You think a calorie is real? You really think a calorie is real? A calorie is choice architecture.
A calorie is a Good Boy Point. You can earn Good Boy Points by doing your chores and playing outside. You can spend Good Boy Points on M&Ms or facial aesthetics.
The whole idea of a Good Boy Point is to subordinate your sensorium to a transaction.
Nobody really cares about the savor or delight that you derive from spending your Good Boy Points. Nobody really has any advice for you about the qualitative drama stemming from this. Nobody really wants to hear what or how you sacrifice or redeem.
Do you have any concept how hard it would be to explain calorie tracking to Shakespeare? The man drank, fucked, fasted, played, and imagined as well as any human really ever can or will, and he never would have imagined turning your body into a bank account for crumbs.
He wouldn't see the point in any of it. It won't raise the dead or make your parents love you any better. It won't give you glory or trust. It won't even make you funny and strange.
You'd have a better time talking to Dean Donne, the preacher-poet of corpses, fleas, and maggots; the poet of the consumption and resurrection of the fleshly body in every scintilla of every fingerprint.
The only problem is that Donne would want to trace down the meaning of every calorie. For every 103 calories in a cup of sack, there's 100 in port? And where does this the difference of 3 go? Into effervescent sweetness? Into the foul, corruptible grave of mutable flesh? Or to the Kingdom?
The people who will most vehemently insist to you that the Good Boy Points are part of the essential energetics of the physical universe are also those that spend their days gulping down brown slop and pretending to be a piston as a hobby. I'm not even saying they're wrong! I'm just saying that all transactional values must be transvalued. Do the brown slop and play piston if you want to min-max Good Boy Points. Or don't.
I'm just a dog on the internet. What do I know?