of planes. Being fat is effectively incurable, every study shows it, and no one will admit it.

So the guy or girl you see in the "Before" and "After" photos in weight loss commercials, who completely changed body type with diet and exercise? You know, like Jared from Subway, who lost 230 pounds? Either they're about to be fat again in a couple of years, or they're a medical freak occurrence, like the sick guy who was told he had six months to live but miraculously survives 20 years. That guy exists, we all know famous examples. But it's a rare, freak situation, living in defiance of all of the physical processes at work.

How rare? Well, this person did the math and as far as they could tell, two out of 1,000 Weight Watchers customers actually maintain large weight losses permanently. Two out of a thousand. That means if you are fat, you are 25 times more likely to survive getting shot in the head ...