I Don’t Care

I have never counted a calorie in my life and have no intention of starting.

A third of people in the UK underestimate how many calories they are eating, according to an analysis of Office of National Statistics data.

It suggests British men eat more than 3,000 a day while claiming to eat 2,000. And women say they eat about 1,500 while consuming nearly 2,500.

I’m slim, nowhere near overweight, let alone obese. I eat when I am hungry and don’t when I am not. I don’t put on weight. I haven’t the faintest idea what my calorie intake is and will continue to ignore both that and PHE.

The recommended daily calorie allowance is 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women.

Allowance? Who the fuck gave you the authority to start deciding on what we are allowed. Fuck off back under the rock you crawled out of you vile authoritarian prodnoses.

Public Health England chief nutritionist Dr Alison Tedstone said under-reporting of calorie intakes “has always been a feature of all diet surveys”.

So stop wasting our money doing diet surveys. That’s two problems solved right there.

As a rule of thumb, Public Health England recommends consuming about 400 calories for breakfast and 600 calories each for lunch and dinner to allow for extra drinks and snacks throughout the day.

I’ll eat whatever I damned well please and you can take your recommendations and stick them where the sun don’t shine.

But many cafes and restaurant do not have calorie information readily available and often include extra ingredients that add flavour but also calories.

So? This is a problem how?

Some restaurant portions may also be bigger than ones eaten at home.

This is not a problem either. If there is too much on the plate, I stop eating. It’s a shame to waste it, but there it is. It’s still not a problem.

But portion size can also be an issue at home.

No they are not. None of your damned business.

8 Comments

  1. How is any of this the business of ‘Public Health’?

    Surely, public health is a matter of sanitation, clean air, and provision of hospitals, not prodnosed interference with our lives.

    Like you, I have no idea how many calories I consume and I don’;t give a monkey’s — I don’t see why amyone else should either.

  2. Like you I have no idea what my calorie intake is. Like you I am slim and fit. I am a type 2 diabetic so carbohydrates are more of an issue, but at present I don’t have to worry about carbs too much either. I find it useful to move around a lot.

    I find these interfering busibodies annoying and would fire them all tomorrow if it was down to me. I also find the mainstream media annoying in the way that they just parrot the press releases without doing any kind of analysis or questioning of what these guidelines and recommendations are based on. A really obvious question that they should be asking is why any kind of calorie limit would be the same for people of all different shapes and sizes taking no account of their levels of activity.

  3. A third of people in the UK underestimate how many calories they are eating

    Probably because – like you, other posters and me – they have no idea and tell questioner what they think is acceptable to Govt/ONS/PHE.

    Me: Hungy – eat, stop when enough, bin or fridge not eaten.

    PHE – FO

  4. As long as the wages are being pid by the taxpayer, this sort of trash will still dribble though your letterbox I’m afraid.

    Me? Just ignore the whole lot and do what I want – much easier!

  5. “I haven’t the faintest idea what my calorie intake is”. Yep, I’ve never known either, I don’t even know what those calorie counts mean, but I can still outrun my teenage kids. Tends to suggest that youngsters aren’t getting enough exercise rather than it being about what they eat. But then, there aren’t massive state-funded salaries on offer for demanding kids be strapped to a treadmill, the snobbery would be beaten out of ‘public health’ by outraged parents.

  6. I put on a lot of weight when I reached That Age That Ladies Get To, having never done so before in my life, ever. So, when I decided that I’d rather lose some weight than go out and buy an entire new wardrobe I simply cut out all the rubbishy between-meals eating that I used to do. No cakes, biscuits, sweeties or doughnuts between meals, but I ate whatever I usually ate at mealtimes, including a dessert if it was on offer. As a result I lost a stone in less than a year, which was about what I was aiming for (not too quickly, which was good – fast loss always seemed to be followed by fast re-gain by weight-watching friends I knew). No special diets involving weird substances instead of proper meals, no pills, no potions, no obsessive calorie-counting, no diet clubs or support groups – and I avoided like the plague any diet which had a name attached to it. I’m now back to my old trim self and am still watching many of my friends endlessly falling for faddy diets and odd eating regimes and usually failing to achieve any long-term weight loss. Common sense and being realistic about your own eating habits seems to me to be the best and easiest way to shed a few pounds.

    • I like to tell people how i went from a 44″ to a 30″ waist aged 17 or so on a diet of drinking cheap cooking oil, chips, chocolate, egg fried rice and BEER…lots of beer (I looked 18 ish)….and I didn’t even smoke back then. Way over 3K calories a day.
      What I don’t tell them is I was doing several hours very intensive martial arts training every single day of the week and often walking 8 miles a day or so to get to lessons.

  7. I have a reasonably good idea of exactly how many calories are in what foods/drinks but only because since I have been forced to ease up (considerably) on my Martial Arts training I have lost a little muscle and gained a little fat. If I feel the fat/muscle ratio going to far in the former direction I do something about it, but that is my choice. It is not something I would force or even suggest to someone else unless they asked for advice on it and that is where these “Public Health” types go wrong. They should be available to give advice when it is asked for. Until then they should just shut the fuck up.

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