Are “Diet foods” wrecking your calorie deficit?
and how to tell…
SO you started a deficit
So you’ve been hanging around here for a minute and have heard us talk about scaling your meals to increase or decrease the calories.
Therefore, you made your grocery list for starting a deficit and picked out a few lower-calorie food swaps that will allow you to still eat the same meals while creating a calorie deficit.
Generally, this is a great idea. However, last week, we shared how food labels can be manipulated to hide calories, and unfortunately, that happens most frequently in marketed diet foods.
Lets dig in. 👉
An Example
Here’s a real-life client example who made the below swaps for her deficit:
Breakfast:
Swapped a Dave’s Killer Bagel (260 cal) for a Better Bagel (160 cal)
Lunch Yogurt Parfait:
Swapped 2oz of Bear Naked Granola (260 cal) for Catalina Crunch (173 cal)
Dinner:
Swapped her regular flour tortillas (293 cals) for carb balance tortillas (140 cals)
On paper, she’s created a 370-calorie deficit by making these swaps while still eating the same meals.
Revisiting Macro math
In our prior post, we discussed how food manufacturers can manipulate the calories on the label outside of using the below macro math.
1g Protein = 4 calories
1g Carbohydrate = 4 calories
1g Fat = 9 calories
Let’s take her dinner taco shell swap for Mission Carb Balance Tortillas:
Label: 70 cal = 3g P / 9g C / 5g F / 15g fiber
Macro Math = 133 cals per tortilla (-63 cals off)
How? They took the 133 calories and subtracted the fiber (15g fiber x 4 cals/g = 60 calories).
133 cals - 60 cals from fiber = 73 cals, which rounds to 70 cals on the label
Whats the problem?
The problem is that every of these swap items she chose uses the same fiber loophole in labeling and distorts its total calories.
That’s a pretty significant difference in advertised calories vs actual calories.
And if you’re using flexible tracking (tracking calorie totals + protein minimums), it can create significant room for error.
Let’s Compare
Now let’s compare the actual calories to her maintenance food choices:
Instead of creating a 370-calorie deficit, she only created a 59-calorie deficit. That’s a pretty staggering difference.
*in order to compare apples to apples, the total calories of the original items have been replaced with the “macro math” as well
How do I avoid this?
The good news? Most foods do not do this. Just the ones that are marketed for keto diets or low-carb.
Here are a few easy labeling “tells” that will cue you in if this is one of the foods that is utilizing the fiber loophole on their calorie counts:
“low carb”
“only [x] net carbs!”
“Keto-friendly”
“Diet”
or has 8-10g+ of fiber (very few foods naturally occur with this much fiber)
The more whole foods you eat (unpackaged meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, etc.), the less of a factor this will be. There is no rounding when it comes to the nutrition facts of whole foods.
Takeaways
Due to FDA guidelines, manufacturers will use the fiber loophole to create seemingly “low-calorie food” by fortifying foods with higher fiber options to artificially lower the item's calories.
We cannot change the labeling. Therefore, this is another win for flexible tracking with minimums vs. trying to hit macros +/- 5g.
If you’re not losing weight + eating lots of diet foods, it might be time to start tracking them more precisely with custom entries!
The biggest issue that comes up is when you change the ruler you’re using. If you typically always count calories from fiber (as all whole foods entries do), and only stop counting calories from fiber sources due to labeling, that creates calorie discrepancies.
