Menus required to state calories per. dish

Antonia

I recently read 'Spoon Fed'by Tim Spector. He says that calorie calculating is useless, partly because it's difficult to accurately assess how many calories are in a meal ( do the restaurants genuinely burn each recipe in a calorimeter machine, or is a guesswork?)

The other reason he gives is that everyone's body processes calories differently, so one person's ideal number of calories is either too much or too little for someone else.

Having just lot a significant amount of weight by strictly calorie counting and fasting, I’m not sure I agree. You can lose weight by any regime you like - Weight Watchers, Slimming World etc, use different systems but when you examine them, they are all down to calorie counting in the end. And it’s not really about a one size fits all approach. If you take into account your lifestyle and how active you are, it’s easy to work out the ideal number of calories to either lose weight or maintain it. I found it more or less simple to weigh the foods and follow guidelines on cooking to get an accurate enough calorie count to lose weight and am now maintaining it in the same way.

I do think it depends on how determined you are to lose the weight and how hard you work at it. This is part of the problem - it’s easier to stay in denial than to do something about it and I think maybe putting the calorie counts on menus may wake a lot of people up to the fact that they’re consuming far more calories than they think - or is good for them.

Tim Spector is so knowledgeable, I’ve read a couple of his books and, hopefully learnt a lot.

I do think that the type of restaurants that have to obey this new law are able to calculate the calories, the meals are all very, very portion controlled and they are big organisations.
That’s not to say though that every calorie is equal. Not in the energy sense but in the nutritional sense.

What we eat is an enormous subject and can be tricky to navigate. I can’t understand why, for example, Slimming World, says grapes are ‘free’ when they are just dinky little bags of sugar? One of my friends eats them all day?

There is a fair amount of challenge from specialists re Tim Spector's "Spoon Fed". They obviously agree with some areas but challenge his very selective use of papers/reports.

Just saying.
I haven't read it nor done any research myself.