How many of us actually understand calories? When it comes to understanding calories many of us can be our own worst enemies. This is exacerbated by a food marketing designed to encourage us to eat more and a political system that does little to stop it. Dr Marion Nestle is a globally recognised expert in nutrition, food studies and public health and also a professor at New York university. In this radio interview Dr Nestle talks about her new book 'Why calories count: From science to politics' (co authored with Malden Nesheim) and explains what calories are, how they affect the body and why its so easy to eat more of them than we actually need. 

Increasingly research is identifying that the expectations you have about specific behaviours (what you think you will get out of a behaviour) are what you should be focusing on if you want to make changes.
 
Often when we do things that we don’t really want to do e.g. overeating, not exercising, drinking etc., it's usually our self talk around expectations that are to blame. Take overeating for example. Expectancy prior to overeating might sound like… 'this (extra food) will make me feel good', 'I need more food', 'it will taste so good', etc. Typically what happens after overeating, assuming it was something you didn't want to do, is that the outcome will be the opposite of the initial expectations. In this case you might now be thinking, 'I feel bad/guilty/angry I ate that', 'I didn't actually need to eat that', and 'it didn't even taste that good'.