Satiety, or the feeling of feeling full, is the key to maintaining a healthy weight and living a healthy life long-term. Instead of calories, people should focus on eating real food. It’s easier to track not eating sugars and artificial sugars than actually counting their calories. Tracking and reliving the calories of carbohydrates you didn’t eat stimulates ghrelin, the hunger hormone.
It’s easier to track pounds of steak, fish, shrimp, and chicken than calories. A calorie is a calorie only if it is incinerated in a bomb calorimeter, and the heat is given off is measured. Biologically derived calories from different foods have entirely different metabolic effects on the human body.
It’s irrelevant how many calories a food portion contains because equal calorie portions of sugar, alcohol, meat or olive oil have widely differing effects on hormonal systems. These effects include insulin as well as satiety signals such as cholecystokinin or peptide YY. What matters is how our body responds to the ingestion and absorption of those calories, how they are metabolized, and the resulting level of satiety.