English Listening Practice: Why Calorie Counting Fails
Losing weight by calorie counting? Remember Weight Watchers? In today's English listening lesson discover how science has moved on, and calorie counting might not just be outdated it could actually be harmful.
“Diet culture is a life thief. It steals your time, energy, and mental space—things you’ll never get back.”
▪️ Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
Subscription Episode 72 follow-up: We explore how Weight Watchers-style diets may have damaged food perception and perhaps fuelled the rise in eating disorders. The good news? Science-backed weight loss is here. This eye-opening lesson improves your English and challenges diet culture.
Why This Matters for English Learners? It will help you expand your English vocabulary with terms like 'calorie restriction' and 'eating disorders' for current health debates and discussing global issues such as obesity. Diets are everywhere. Understand the science to follow conversations and share your views. Ready to learn English and rethink weight loss? Let's begin.
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More About This Lesson
Have you ever tried to lose weight by counting calories? Perhaps you recall Weight Watchers, the diet industry giant? Well, science has advanced – and it seems calorie counting isn't just outdated, it could be actively harmful.
In this follow-up to Subscription Episode 72, we examine how Weight Watchers-style diets may have negatively impacted how a whole generation views food, turning it into the enemy. Furthermore, the significant rise in eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia alongside these diets? It's unlikely to be mere coincidence.
“The calorie is a cruel and useless metric. It tells us nothing about how food affects our bodies.”
▪️ Gary Taubes
Spoiler alert: Science-backed weight loss methods are now available (so, goodbye misery!). Stay with us – this is a genuinely eye-opening lesson that will improve your English and make you reconsider diet culture.
Listening to this English lesson will help:
- You learn vocabulary like "calorie restricted diet" and "eating disorders" in real contexts.
- You hear natural pronunciation of complex words (e.g., "anorexia," "bulimia").
- You understand idioms like "haunted by" and "food deserts" through examples.
- You practice listening to debates and opinions on health topics.
- You pick up transitional phrases like "first of all" and "in other words."
- You grasp scientific terms (e.g., "ultra-processed foods") with clear definitions.
- You learn to express contrasting views with phrases like "I realise... but."
- You hear numbers and statistics used in persuasive speech.
- You discover cultural references (e.g., Weight Watchers, Karen Carpenter).
- You follow extended arguments to improve comprehension stamina.
Why This Matters for English Learners:
You'll expand your English vocabulary with key terms like 'calorie restriction', 'eating disorders', and 'ultra-processed foods' – phrases vital for current health discussions. This understanding will also help you confidently discuss global issues such as obesity epidemics.
And let's be honest, diets are everywhere – in media, advertising, and daily conversation. By grasping the science and history, you'll follow native speakers more readily and be better equipped to share your own views. So, ready to learn English and rethink weight loss? Let's begin.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the harm caused by calorie counting and Weight Watchers according to the podcast?
Calorie counting and Weight Watchers have been criticized for promoting a negative relationship with food, framing it as an enemy rather than a source of nourishment and pleasure. This mindset has contributed to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, particularly among women and girls. The restrictive approach can also lead to body dissatisfaction, food obsession, and low self-esteem, despite its initial popularity for weight loss.Why is calorie counting considered outdated for weight loss?
Calorie counting is based on 19th-century science that measures food energy by burning it, which doesn’t account for how different foods (fat, sugar, protein, etc.) affect the body differently. Modern research suggests better alternatives like intermittent fasting, keto, or eliminating ultra-processed foods. These methods are more effective and sustainable than traditional calorie restriction.What are some modern alternatives to calorie counting for weight management?
Instead of calorie counting, you can try intermittent fasting (e.g., 5-2 or 16:8 diets), paleo or keto diets, or reducing ultra-processed foods. The UK’s ZOE programme also offers personalized nutrition insights. These approaches focus on food quality and metabolic response rather than just calorie quantity, making weight loss more manageable and less stressful.How did Weight Watchers contribute to the rise of eating disorders?
Weight Watchers popularized the idea of strict food control, which aligns with disordered eating behaviors like extreme restriction or binge-purge cycles. Studies suggest that while not everyone develops a full-blown disorder, many participants experience heightened food anxiety, guilt, and body image issues, perpetuating unhealthy relationships with eating.What role does the food industry play in obesity and weight struggles?
The food industry designs ultra-processed foods with addictive fat-sugar balances not found in nature, making overconsumption easy. Low-income areas often lack access to fresh produce, creating "food deserts" where unhealthy options dominate. This systemic issue shifts blame away from individuals, highlighting how environmental factors drive obesity more than personal willpower.
Most Unusual Words:
- Haunted: Causing repeated suffering or anxiety.
- Anorexia: A mental disorder where people eat very little, becoming dangerously thin.
- Bulimia: An eating disorder involving binge eating followed by purging.
- Binge: Eating a large amount of food in a short time.
- Deserts: Areas where it's hard to buy fresh food, like fruits and vegetables.
- Obesity: The condition of being very overweight.
- Intermittent: Happening at irregular intervals, not continuous.
- Paleo: A diet based on foods eaten by early humans, like meat and plants.
- Keto: A high-fat, low-carb diet that forces the body to burn fat.
- ZOE: A health program that personalizes diet advice based on your body.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| Calorie | 22 |
| Weight | 26 |
| People | 15 |
| Eating | 15 |
| Watchers | 14 |
| Which | 11 |
| About | 10 |
| Counting | 10 |
| These | 9 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
Transcript: English Listening: How Ultra-Processed Foods Trick Us
Hi there and welcome to this podcast episode. If you're learning English, then listening to these podcasts will help your language learning. Let's cover a really juicy topic today to keep your interest while your brain does its English language practice. Have you ever done a calorie restricted diet?
The death of Calorie restriction and hopefully with it, unhealthy attitudes around food?
A calorie is a unit of energy, similar to a joule, J-O-U-L-E. And a calorie restricted diet is a very traditional way that people use to try to lose weight. You restrict the number of calories in your food. Have you tried a calorie counted diet? Did it work? Today's podcast is partner to subscription episode 72, which talks in more detail about our understanding of diet and the best ways to lose weight and how we know so much more in recent years. That episode also covers the story of calorie counting and the rise of weight watchers and how that became a billion dollar industry which is no longer successful. In this podcast today, I'm going to talk about why I'm pleased that calorie counting and weight watchers and similar organisations are no longer the model for losing weight that many people use and why I think weight watchers may have been harmful. A generation of women and girls had been taught to regard food not as something pleasurable and good and healthy but rather as an enemy, something to be controlled and limited. It's perhaps a controversial opinion but I would be really interested to hear from you if you have a different opinion. And this podcast covers what I hope will be an interesting topic to keep you listening longer so that you learn more English.
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
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The Harmful Legacy of Weight Watchers
So the harm done by weight watchers and calorie counting to a generation of women? First of all, just an acknowledgement to anyone listening who's done Weight Watchers or done calorie counted dieting, calorie controlled dieting, if it worked for you well done I in no way want to lessen that achievement. If anything even more praised because what I'm saying is that it's actually quite difficult to lose weight on a calorie counted diet. It needs huge amounts of self-control. I mentioned in subscription episode 72 a newspaper article I read by Zing Tseng. With the title, 'A Generation of Women are Still Haunted by Weight Watchers'. The word 'haunted' there is from the verb 'to haunt', H-A-U-N-T which means 'to cause repeated suffering or anxiety'. That's a big word. So the idea that Weight Watchers has caused lots of suffering and anxiety. Zing Tseng also says, "Weight Watchers and calorie restriction profoundly altered how a generation of women and girls felt about food, not as a pleasurable source of nourishment but as something to be controlled and limited." Or as she says later in the article, "The idea of food as something to be portioned and carefully handled like a radioactive substance which could ruin your week if you weren't careful."
📷
A mock gravestone with high calorie food on top that says R.I.P. Hear natural pronunciation of complex words.
Understanding Anorexia and Bulimia
At the same time as Weight Watchers and calorie counting were succeeding and becoming the dominant model for people who wanted to lose weight, eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia were massively on the rise. What we call in English 'eating disorders' are hugely complex, very difficult psychological problems. But in the mix of other things that may create them, I'm sure that the thinking promoted by Weight Watchers and the popularity of calorie counting will have played a part. Anorexia, A-N-O-R-E-X-I-A, is a disorder of the mind where people restrict their food intake so much that they become very thin. It can even endanger life and tragically people can starve themselves to death by not eating because of anorexia. A famous person, singer Karen Carpenter, died in 1983, aged only 32, after a long struggle with anorexia and bulimia, B-U-L-I-M-I-A. It's similar in many ways, but presents differently. With bulimia, people eat more normally and tend to have normal weight. You can't tell, in other words. But secretly, people with bulimia eat too excess, they eat too much, usually through what we call 'binge eating', B-I-N-G-E. And then bulimics tend to use various methods to remove the excess foods from their bodies, maybe vomiting or using laxatives. Both of these disorders are serious and ruin the lives of many people, mostly women and girls.
The idea of food as some kind of enemy, and I believe these restricted methods that have been promoted for losing weight, play a part in these eating disorders. Anorexia was first recognised in the manual, the book used by psychiatrists, in 1952. But bulimia didn't appear and wasn't recognised as an eating disorder until 1980, with the third edition of that psychiatrist manual, known as the DSM-3. So the rise of eating disorder and the success of Weight Watchers and calorie counting actually occur in the same time frame, which I find interesting. The website, Eating Disorder Resources, there's a link in the transcript, asks, "Does Weight Watchers encourage disordered eating?" And it answers its own question, that "studies have shown that 80% of women engage in some eating disordered behaviours." Maybe Weight Watchers won't trigger an eating disorder for the majority of people who join the programme, but it will trigger body hate, food obsessions and low self-worth. I realise that eating disorders are complicated psychologically, but the idea of restricting food is central to eating disorders.
There's usually a big fear of food, and the idea that eating a single biscuit can suddenly lead to a massive gain in weight. People with eating disorders are fearful about food. Rather than seeing it as something wonderful, nourishing, health-bringing and pleasurable, food becomes an enemy to be treated with suspicion. What's particularly unfair about this situation is that actually, many people are overweight because of the type of food that's available.
Food Accessibility and Industry Responsibility
It's hard, especially if you are on low income, to avoid ultra-processed foods. It's much cheaper to buy these ultra-processed foods and carbohydrates than it is to buy fruit and vegetables in many areas of the world. This can be particularly so in inner cities. We even talk about food deserts in the middle of cities, where it's difficult to buy groceries and even harder to buy fruit and vegetables. In these food deserts, you can get fast food. You can buy a McDonald's hamburger, but you can't buy an apple.
In America, in 2019, more than 53 million, or 17% of Americans, were considered on low income and had little access to supermarkets or large food stores because they lived in inner cities. That's 2019 from the US Department of Agriculture. The Weight Watchers model tends to suggest that people are greedy and they eat too much. This may be true for some people, but in many ways the food industry is responsible.
The food industry puts lots of effort into making sure that the foods we eat are perfectly balanced in fat and sugar content, so that we end up automatically eating much more of these foods than we intend. Fat and sugar do not occur in that balance in nature, in natural foods. Something as addictive as Pringles doesn't exist in nature! So some of the responsibility for people being overweight, the obesity epidemic, in other words, lies with the food industry.
English Listening-London Life With Gen Z Trends
Outdated Science of Calorie Counting
And the notion of calorie counting is somewhat old-fashioned. The science has moved on. You don't need to calorie count if you want to lose weight. I've stolen this next bit from my own podcast. Number 701, which was on the obesity epidemic.
That's O-B-E-S-I-T-Y. If you're interested in listening to this one, here's a small part of it. "Finally, calorie counting is no longer seen as a way to lose weight. An old saying, "A calorie is a calorie is a calorie," has been quoted to me in the past. This belief that all calories are the same comes from an American chemist called Wilbur Atwater, and dates back from the late 1800s, when science first learned that you could measure the calories in food by burning it.
But guess what? The science has moved on since the 1800s. And it turns out that measuring food by the calories released when you burn it is not that useful. What happens to your body when you consume fat, sugar, protein, or plant foods is completely different.
And most people are miserable doing calorie counting. So actually, this is good news. There are better, more effective ways to lose weight. Scientific understanding has moved way beyond Wilbur Atwater, and his food burning. So I tend to see Weight Watchers going bust rather than something to celebrate. It's the end of the calorie counting era.
Modern Approaches to Healthy Weight Management
Better ways to lose weight which have scientific backing? Even if they haven't been adopted yet by mainstream health organizations like the NHS, there are different methods which will suit different people. And not all of these suggestions will work for everyone. But the list of ways to lose weight, or maintain healthy weight, are as follows. Intermittent fasting. So that's to fast, F-A-S-T, which means 'to not eat for a period of time'. This includes the so-called 5-2 diet, or the 8-16 diet.
Other variants are OMAD, or 'One Meal A Day', or T-MAD, "Two Meals A Day', a bit less extreme, and suited to more people. There are paleo diets, keto diets, diets which suggest eating only proteins, fruits, and vegetables. These work for most people, if they want to lose weight. But for most people, eliminating ultra-processed foods and carbohydrates will probably work wonders.
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The UK's Zoe programme is another method. This is interesting because you find out exactly how your body processes food. We're not all the same. The Zoe programme is currently quite expensive to do. But my hope is that this type of healthcare will become more widespread.
Goodbye
And people will be able to learn what type of eating is best for them and their bodies. I say, Rest In Peace, Weight Watchers. We are glad to be rid of calorie counting and the misery that sometimes goes with it. Once again, let us know what you think. Enough for now. Have a lovely day. I'll speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com
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