Hey, hey, welcome to Goals, Grit, and Some Woo Woo Shit. I'm your host, Oonagh Duncan.  And I have a question for you. Do you have an app on your phone right now that will help you  track the calories in your food? I do. And we can both thank Lulu Hunt Peters for that. Or maybe  it's blame her. 

I just learned about the history of the calorie by reading an article by Michelle Stacey in the  Smithsonian Magazine. And for the life of me, I couldn't track Michelle down online to interview  her here, but I thought this article was so interesting that I wanted to share with you the story of  what I learned from her work about the history of the calorie, calorie counting, and why we still  think of food in terms of numbers instead of, you know, like deliciousness. 

Spoiler alert, I'm now thinking hard about whether that calorie app serves me, and I'm curious  what effect this will have on you. So make sure you reach out and let me know and definitely  send this episode to anyone you know who is currently tracking their calories. Okay, so let me  start by taking you back to the United States in 1909. Women couldn't even vote yet, but Lulu  Hunt-Peters has a medical degree and she's out there running labs, lecturing on public health. 

And telling everyone how to feed their kids. She was an absolute badass for her era. And as she  entered her 40s, she realized that she had gained weight. Tale as old as time. And she decided  that her body was, in her words, too, too solid. I can actually hear my grandmother saying those  words right now. Too solid. So, what Lulu did, she dropped 70 pounds. 

According to Lulu, this was her crowning achievement. And it's a bit of a bummer considering  that only 5% of medical students at that time were women. Anyway, what she wanted to tell the  world about was her weight loss and specifically the tool that she used, this brand-new concept  called calories. And it was so new that she had to tell people how to pronounce it, writing the  word out phonetically in her seminal 1918 book, Diet and Health with key to the calories.  

This is thought to be the first ever bestselling diet book. And no wonder it was a bestseller  because let me tell you, old Lulu was a snappy writer. She told stories about Mrs. I'm a gobbler  and Mrs. Tiny Weigh-A-Ton as members of the, are you ready for this? Friendly Fat Fraternity. 

Like I'm cringing so hard right now. And in this book, she really hammered home the idea that  calories are everything.  

In the book, she says, hereafter, you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one  slice of bread or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 300 calories of pie. And dude,  at the time, this was a mind-blowing concept. At this point, food was still mostly thought about in  terms of enjoyment or survival.  

And Lulu just came along and said, no, food is numbers now, and if you are eating 350 calories  of pie, you better know about it. And people were blown away by this new approach to food, and  it caught on like wildfire for a couple of reasons. Okay, first of all, this was the Industrial  Revolution, an era that was fixated on science, rationality, and quantification. People have been  studying the calorie, but like as a measure of heat that could be converted to energy. Calories at  that time were about machines, and specifically the steam engine and how much coal it would  take to create how much power.  

So it felt very smart and evolved to extend that idea to the human body as a machine that also  burns fuel and therefore how could we be more efficient with that fuel? The early research on  calories is basically, okay, how can we get more work out of these factory workers and peasants  with a more efficient fuel system?  

A leader in this movement was a guy named Atwater who really nails the scientific man-is machine idea by calling food physiological fuel and saying, quote, in our actual practice of  eating, we are apt to be influenced too much by taste. We must regulate appetite by reason.  And the reason was, how many calories can I get for how little money? There was actually an  ad for a beer company published in 1915 that said, pure beer is next to milk as energy builder. 

And then it went on to say, glass of milk yields 184 calories, a similar glass of pure beer, 137,  and beer doesn't make you bilious. Therefore, beer was the better energetic bang for your buck.  Okay, and then comes along Lulu Hunt Peters with her 40 something too, too solid bod, and she  starts thinking. 

If calories in food create energy and mass, what happens if we purposely create a caloric  deficit? Hence the 70 pound weight loss and the bestselling book because aside from it now  being the age of reason and quantification, guess what else was happening? It was suddenly really hot to be really skinny. As I said, Lulu's book came out in 1918, right when the ideal body  shape was shifting. 

Previously, it'd been all about the Gibson girl. You know, you can picture that super curvy  silhouette with the big bustle and the big hat. I love reading books from that time, because they'll  always describe the main female protagonist like, she was plump as a partridge and just as  pretty. Like, that's a good thing. Having extra body fat at that time was seen as a sign of wealth  and femininity and good health, especially for bearing children.  

Then at the turn of the 20th century, body fat started to shift and become associated with lower  classes and being lean started to indicate affluence and status. And dude, to be honest, this is a  bit of a weird shift, but most historians explain it like this. They say, okay, the new upper middle  class created by the industrial revolution displayed conspicuous consumption, but also  conspicuous waste. And what could be more wasteful than turning away food? 

I mean, I still kind of don't get it, to be honest. It sounds like a bit of a weak explanation. I don't  get how this changed so quickly and so dramatically. But the fact is that the shift was  happening. That is indisputable. The Journal of Women's History gathered up letters sent home  from the All-Women's Smith College. In the late 1800s, they'd write home talking about all the  amazing feasts they had. And one girl wrote home saying, she weighs 135 pounds, but it's her  ambition to weigh 150. 

Fast forward to 1924, and there's an article in the Smith College Weekly that warns, if  preventative measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon, Smith College will become  notorious, not for the self-like forms, but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her  students. It was like all of a sudden in the 1920s, women finally took off the corsets and instead  adopted a new form of internal torture to control their bodies through dieting.  

Also, around this time, there was another innovation, the bathroom scale, which came on the  market in 1913. So before then, you would have no way of knowing what you weigh other than  when you go to the doctor's office, or they actually had something called a penny slot machine  at movie theaters or like department stores.

So just pause for a second to imagine that being part of your fun night out of the movies with  your friends, you pay a little extra to weigh yourself. So now we have the calorie as a way to  quantify food, the bathroom scale as a way to quantify yourself, and thin is in. So people started  to feel like they had this really clear way to measure their success and their failure and get a  sense of control over the process of what they would call, or sorry, what we would call dieting they often called it reducing or what Lulu Hunt Peters, ever the savvy marketer, called Peter  sizing.  

Okay, and she really was a savvy marketer, especially in her associating thinness with virtue.  Right off the top of her book, which you'll remember was published right after World War I, she  writes, “In wartime, it is a crime to hoard food. Now, fat individuals have always been considered  a joke. 

But you are a joke no longer. Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and  amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion, and even aversion. How dare you  hoard fat when our nation needs it. You don't dare to any longer." Harsh, right? And then she  suggests, listen to this, round up all your fat friends. What did she call them? The fat, friendly fat  fraternity, and have a watch your weight anti-Kaiser class where you get together and you weigh  yourselves once a week in order to defeat the Kaiser.  

So if you were one of my many listeners who got dragged to Weight Watchers meetings when  you were like 12, did you have any idea that you were smashing the Kaiser? No, you do. And  you know, all that seems kind of funny and quaint, but Lulu Hunt Peters linking thinness with  morality feels depressingly, gut wrenchingly familiar. 

Her newspaper column was literally called, A Disgrace to be Fat. She explained that being thin  was a visible expression of morality, having self-control, being smart, ambitious, and efficient.  Ha ha, that's crazy, I've never felt that before. So, here we have the age of reason and science  and quantification. 

We have a sudden fashion to be really thin. We have scales and Lulu telling us to measure our  food in calories. So who needs to enter the chat? Corporations. I mean, this is a fucking  goldmine, right? If the public is now believing that you control your calories, you control your life,  it's only a matter of time before every food and beverage company under the sun is advertising  that their product can neatly fit into this new framework.

Calorie counting, or sorry, calorie counts, eventually appeared on every box, can, and bag,  promising people that if they just stick to this number or this portion size, then they can reduce  their body down to an acceptable size. And now 100 years later, I'm guessing your grocery  store, like mine, has all kinds of 100 calorie snack packs, lower calorie light versions of  everything from yogurt to beer. 

Zero calorie soft drinks, all continuing to sell us this promise that if we can control what we eat,  we can control how we feel about ourselves. But wait, how much of this is true? I mean, now  that I've brought us up to the present, this is the big question, right? All cringey historical and not  so historical fat phobia aside, does calorie counting work? Like, is this bullshit or what? I mean,  Lulu did drop 70 pounds.  

This is science, this is the law of thermodynamics. Energy in minus energy out equals changes  in fat stores. This is irrefutable. The only way to lose body fat is to be in a caloric deficit. That is  true. And sometimes people are like, no, no, no, I lost weight on the keto diet. I ate whatever I  want. That may be the case, but it worked because you were in a caloric deficit. Sometimes  people will say, no, man, I swear I'm in a caloric deficit and I'm not losing weight. They're not in  a caloric deficit.  

Or sometimes people will say, no, no, it's not calories, it's hormonal weight gain. But to be clear,  it's that your hormones have affected the energy balance. For example, if you have  hypothyroidism, then your metabolism can slow down so that you burn between 150 and 350  fewer calories a day. 

Or sometimes people will say, I'm only eating like thousand calories a day and I'm still gaining  weight. So my calories in calories out is definitely broken. In those cases, it's usually that those  people are vastly underestimating their calories. Or maybe they are eating a thousand calories a  day from Monday to Thursday. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they're kind of tripling that and it's  averaging out to caloric maintenance. Basically, Lulu was right. 

And that is why our public health organizations have always talked about CICO or calories in  calories out. So why aren't we all skinny yet? Especially with all of these super helpful low  calorie products now available to us. And like I said, most of us have a handy calorie tracker in  our pockets these days. And I'll personally say like I've found calorie tracking to be a useful tool every now and then. You know, I'll realize that my ritual heaping spoon of peanut butter after  meals was basically adding 50% more calories to my day. That is good data. But here's what  else I've learned. Weirdly enough, calorie counting is not the best way to make sure that you're  in a calorie deficit. And if you look around, the truth is that generations of people have adopted  Peter's idea to count calories and the public health advice to, eat less and exercise more  doesn't seem to be working. 

As you know, the majority of North Americans are now overweight or obese. The large-scale  results of this approach have been pretty fucking dismal. So one theory about why that's the  case is because all of these low-calorie foods are often highly processed, and it's creating a  food culture focusing more on calorie quantity versus nutrient quality.  

And also, calculating the actual calories in and actual calories out is way more complicated than  it seems. First of all, most people don't weigh and measure every single bite they take, and they  will weigh, underestimate how many calories they are consuming. Even if they were weighing  and measuring absolutely everything, the labels on the food might be inaccurate. In fact, they  are allowed to be inaccurate for up to 20%. 

Restaurant information is often mislabeled by up to 300 calories. And even if you were able to  absolutely accurately know exactly how many calories you are consuming, it doesn't count for  absorption of calories, which varies wildly, like based on the type of food, our gut bacteria and  the way the food is prepared. Okay, so that's just calories in. For calories out, that's really hard to calculate because it depends on your body size, your hormonal status, your dieting history,  your genetic factors, how much you've slept and how old you are.  

Finally, there's more and more research suggesting that the math used by the early calorie  quantifiers are drastic oversimplifications. For example, in her book, Lulu says, cutting out 1,000  calories a day would equal a reduction of approximately eight pounds a month or 96 pounds a  year.  

So under that logic, one could continually shrink away to absolutely nothing by simply continuing  to cut out a thousand calories a day. But it doesn't work that way. Lulu actually plateaued in her  weight loss. Even though it was Lulu's life goal to be 150 pounds, she never got there. And she  lived on 1200 calories day. And by God, I believe that woman probably gave it her all. And she  never succeeded in busting that plateau. Reducing her calories was just not working anymore. 

Because the truth is, we aren't just calorie burning machines. We are vastly more complex. And  I mean, this isn't even touching all the psychological factors which influence calories in and  calories out. Physiologically, there are so many factors that determine whether our calories are  stored as fat or burned for energy or used to build tissue and muscle.  

And despite all this, all this new information, the impulse to quantify everything and treat  ourselves like machines is, I think, more prevalent today than it ever was. People track their  sleep, the calories burned during their workout, not only their calories consumed, but their  macros, and even getting down to the net carbohydrates. And I just don't think it's working for  us. It's not working for us to get the physical results we want, and I know it is not working  psychologically. Here's the last line of Lulu Hunt Peters' 1918 book. 

She says, “Do you want to reduce foolish question number 13,579, why you want to reduce  more than you want anything on the face of the globe or the feet of the gods? Tomorrow's the  day. And it's so simple.” I think that getting fit is often so simple, but it's not about doing math. In  my program, we don't have the calories listed on our meal plans. And sometimes people  freaking hate that. 

They want to make sure they're not getting slipped extra calories like their drink is getting  roofied because sometimes they do want to lose weight more than anything on the face of the  earth or the feet of the gods. And I get that. And I'm not being cagey by excluding the  information. I'm trying to change the subject towards behaviors that will actually create a  sustainable caloric deficit in a much healthier way. Stuff like eating shit tons of vegetables. 

Not eating unless you're actually hungry, laying off the booze, managing your stress. And I get  that is fucking boring and it is low tech and it actually works way better than calorie counting.  And I just know that for myself, I just feel like it's a healthier choice to live in a mental landscape  where I have a slice of pie instead of 300 calories of pie. But as always, I wanna know what you  think.  

And listen, if you know anyone who is currently tracking their calories, that's awesome that  they're collecting the data. Like I said, that peanut butter thing, it was an eye opener for me. But  will you do me a favor and send them this podcast so that they can add it to their research?  Thank you for tuning in and I will see you next week.