Know Your Food

If I asked you which has more calories—half a cup of cooked rice or a tablespoon of butter—what would you say?

As it turns out, they have almost the exact same number of calories. And that breaks your brain a bit when you consider that by almost every other measure, rice is more: more volume, more weight, and more time to eat.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that some macronutrients pack more energy than others. After all, that’s exactly what calories are—they’re a measure of how much energy food provides your body. And surprisingly, fat contains more than twice the calories per gram as carbohydrates and protein.

This becomes really important when we talk about high-fat diets like keto. Keto can be powerful for metabolic health, brain health, and even type 2 diabetes. But many people struggle with keto for a very simple reason—they replace carbs with fat one-to-one.

Imagine you ditch the bread from your sandwich, turn it into a salad, and then replace the bread with the same weight of salad dressing. Because fat is so calorie-dense, you may have just doubled your calories—without realizing it. That’s why some people don’t lose weight on keto—or even gain weight.

So what’s the message? It’s not that keto is bad. In fact, it can be life-changing for certain conditions and lifestyles. The real message is that diets work best when we understand what we’re putting into our bodies.

Just because our eyes tell us that half a cup of rice is “more” than a tablespoon of butter doesn’t mean that it actually is—at least not by every measure.

Part of eating well is understanding what we’re eating. So my challenge for anyone wanting to improve their diet is to become familiar with the macronutrient composition of the foods you eat. You might discover that what looks like a balanced diet just needs a little fine-tuning.