Before you bust a button, hear me out.
Labels and exercise machines both have their appropriate place.
A label is great for showing the vitamins, minerals, and ingredients in our food.
An exercise machine is great for getting people off the couch and working out.
My beef with labels and machines is not what they do per se, but the myth they perpetuate.
Through their function, they feed into a way of thinking about weight loss that actually makes it harder to control weight.
They've turned us into a community of heavies who worship at the altar of one seemingly omnipotent number: the calorie.
With every food you eat and with every workout you finish, you look at how many calories come in and how many calories go out.
It's the turnstile theory of weight loss: If you exercise away more than you take in, than you'll lose weight.
Experts tell us that a pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories, so if you simply delete 500 calories from your daily meals, increase your daily exercise by 500 calories, or some combination thereof, you'll lose a pound of fat a week.
That sounds great in theory, but in real life, the whole concept of calorie management is more likely to make you lose heart than lose weight.
You hump it on the stair climber for 30 minutes and sweat your butt off.
When you see the final readout - "Workout Completed; 300 Calories Burned!" - you feel like you've chipped away at your belly and gotten closer to your goal.
That is, until you reach for a midnight snack and see that a serving and a half of bran flakes also equals 300 calories.
What took 30 minutes to burn takes 30 seconds to dust off.
It's a psychological diet killer.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with using nutritional labels to track what you eat or as a deterrent to stay away from high-calorie foods.
And it can be helpful to use machine readout to gauge the intensity of your exercise.
But you will derail your weight loss efforts if you keep focusing on the number of calories you take in during meals and the number of calories you burn off during exercise.
You need to focus, rather, on what is happening inside your body during the rest of your day - when you're working, sleeping, or just sitting still right now reading this article.
Labels and exercise machines both have their appropriate place.
A label is great for showing the vitamins, minerals, and ingredients in our food.
An exercise machine is great for getting people off the couch and working out.
My beef with labels and machines is not what they do per se, but the myth they perpetuate.
Through their function, they feed into a way of thinking about weight loss that actually makes it harder to control weight.
They've turned us into a community of heavies who worship at the altar of one seemingly omnipotent number: the calorie.
With every food you eat and with every workout you finish, you look at how many calories come in and how many calories go out.
It's the turnstile theory of weight loss: If you exercise away more than you take in, than you'll lose weight.
Experts tell us that a pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories, so if you simply delete 500 calories from your daily meals, increase your daily exercise by 500 calories, or some combination thereof, you'll lose a pound of fat a week.
That sounds great in theory, but in real life, the whole concept of calorie management is more likely to make you lose heart than lose weight.
You hump it on the stair climber for 30 minutes and sweat your butt off.
When you see the final readout - "Workout Completed; 300 Calories Burned!" - you feel like you've chipped away at your belly and gotten closer to your goal.
That is, until you reach for a midnight snack and see that a serving and a half of bran flakes also equals 300 calories.
What took 30 minutes to burn takes 30 seconds to dust off.
It's a psychological diet killer.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with using nutritional labels to track what you eat or as a deterrent to stay away from high-calorie foods.
And it can be helpful to use machine readout to gauge the intensity of your exercise.
But you will derail your weight loss efforts if you keep focusing on the number of calories you take in during meals and the number of calories you burn off during exercise.
You need to focus, rather, on what is happening inside your body during the rest of your day - when you're working, sleeping, or just sitting still right now reading this article.