Stop Worrying About Counting Calories

As a person who spent years worrying about counting calories before making a complete reversal to spend years utilizing intuitive eating, I have a strong understanding of the importance of tracking to reach your physique and fitness goals.

Weight loss and other physique changes are often unseen on a daily basis. Only after weeks, months, and years do we really see the fruits of our labor.

Counting calories is a way of measuring the unseen fruits of our hard work on a daily basis and making them visible.

Many people begin counting calories with pure intentions, but then as time goes on, their focus shifts.

In my experiences, I became more fixated on meeting the exact number that I set as my caloric goal than making healthy food choices.

I believe that the reason most people start worrying about counting calories is because they don’t understand why counting calories is important and develop the tracking techniques that they can use to stop worrying about counting calories.

For that reason, I want to share with you: 

• The true purpose behind counting calories, which is building healthy habits and techniques

• The technique of varying your tracking frequency to stop worrying about counting calories

• My personal process for taking control of my calorie counting 

Let’s break this down further!

The Purpose Behind Counting Calories

Many people form a relationship with calorie counting that is based on the idea that it will allow them to lose weight and have the body that they always dreamed of. 

By measuring the number of calories or energy that they intake on a daily basis, they can control their body composition. 

Nothing is wrong with this mindset of calorie counting, but it is very incomplete. 

When we take a complete look at it, the true purpose of calorie counting is to teach strong habits and create the ability to choose appropriate portion sizes.

It’s as simple as saying, “ No, you can’t eat that whole tub of ice cream every day for dessert and expect to stay the same weight.” 

Calorie counting teaches you the small techniques that build the skillset of a healthy lifestyle , such as:

• Eat more vegetables because they are low in calories, high in nutrients, and very satiating due to their generally high water content and fiber levels
• When eating high amounts of sugary foods, it’s very easy to eat a great deal of food, because carbohydrates are fairly unsatiating compared to fat and protein
• Spacing your protein out by eating a small bit with every meal allows you to meet and easily digest the total protein you need throughout a day 

Small tips and tricks such as these help a person to develop strong eating habits and a healthy relationship with food. 

This is the true purpose of counting calories. 

Calorie counting is a teaching tool!

It can be a lifestyle decision that you maintain for a lifetime, but I believe that at its best, calorie counting is simply a tool to be used to reach certain goals.

Relationship Between Calories and Weight

As I mentioned before, the main reason that counting calories work so well is because of the relationship between calorie intake and weight gain. 

You eat more food consistently over a period of time and your weight goes up. 

You eat less food consistently over a period of time and your weight goes down.

By riding this weight loss – weight gain roller coaster a little bit, a person begins to understand the number of calories that they can handle. 

For example, in my case, I used to think that as a six-foot six-man, I needed to eat 4000- 5000 calories a day because a NBA player who was my height and weight ate that amount. 

However, I found that when I ate that those amount of food, I gained weight. 

The weight gain taught me many important factors.

One factor was the person I emulated trained for several more hours than I did on a daily basis because basketball is their career and not a hobby. 

Their activity boosts their daily caloric value to a much higher level than mine.

This approach, while obviously very unwise at the time, taught me to individualize my own nutritional habits and to stop comparing myself to others. 

Check out this video by powerlifting coach, Brendan Tietz.

This video taught me about the individual variation in calories between people who may even appear to be the same size and similar build. 

You can’t compare yourself to others because even if you look the same, what’s going on in your bodies may be very different!

If you enjoy this video, check out my article, Weight Loss is Sooo Easy, for 5 more of my favorite YouTube videos on weight loss!

Techniques You Can Use to Stop Worrying About Counting Calories

Overview

Okay, we’ve explored the “what and why” of calorie counting and now we’re going to explore the “how”. Keep in mind that each of these techniques involves varying the time between periods of tracking. 

To maximize the effects of these techniques, always weigh yourself and track your calories on a consistent basis. 

Daily Tracking

Daily calorie counting is what most people are familiar with. It is the most common way to count calories and can be a wildly successful strategy for certain individuals. 

However, in my experiences and in the experiences of many, it can be very stressful and lead to anxiety and obsession with a caloric number that is simply, at its best, an estimation. 

To perform the daily tracking strategy appropriately, you need to count your calories throughout the day and weigh yourselves preferably in the morning.

This strategy will help you to become aware of how your weight fluctuates over a week’s time. 

Most people find out that they weigh more on the weekends because they have less activity and eat more. 

I want to make sure I state that there is nothing wrong with this strategy of daily tracking. 

However, it can be very hard to implement correctly for people such as myself who are overachievers and/or very number oriented and easily become obsessed with calorie counting.

I have found that the following strategies work far better for overachievers like me!

Weekly Tracking

Weekly tracking, as opposed to daily tracking, only involves tracking one day of every week. 

I find that this technique really reduces the stress of tracking. This is because it allows you to focus more on completing your daily tasks rather than logging everything into an app or a notebook. 

For me, it really gave my brain the break it needed and allowed me to relax. 

To track on a weekly basis correctly, pick the same time of day and the same day of the week. 

As I mentioned before, many people experience weight fluctuation differences during the week as opposed to the weekend. 

Therefore, if you weigh yourself during the week one day for your weekly check-in, make sure to consistently weigh yourself during the week to be accurate. 

I found that when I was using weekly tracking, I gained more awareness of the habits that I built during daily tracking because I was not fixated on writing my calories down.

Instead, I was focused on eating a similar pattern to make sure my weight did not rise throughout the week.

Spacing out my check-in periods by a week, allowed me to focus on habits rather than counting calories.

So, I learned that if I normally had 4 oz of chicken, I could substitute that four slices of deli turkey or Greek yogurt to get a similar amount of protein and only a small difference in calories. 

This helps me understand that I didn’t need to eat the same thing every day, but I needed to eat a similar amount every day.

In addition, I started to realize which foods were high in specific nutrients.

Monthly Tracking

As you can imagine, monthly tracking is very similar to the other forms of tracking. 

Pick the same time of day and preferably the same day of the month to track your foods.

Keep in mind any events or special occasions before this day that can greatly influence your tracking day.

You don’t want to mess up your one monthly tracking day because you went to a party the night before!

I found that when I utilized monthly tracking, calorie counting was no longer on my mind. 

This doesn’t mean I ate whatever I want! 

The difference was that nutritional discipline was now built into my lifestyle through my habits!

I felt that when I reached this point, my techniques were much stronger and I was executing the simple habits, such as reading food labels at the grocery store, consistently.

Quarterly Tracking

The last form of infrequent tracking that I want to mention here is quarterly tracking AKA counting calories for one day every three months. 

For this method, pick the same time of day and the same day of the month every three months. 

This is as infrequent as I would tracking calories before making a complete transition to intuitive eating.

Personally, this is the way that I find it best to monitor my own weight.

As someone who lifts weights, my weight consistently increases a slightly as the months pass by.

While I enjoy gaining weight because this signifies muscle gains, I want to ensure that my weight doesn’t increase too much at once. 

So, if I weighed myself 3 months ago at 230 pounds, I shouldn’t weigh 240 lbs now. 

This would signify poor dietary habits and most likely excessive fat gain.

The quarterly tracking style makes it very easy to see the small increases in weight gain that signify dieting success for me.

Using this style of tracking lowers my stress to a minimum and prevents me from waking up one day 20-30 pounds overweight over the course of a few years.

I will consistently be aware of where my weight is and the direction that it is heading in.

Combining Habits and Tracking Techniques to Stop Worrying About Counting Calories

The final concept that I want to discuss here is combining all of these calorie counting techniques into one progressive system. 

To do this, I recommend the following steps:

1. Track every day for a week, 
2. Track every week for the rest of the month, 
3. Then, track every month for 3 months, 
4. And finally, track every 3 months for a year

It seems very simple, right?

However, it’s not the steps themselves that are beneficial, it’s how you complete the steps that are beneficial.

While you are going through this process, never forget that you are teaching yourself healthy habits.

Focus on the habits and skills that you are learning on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. 

When you finish a day of tracking, taking 3 – 5 minutes to review what you have learned that day and rating the success your day makes a large difference

Ask yourself questions at the end of the day like:

• Are you hungry?
• Do you reach your goals?
• Do you feel healthy, strong, tired, etc?

When I’m coaching people, sometimes I recommend that they simply make observations or keep a journal, if that’s easier. 

Remember that this is a gradual process. 

It takes time and consistent effort to stop worrying about calories. 

However, it is possible and it is completely worth it! 

You can get there if you make the decision to teach yourself healthy habits and not to quit until you find a method of tracking that works for you!

Why I Wrote This for You

For years, I struggled with counting calories and this led to many limited lifestyle choices under the guise of discipline. I would tell friends, “I’m not going out to eat because that’s unhealthy.”  

The truth was that I, like many people, became obsessive by worrying about counting calories. 

This fixation eventually caused me to switch all the way to the other end of the tracking spectrum and start intuitively eating because I felt too restricted by calorie counting.

However, because I didn’t develop the skills that are referred to in this article, intuitive eating didn’t work for me and my weight rose too quickly. 

Only after truly understanding the purpose of tracking calories and developing these techniques did I begin to use calorie counting in a healthy manner. 

My goal is to share this healthy manner of calorie counting with you to help you stop worrying about counting calories and focus on building healthy habits.

This article shares with you:

• The true purpose behind counting calories which is building healthy habits and techniques
• The technique of varying your tracking frequency to stop worrying about counting calories
• My personal process for taking control of my calorie counting

Did you find this article helpful? I would like to hear/know your thoughts and experiences with counting calories down below. 

Does counting calories support your healthy lifestyle or take away from it?

Peace!