By Flic Everett

According to a new survey, 63 percent of us have no idea how many calories we should eat in a day - and we're in danger of becoming "calorie-oblivious". Could that be the reason why 60 percent of the UK population is overweight?

Back in 1976, my family's meals always began with mom consulting her dog-eared Calorie Counter book. Then she'd weigh what she was about to eat and add up the calories.

I can't remember if she actually lost weight, but in the 70s, if you wanted to shed kilos, that was what you did.

Thirty-odd years on, it's no longer that simple. Thousands of diet gurus offer easy, speedy answers.

Cut out processed food. Don't mix carbs and protein. Eat what you like. Eat like the Japanese - or the French - or the skinniest woman you know. Then the Food Standards Agency pitched in with food labelling, and the "recommended daily allowance".

And the result of all this conflicting advice is simple: we're getting fatter - and more than half a million schoolchildren are classed as obese.

Yet, there has never been more information available on how to eat healthily. Being calorie-aware is still considered by most experts to be the bedrock of a healthy diet.

Almost all food, unless you shot it or grew it yourself, now carries clear labelling listing the calorie content. So why isn't it working?

The US survey that found 63 percent of people don't know how many calories they should be eating also discovered that only 12 percent have a roughly accurate idea.

This is partly because, despite labelling advice, calorie requirements vary dramatically depending on a person's size and age, and can range from 1 200 a day for a small, inactive woman to more than 4 000 for an athlete in training - and that's just to maintain the same weight.

If you want to lose it, you may need to eat as little as 1 000 calories a day.

"For weight loss of 500g or about 1kg a week, people need to eat 500 fewer calories a day," says Jayne Brocklehurst, a dietitian for weight loss surgery clinic, Gravitas.

"So if the average woman needs 2 000 to stay the same, she'll need about 1 500 to lose weight."

However, the problem is that most of us aren't the "average woman".

To work out how many calories you really should be eating, you need to work out your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which is based on your age, gender and weight.

Your BMR is the minimum number of calories that your resting body needs simply to function (www.bmicalculator. net/bmr-calculator).

Any calories you consume above that need to be burnt off by activity.

A bit of number-crunching reveals my own BMR to be 1 277, which given my 2 000-a-day calorie intake (and more on wine-nights), means I should probably be doing a bit more exercise to burn off the excess.

So what exactly is a calorie? It's simply a unit of energy. A gram of carbohydrate or protein is four calories, while a gram of fat weighs in at nine calories.

But just cutting down on your calorie count isn't enough, explains Brocklehurst.

"For dieters, it's crucial to look at overall lifestyle changes, eating fruit and veg, and having a balanced diet," she says.

"Otherwise, people tend to get bogged down in calorie-counting. That way, you might lose weight, but your diet can still be high in fat."

The problem with looking solely at the calorie content of food is that it can't distinguish good calories from bad. Eggs and nuts are high in calories but incredibly nutritious, so to cut them out could have detrimental effects on your overall diet.

Diary

Dietitian Sian Porter, of the British Dietetic Association, recommends keeping a food diary, because, she says, most people eat far more calories than they think.

"Portion size is crucial, and average serving sizes have crept up over time - in restaurants and at home," she explains. "People think they can afford to have a slice of pie, say, but the slice is bigger than it used to be."

Recent research backs this up, suggesting that most of us have no idea of portion control. Ninety-one percent of us never weigh our food or control serving sizes.

Only 23 percent bother to check their food labels for calorie and fat content. That might be why 18 percent of dieters end up bigger than when they started out.

The other reason is that counting calories is pointless if you don't also count how many calories you're burning.

"People end up thinking they've exercised for 20 minutes, so they deserve a chocolate bar. But actually it takes 40 minutes of aerobics to burn off around 300 calories, which is just one chocolate bar," explains Brocklehurst.

Research from Penn State University discovered that when served a portion 50 percent more than average, diners still ate all of it - simply because it was there.

However, they reported the same level of satisfaction as diners who had the smaller portion, suggesting that over-eating is often simply habit.

Nutritionist and obesity researcher Zoe Harcombe, author of Stop Counting Calories, Start Losing Weight, is one of a growing band of experts who believes we're conning ourselves by counting calories, and that the practice is irrelevant to weight loss.

A reduced-calorie diet will, she argues, work in the very short term - "but then the body quickly adapts and works to get you back to "equilibrium" at your previous weight - but needing fewer calories to stay there than you did before".

Accepted scientific wisdom states that 500g of fat is equal to 3 500 calories, so reducing your calorie intake will melt the excess. But Harcombe questions the science of calorie intake.

"If the calorie theory worked, a woman who eats 2 500 calories a day would have put on 23.5kg every year by eating 500 calories a day 'too many'," she points out. If you did that for 25 years, you'd be 636kg."

Harcombe is an advocate of the lower-carbohydrate diets made famous by Dr Atkins.

"On a reduced-calorie diet, as you eat less than you need you get hungry and tired. You are in the position of wanting to eat more and do less - the opposite of what dietitians intend to happen."

Given that many of us are either clueless about calorie content, or grossly underestimate the number of calories we consume, is it worth counting them at all?

Diet and fitness guru Rosemary Conley still thinks so. If we were better educated about our calorific needs, she believes, we'd find losing weight much easier.

Cutting calories almost inevitably means cutting down portion sizes.

So while many successful dieters boast that calorie-counting helped them lose the kilos, perhaps the easiest way to lose weight is to stop counting and to reduce the size of our plates. - Daily Mail