My fitness journey began ten years ago when, during a routine check up, my doctor informed me that I was prediabtic. I was scared and knew I needed to make big changes to avoid a lifetime of illness.
However, this was not the first time I tried to lose weight. I knew for years that I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. Without a concrete plan, I struggled to find my way.
Around the same time as my fateful appointment, I happened to discover a food blogger who had successfully lost a lot of weight. She laid out the steps she took to achieve her goals and many of them involved counting calories.
Losing weight always seemed like a mystical process beyond my grasp. Now, for the first time, I saw a clear path from where I was to where I wanted to go.
All I had to do was do a few calculations, start logging my food, and patiently trust the process.
I bought a food scale, learned to cook, and dutifully logged my calories every day. Right away I saw that I was eating WAY more calories than I realized. No wonder I was having so much trouble losing weight!
I used this data to experiment with different changes to my diet. For the first time, I saw real progress toward my goals and felt like I actually had the power to make this daunting change.
Calorie counting helped me with all of this:
- It helped me detach from my extreme emotions about food and get objective.
- It improved my relationship with hunger and cravings.
- It showed me a clear connection between the foods I ate and the way I looked and felt.
- It gave me the power to make changes based on actual data, not just how I was feeling. Instead of getting frustrated when my efforts didn’t match my results, I now clearly saw where I could make changes.
- It eliminated my fear of “junk” foods, because I saw that I could enjoy them in reasonable amounts and still lose weight.
- Most importantly, I actually saw real weight loss success.
Counting calories gets a bad rap in the fitness world.
Gurus love to tell you that counting is obsessive and that it destroys your relationship with food. I disagree with this appraisal because myself and countless clients have had the opposite experience.
Too many people give up on their weight loss goals because they feel like they’re working really hard with little to show for it. This is where having actual data can be so powerful: you clearly see what’s going on which gives you the opportunity to make more impactful changes.
If you wanted to improve your financial health, you’d start to track numbers and data. You’d create a budget, monitor spending, create a debt pay-off strategy, and make smart investments.
No financial advisor would tell you to just listen to how you feel and trust that you’ll instinctively know what to do. And no one would be able to help you if you had absolutely no idea where your money was going.
Some people may take tracking a little too far and waste half their work day watching market fluctuations. Most people, however, would simply view this data as an objective measure of their success or failure.
They’d know they’re doing the right stuff when they see more and more money in the bank. If the numbers go in the wrong direction, they can look at their spending and budgeting to see what may be causing the problem.
Calorie counting works in the same way. You have a “budget” of calories that you need to stay underneath to lose weight.
Once you understand how your favorite foods fit into your daily budget, you can choose to eat the ones that are the most filling, satisfying, and energizing without going over your number.
You don’t need to count calories forever. I don’t do it all year long, and I don’t force my clients to do it if it’s not a good fit. But, if you’ve been struggling to lose weight for a long time, counting calories for a while can be a helpful and illuminating experience.
You may benefit from counting calories if:
- You’ve been following popular diets (Keto, Weight Watchers, Paleo, Whole30, Atkins, etc.) but haven’t been able to lose weight.
- You’re tried of feeling like you’re working really hard to lose weight but not seeing the results you expected.
- You’ve never tried to lose weight before and you don’t know the calorie content of common foods.
- You are a person who likes to make decisions based on numbers and data.
- You want to be able to enjoy some of your favorite treat foods while you diet.
- You are a pragmatic person who prefers systems and science vs relying on intuition and feelings.
If you want to learn more about setting calories for your goals, check out this blog post.
You may want to skip counting calories if:
- You’re incredibly busy and the thought of adding even one more task to your day stresses you out.
- You’ve tried to count calories in the past and you know for a fact that it creates unnecessary stress, anxiety, or food obsession.
- You don’t care about losing weight and would rather work on eating in a mindful, moderate way.
- You have a history of disordered eating and have been instructed not to count, weigh, or measure food (please note this isn’t true across the board, some people – myself included – use calorie counting or food logging to help them recover from disordered eating).
If you want to learn more about how to lose weight without counting calories, check out this blog post.
And if you want some help with your personal fat loss goals, you can apply for my 1:1 coaching program here.