>>55249427Since making this post, I've learned that the FDA now DOES require reporting calories from soluble fiber.
>>55250607I'm gonna sperg on this topic for a minute. Some or all of this might be redundant for you, but other people should know. tl;dr, even if you are, it isn't really a big deal. You'll be somewhat inaccurate no matter how good you get at it, and it's not worth beating yourself up over as long as you continue to improve. There are a billion little factoids like that one which seem to undermine calorie counting efforts, but in the end it doesn't even matter that much if you're calorie counting consistently and adjusting according to results.
This is because the most important part of calorie counting is having consistent data, not perfect data. Even if you're consistently under/over-counting your calories, your final judge of whether you're progressing should be the average of your scale weight, taken over weeks, which accounts for errors and daily weight fluctuation. If you're not progressing in the direction you want at the speed you want, you can make the assumption that you over/under ate based on how much progress you expected to make, and adjust calories accordingly. This essentially overrides the errors in your data over time, because your corrections are relative to the mistake. Take the following example:
>Your TDEE is 2000 cal, and you want to lose 1lb/week.>1lb bodyfat is roughly 3500 cals.>3500 cals / 7 days in a week = 500 cals/day cut.>2000 - 500 = 1500 cals/day to eat.If you weigh yourself every day, then by the end of week 2, you can average your weights, and see if you've lost an average of 1lb per week. If you find that you've only lost about 0.5 lbs per week, you can assume that, for whatever reason, you were eating 250 more calories over your goal per day than you thought you were. This could be for any reason, such as incorrectly calculating your TDEE in the first place, or bullshit relating to food labels. But it doesn't really matter what the reason is, because you know what you need to do to get the result you want, which is to cut calories by another 250 per day. You'll also need to adjust when you lose enough weight (a few lbs) that your TDEE has changed so much that your old calculations are no longer accurate. Also, TDEE calculators can't take your personal genetic variables into account, so they were always just an estimation tool from the very beginning.
Of course, it's always better to be accurate when calorie counting in the first place so that fewer and less drastic adjustments are needed, but it's not a significant block to progress, so here are some more of those factoids:
>A cup of black coffee is still about 2 calories worth of particulate nutrients.>Vitamins and pills contain fillers such as cornstarch which are carbs.>Fish Oil supplements are oil, and thus are fat, which should be counted as 9 cal/gram.>Almost all nutrition labels are wrong for various reasons, especially in the US.>If you manually calculate calories yourself, based on their reported number of grams of each macronutrient, you'll often find that it's substantially off.>Calorie counts in the US are always in increments of 5, regardless of reality.>The FDA allows food companies to round down in ALL cases, which means anything less than 5 is reported as 0, and anything less than 10 is 5.>Serving sizes are manipulated by companies to allow misleading expectations and false calorie reports. Frequently, the stated serving size is not he correct number of grams (IE, 19 pretzels/X grams)>All common artificial sweeteners are padded with maltodextrin in order to reach a similar amount of sweetness by volume as sugar. This is not the same as sweetness per gram.>Therefore, artificial sweeteners state a serving size of 1 gram, and there are actually 4 calories per gram, but they get to report ZERO calories per gram.>The calorie counts given for restaurant foods average about TWENTY PERCENT LESS than the actual number of calories in them.>All of this definitely has nothing to do with the obesity epidemic or the influence of the (shockingly powerful) food industry on government policies.Sperg over. I feel better. Have fun with all that shit.
