Peter Wilson is a writer and journalist who has lost 13 pounds over the past year simply by reviewing his relationship with food. And by stopping counting calories.

He did so after having carried out quite in-depth research on the CICO system, which stands for Calories In Calories Out.

A system that we all know, in practice, and which essentially means: if you want to lose weight you must introduce fewer calories (calories in) than how many do you consume (calories out).

At the base of Wilson’s research there are some cases of people who , despite religiously counting calories, did not lose the weight that in theory they should have lost, but much less and with much more effort.

If the calorie counting system works , why after cutting 3,500 calories a week, many don’t lose the classic pound that one would expect? Just look at the studies on low calorie diets: Participants do not have linear weight loss. There are those who lose very little, some more, despite the subjects being grouped according to their daily energy expenditure. The reason is explained by the mathematician Kevin Hall , author of numerous scientific studies on weight loss. This measurement comes from a laboratory-made count between pounds of meat and fat. But when you look at the scientific literature, you can easily see that by cutting 3,500 calories from their diet, people don’t automatically lose a pound.

Wilson makes a careful analysis of what calorie counting means, scientific studies in hand.
And he highlights some interesting findings, in an article later published in The Economist.
I’ll summarize them for you in a few points.

WHAT ARE CALORIES IN TWO POINTS

1. A calorie is the amount of heat that distilled water uses in doses of one kg when it passes from a temperature of 14.5 ° to that of 15.5 ° at a pressure of 1 atm. And what it emits when cooling in reverse.
   By changing medium, that is, using food instead of water, which was done from 1860 onwards, it is possible to calculate how many calories a gram of carbohydrates, one gram of protein and one gram of fat develop. At the moment what we call the “calories” of a food are in fact the kilo-calories (Kcal), but the international system uses joules (and kilo-joules) as the most reliable unit of measurement.
2. According to the first law of thermodynamics , the energy of a system can be traced back to the amount of heat it produces in its transformation. From this, calories are used in dietetics to say that the energy you take in, essentially, through food can be translated into its heat, and therefore can be calculated in calories, as well as the energy you consume. Therefore the human system , through the metabolism, can be reduced to a daily energy expenditure and a daily energy accumulation. If you accumulate more calories than you consume, you get fat.

The problem is: how do you correctly determine how many calories we eat?
How do you correctly determine how many calories we burn?