Weight loss isn't a numbers game
But counting calories may have something to it
There is a simple explanation for the obesity crisis in the United States: it is all about how many calories the average American eats every day. This is an attractively simple hypothesis. The calories consumed by Americans has crept up year by year at the same time that the percentage of overweight or obese Americans has increased. And calorie restriction is really the only effective way to lose weight for most people. Even 'miracle drugs' like Ozempic or other GLP-1 medications operate not through any secondary mechanism, but by attacking the reward mechanism at the heart of appetite, reducing desire and therefore—surprise!—reducing calorie intake.
And we can also explain why, if humans have always had an appetite, obesity is increasing now, not at any other time in history. It is not only that we are more sedentary, that the composition of our food and diets have changed a lot recently, or any other cause: we're just eating more because we can. If food scarcity was a fact of life for most of human existence, it makes sense that humans carry some aggressive in-built drive to hoard calories in the rich times to prepare for the inevitable lean years. But most of us here in the United States no longer have these lean times our ancestors were accustomed to. And so our misbegotten survival instinct—to take on food like a camel stores water before the desert crossing—betrays us. We live our lives by these oases, and grow fat in the shade.
But I think that this story, while it may be correct on some of the historical and material mechanisms that make the wealthy West an empire of calories, obscures the why because it so focused on the most visible forms of gluttony. It suffers also from a historical amnesia, casting gluttony as a uniquely modern problem arising from contemporary technology and society. But food—our desire for it and obsession over it—has always caught us out.
To put it another way: humans have always had appetites. And as long as we have had them, we have also had to restrain, govern, and channel them toward orderly outcomes and away from disorder. Not content with the delights of the garden, Eve took of the forbidden fruit. Her downfall was pride, but the account does not fail to describe also the sensual appeal of the fruit, as well: "the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes." The mythical son of Zeus Tantalus, from whom we have the English word tantalize, was imprisoned for tricking the gods by exploiting their appetite. He was placed like Sisphyus in an eternal conundrum, trapped in a pool of water beneath a low-slung fruit tree. When he reached up to eat, the branches receded; when he bent down to drink, so too did the water. St. Thomas Aquinas classified disordered forms of appetite as eating "too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily". Even when food was far more scarce that it is today, the governing of our appetite was enough of a preoccupation that the concept is found in every major religious and philosophical tradition.
So while the statistical evidence is clear that Americans struggle with some form of gluttony (in Aquinas' view, eating too much), we are remarkably loath to discuss gluttony in moral terms. And when we do so, it is to point fingers or cast condemnation on those who struggle with only one form of disordered appetite (overeating) to the exclusion of the whole. And we also carry a very eliminationist approach to appetite, at least as judged by our pharmaceuticals. Instead, we ought to ask, what is appetite for?
I have intentionally used the terms 'ordered' and 'disordered' to refer to appetite. I do so to imply (as I am about to argue) that appetite can be turned toward both toward good ends and bad. If appetite has a purpose, then we must be very cautious when we exploit it—or tinker with it. Appetite motivates us. It changes us. Disciplining it cultivates useful virtues in us. Appetite is everywhere, not just in our desire for food. The instinct to survive has us working to eat. Sexual desire has us attempting to become more marriageable. The pleasure of companionship gets us off of our couch and into the presence of friends. We need the reward center of the brain as much as we need the pain center. GLP-1 drugs, which attack appetite at the root, have some complaining of 'Ozempic personality'—and the side effect reported by some: acedia, listlessness, depression, and diminished libido—are all things we would expect from lessened appetites across the board. Weight loss may be just the side effect of a war on the self that craves.
Enter calorie counting
Is it possible to take up the good of appetite without the bad? I have been trying recently, if only because I do not want to go to the expense of buying new pants. I began, as any child of the West might, by trying to count the calories I was eating each day. I learned a lot. But after some time, I learned more about how unruly my appetites were. Calorie counting is a chain-link fence around an angry dog. Useful, but if anything the noise increases when the fence is put up! The disorders of my own appetites are personal to me, and gluttony will certainly manifest itself differently to others. The terror of gluttony is that it is a many-headed Hydra of impulses, boasting at least the five that Aquinas outlined.
I first learned that I was not paying attention. I simply did not attend to the amount or quality of the food that I ate. Gone are the days when I would habitually watch a TV show or scroll on my phone while eating, but the same instinct of inattention remains. Ironically, the most helpful thing I found about counting calories may have been the inconvenience of having to pay close attention to my food. Measuring it, weighing it, and reading the nutritional facts on the back label was annoying and time-consuming. It built in me a grudging attentiveness to what and how much I eat that has been helpful even since I stopped counting every morsel.
Compounding the dangers of this inattention is my overly pragmatic approach to food. In my undergraduate days, my schedule was grueling: I studied long hours in a demanding degree program, lifted weights, and played rugby. I needed the calories by any means necessary. My wife and I recall (to her amusement and my chagrin) the first meals I cooked for us while we dated. I would charitably describe them as utilitarian. She was likewise unimpressed by my practice of combining four McDonald’s McChickens into an unholy (but protein-rich) stack. I am grateful that her culinary skills have slowly rehabilitated me. But recently, calorie-counting did exacerbate this utilitarian tendency, turning food for me into an optimization problem whose goal was not just a number, but even the macronutrients within a diet: achieving the proper balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates was a sideline obsession.
Finally, I learned just how much of a wimp I was about feeling hungry. I was so unused to even an incredibly mild signal of hunger, sated as it was constantly by the ubiquitous snack, that the surprise of being ready to eat, in the refreshingly fulsome sense of a return from long journey, was an experience I was unused to. I also learned to distinguish satisfaction from fullness. The subtle turn of the feeling from 'enough' to 'too much' became more obvious when I was counting calories. The calorie limit stopped me short of the threshold.
To borrow Aquinas' language, I certainly ate food to excess, overstepping satisfaction into fullness. But my tendency was also to eat at inappropriate times—a snack thirty minutes before lunch because I could not bear the mildest of hunger. I do not know how to categorize my brutally utilitarian approach to food, but I might call it at best a graceless approach to the good and bountiful gift of appetite and its satisfaction in good food. In my rush, I hollowed out the nature of true feasting, and therefore missed out on the festal joy contained like potential energy within all food and, crucially, within meals shared with others.
The moral weight of food
These realizations, freighted with profound moral considerations, have convinced me that weight loss isn't a numbers game. Or really, that treating weight loss like an accounting problem may have immediate effects on your weight but at an expense. One may err in two ways. On the one hand, we risk stripping appetite of its moral valence and miss out on developing virtues useful to all life, not only to eating. Or, on the other hand, one may fall into a ruminative obsession with food. Aquinas warned that there are paths to gluttony beyond overeating that implicate us all. C.S. Lewis built on this theme. His satirical novel The Screwtape Letters (an imagined correspondence between a an elder demon and his mentee) contains this passage with the elder instructing his charge:
She would be astonished—one day, I hope, will be—to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness and self-concern?
It is no wonder that we are tempted to castrate appetite, to take that very fire in our belly and quench it, in hopes that we can accomplish deliverance from inordinate desire by ceasing to desire at all. It is this same despair over desire that drives the flagellants, the ascetics, the self-loathing. Appetites of all kinds have a productive and motive force. Denying this implicates ambition and merriment and erotic desire themselves as a priori vices, and subjects them also to the cleansing fire of the self-immolator.
And yet, that we call gluttony an inordinate desire requires that there is some good and true vision of appetite on offer if the desire can be ordered. The psychologists tell us that eliminating bad habits is not enough, but that we must replace them with good habits if we want them to stick. To state it differently, maintaining a healthy weight may be a side effect of enjoying food fully and properly. This is good news for us! Desire harnessed and yoked draws us into the full-throated joy of food. It adds fervor to the feast and gravity to the fast. It calls us to care for ourselves and others, and to care likewise for what food we do eat, knowing that it exists for the fulfillment of a desire that can be properly felt. By comparison, hacking away at desire by a kind of chemical lobotomy seems a violation, a cure worse than the disease. For desire and satisfaction are tools: not goods in themselves but a vehicle for earthly joys.
It strikes me also that to treat food, or the object of any other desire, in a disorderly way is an unkindness not only to ourselves, but to the gift that is that object. Treating food as a mere fuel undersells its potential. Gorging oneself on it is an insult of another kind. Treating it, and the pleasure it brings, with the insipid disdain of the performative dieter unfairly tarnishes it. The objects of our appetites deserve better.
In a curious twist, it was calorie counting that led me into these realizations, if only indirectly. Perhaps it served as that fence, one that developed in me instincts about the proper boundaries of a territory so that even when removed, the lessons of that confinement worked themselves into me. When cultivating the virtues, it may be prudent to work both from the inside out, and from the outside in.