Calories do matter, especially when we are following anxious, reactive, addictive diet patterns. Especially when we do not understand nutrition in its entirety. In my opinion, when we chase calories as the only means of determining what to eat, we are still inside an addiction loop. There are exceptions. In extreme cases where immediate weight loss is medically prescribed for a patient's safety, counting matters in a different way. But even then, in my view, a low calorie diet built around processed foods and animal protein is still a reduced unconscious diet, and it will eventually lead to the same problems in the body's chemistry.
How many times have people asked me how many calories are in an apple? I look at them and say, it matters in context. The context of your overall diet. The context of your lifestyle.
A small business like Good Sugar is not yet required by law to publish full nutritional data. The thresholds are real and worth knowing. In New York City, restaurants and food retailers with 15 or more locations nationwide doing business under the same name must disclose calorie information on menus. At the federal level, the FDA menu labeling rule under the Affordable Care Act kicks in at 20 or more locations nationwide under the same name doing substantially the same business. Until you cross those thresholds, we are not obligated to post calorie counts.
That is actually good news for all of us, in my opinion, because if our health is going to improve, we have to focus on what is inside the calorie, not the calorie itself. That, to me, is the educated and scientific way of being happy with our eating pattern.
My experience has been that the most critical improvement to make in your diet is the elimination of processed foods in the first place. When we do that, the entire body changes in due time. We stop eating compulsively to fill chemistry demands. We stop chasing the rush of dopamine. We start feeling something else.
These are my opinions, formed over many years of running a juice and food business and watching how people eat, how they recover, and how they relapse. Take them or leave them. I am not your doctor.