As I have written to you many times before, calories are not everything in the diet, and in life.

We cannot base our diet only on the calculation of calories, otherwise every food risks being translated into what it gives us in terms of energy, and not in terms of nutrients. These two things, eating a nutritious diet and eating a diet that is calorically suited to our energy needs, are the key to losing weight.

If we exclude one or the other, we risk gaining weight: if we focus only on macro and micronutrients, we can end up eating too much; Almonds have good fats and fiber useful for the body, but eating your fill without counting calories can mean adding a thousand calories to your daily calorie requirement.

This is the reason why many people, for example, get fat on the Paleo diet: calories don’t count, but nobody forces you to binge on oilseeds, to use them to make biscuits, pizzas, grain-free breads, cheesecake bases. Same thing with ketogenic: it is true that by eliminating carbohydrates you can afford a few more calories and lose weight all the same, but this does not mean eating five avocados a day.

Other dietary approaches that do not contemplate the calculation of calories, in reality take them into account: away this one, away this other, abundance of vegetables and that’s it. A low-calorie diet disguised as a healthy diet: an old trick.

So calories matter. They are not everything, but they do matter. And counting them allows us to limit ourselves to the table, hoping not to make it a disease. But do a calorie calculation the right way?
Many people fail to count them, underestimating them. They are those who believe they eat very little, but are allergic to the food-weighing scales.

Let’s take the case of a spoon. A tablespoon of a liquid usually does not exceed ten or twelve grams. The more viscous that liquid is, the heavier it weighs. If we get to a cream, a scant spoonful of cream will have twenty grams, a nice spoonful of ice cream, Nutella or peanut butter, however, can exceed 40 grams. Same thing for the teaspoon. A teaspoon of Nutella is not five grams, nor ten. It reaches 20 grams.
40 grams of nutella or peanut butter is over 240 calories. Not thirty.

A handful of walnuts can weigh up to 50 grams of product in caloric terms. Three hundred calories.
A sugar-free juice? It is not a fruit. It is often the caloric equivalent of three fruits. Two hundred and fifty calories.
So let’s learn to keep track of calories, at least for the most calorie-dense foods: fats and simple carbohydrates.