Calories and grams: the building blocks of a slimmer you.

What is volumetrics?

My previous post in this series was about a cell phone app called Noom. Noom builds its program (and its food database) on a concept called volumetrics.

CNN article on volumetrics

Put simply, volumetrics is all about eating food that has a low calorie density so that you will feel satisfied, but will not gain weight. The measure used by Noom is calories per gram, and it’s very easy to calculate. Take a look at the following label:

You only need to look at two items in the list to figure out the calorie density of this food: 200 calories per serving, and 172 grams per serving. So, for this food you would divide 200 by 172 and you come up with 1.16 calories per gram. That’s actually quite a good calorie density.

Why do I care?

There’s two numbers here:

• Grams – The total amount of food you eat. In theory, the higher this number, the more satisfied (or full) you will feel after eating a meal.
• Calories – The amount of the food that is absorbed by your body. In theory, the higher this number, the more weight you will gain after eating a meal.

It makes sense that you want the grams to be high, so that you feel satisfied, and you want the calories to be low so that you don’t gain weight. It’s that simple.

Now, given that 3600 calories is roughly a pound, and also given that 454 grams is a pound, we can calculate that a density of about 7.9 calories per gram indicates that every single bit of a given food (after you have exceeded your basal metabolic rate) will go directly to your gut. Wegmans brand butter, for example, has 100 calories in a 14g serving, yielding a density of 7.1 calories per gram. That’s pretty close to the worst possible number.

NOTE: This is a major simplification of the topic. There are many other issues that can come into play that will affect how calories relate to weight gain / loss. These factors are taken into account in something called the thermic effect of food. For a very interesting application, see this article on number of calories in a banana. This is a relatively new topic of research, and the contributing factors and implications are not fully understood at this time.

Noom’s color coding system

Noom uses a red / yellow / green system to indicate how likely it is that a particular food will cause you to gain weight. This is largely based on the calorie per gram figure, although other factors are considered as well.

Typically, foods with less than 1.0 calories per gram are considered to be green. Between 1.0 and 3.0 is yellow, and above 3.0 is considered to be red. Considerations such as how long a food takes to digest (keeps you feeling full longer) and how much fat content the food has can also come into play, but the calorie density is the main indicator.

Noom recommends that you try to structure your diet in such a way that about 50% of the calories you consume are in the green category, about 35% are yellow, and about 15% are red. Based on my goal of 1800 calories per day, that means that 900 of those should be from green foods, 600 from yellow, and 300 from red.

Some food examples

Let’s take a look at several examples of calorie density calculations:

Green foods

	Calories	Grams	Density (cal / g)
Egg whites	30	57	0.5
Wheaties	100	27	3.7
Quaker instant oatmeal	160	43	3.7
Whole wheat mini pitas	110	48	2.3
Red grapes	90	128	0.7
Watermelon	40	140	0.3
Italian blend salad	15	90	0.2
Fat free milk	90	240	0.4

Yellow foods

	Calories	Grams	Density (cal / g)
Whole egg	70	50	1.4
95% lean ground beef	150	85	1.8
Pork chop	160	85	1.9
Haddock	100	113	0.9
Extra virgin olive oil	120	14	8.6
Apple juice	110	240	0.5

Red foods

	Calories	Grams	Density (cal / g)
Bacon	80	45	1.8
Turkey bacon	45	28	1.6
Pop tart	210	50	4.2
80% lean ground beef	210	85	2.5
Pretzels	100	28	3.6
Potato chips	160	28	5.7
Whole milk	150	240	0.6

The color categorizations above are all according to the Noom food database. I’m not sure I completely agree with all of the assigned colors. For example, I would personally consider haddock to be a green food. Noom doesn’t, though.

Some of the anomalies have a very good reason for being categorized the way they are, though. Take whole milk, for example. While its calorie density is well under 1.0, close to half the 150 calories (70 of them) are delivered in the form of fat. Given that this is in a quickly digested liquid form, it makes sense for it to be a red item. Try to “fill up” on milk sometime. Good luck with that.

That’s a lot of food

If you follow Noom’s suggestions and eat 50% of your calories from “green” (very low calorie density) foods, then it will take a lot of food to meet your daily calorie goals. For example, if you were to eat only baby carrots all day, and your daily caloric intake goal is 1800 calories, then you would need to eat almost 5 pounds of baby carrots to get 900 calories (50% of your goal).

This is a silly example, but it illustrates the concept that you need to eat large portions of green foods to provide sufficient nourishment for your body. It can take a very long time to eat such large quantities of food. You wouldn’t be able to easily do it within 3 normal meal times. You would need to be almost continually eating throughout the day.

So plan ahead! What foods will you eat? How much will you eat? How long do you think it will take to eat it all? In the next post, I will discuss the specific changes I have made to my diet.

– danBhentschel

Marlene and I have had “smartphones” of a sort since the early 2000s. Our first was the Kyocera 6035, back in 2001. It was an ugly brick of a phone based on the Palm operating system; clunky, and barely functional. Over the next 10 years, I limped along with various incarnations of Palm OS. The Treo 300 lasted me from 2003-2007. The Centro followed, and served me until the summer of 2011.