What calorie counters don’t count

When looking to lose weight, a first step may be to use a calorie counter to track your food intake – but calorie counters don’t show the whole nutritional value of a food – a key piece for health and long term weight loss.

You’ve most likely heard the term “calorie deficit”, especially if you are looking to lose weight. But there’s much more to weight loss success.

While a calorie deficit (meaning one is consuming fewer calories than one is burning) is a key part of weight loss, it only tells part of the story when you’re looking at long-term overall weight loss, as opposed to a short-term drop in pounds.

It’s easy to find calorie counters online, but they’re not all created equally. If they don’t factor in nutrition, then using them to count calories won’t give you a full picture of your diet. It reduces everything you eat and drink to numbers, but it doesn’t consider the nutritional values of those numbers. For example, 100 calories of cookies and 100 calories of salmon may have identical caloric values, but they carry very different nutritional profiles.

WW’s PersonalPoints system considers all of this and more, making it a smarter tool than a basic calorie counter. The PersonalPoints system is backed by the latest nutritional science and is designed to gently guide you toward a healthier pattern of eating, focusing on more foods that are higher in fibre, protein and unsaturated fats, and lower in added sugars and saturated fats. The PersonalPoints values of food items go up when there are saturated fats and added sugars present, while also factoring in calories, and the values go down when foods contain protein, fibre and unsaturated fats (the healthier type of fats).