Counting Calories - Yes or No?
I am all for body autonomy.
If my clients have a particular goal in mind, and I believe it could be realistic and safe for them to achieve that, I help them with it where I feel like I can.
If my clients want to take the focus off working towards a specific goal, we find other things to work on, like working on weaknesses or maintaining good habits.
I don’t have a one size fits all solution for every type of health and fitness goal, but I try to see the pros and cons for each method and determine based on conversations I have had with clients whether a particular method will be appropriate.
One of the common methods I get asked about and also use in practice with some of my clients is calorie counting. Here I discuss the nuances of calorie counting and whether it might be a good idea for you to try.
Disclaimer: Calorie counting can be emotionally triggering for many people. Any person with an eating disorder, history of eating disorder or disordered eating should err on the side of caution with calorie counting and should seek guidance from an eating disorder specialist and/or counselor/psychologist to decide whether counting calories would be appropriate for them.
People under the age of 18 as well as people who struggle with serious body image issues, people who self harm, people with mental health concerns, or a negative relationship with food should also take caution with calorie counting and not see it as a solution or part of a solution for such concerns. My suggestion is that it would not be suitable for these people to count calories until they feel more certain that calorie counting will have no effect on their mental well-being.
If calorie counting does not instinctively feel like the right thing for you to do once you start doing it, I would suggest stopping altogether and exploring other nutrition techniques such as hand written food journals and mindful eating practices instead.
Counting calories isn’t a new thing, but with the rise of apps that allow you the convenience of being able to search the nutritional information for more kinds of foods than ever before, counting calories has become increasingly accessible as a method of shifting body composition or gaining insight towards personal nutritional intakes.
But is it really a good idea? There seems to be all sorts of controversy as to whether or not counting calories is necessary, whether it is ‘healthy’, or whether or not it even works.
There are elements of truth to both sides of this argument. Calorie counting can ‘work’ for a lot of people and it is a great tool to improve a person’s understanding of nutrition, however, it certainly has its limitations and many people might not ever need to count calories to achieve whatever their nutrition related goal might be.
First, let’s talk about calories
What is a calorie?
A calorie is a unit that measures the amount of energy we can obtain from the food that we eat, or the energy which we expend through activity.
When people are talking about being in a ‘calorie deficit’ or a ‘calorie surplus’, they are referring to either consuming less energy (calories) from the food which they are eating relative to their daily activity, or consuming more energy from the food which they are eating relative to their daily activity.
In general,
If you consume less energy than you expend over a period of time, (calorie deficit), you will lose weight, and if you consume more energy than you expend over a period of time (calorie surplus), you will gain weight.
To gain a kilogram of body fat requires a calorie surplus of 7700 calories. To lose a kilogram of body fat requires a calorie deficit of 7700 calories.
If you wanted to lose 0.5 kg of body fat per week, you would need a total calorie deficit of 3,850 across the week, which averages to a deficit of 550 calories per day. Therefore, if you roughly know how much energy that you expend on average per day, you can simply subtract 550 from that number and aim to eat less than the remaining amount of calories across the day. If you know that your ‘maintenance’ calories are about 2200, you can aim to eat 1650 calories per day, and you should lose 0.5 kg across the week. You can use an app like MyFitnessPal to track your calories to make sure you’re on point.
Doesn’t sound too hard, right?
Here’s where it goes wrong
Reason 1: It’s nearly impossible to actually know how many calories you are using across the day, for a few different reasons.
Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is different every day. Some days you will be more active than other days, depending on whether you exercise or whether you are up and about more often. We can estimate how much energy you might be expending doing the different activities you do, but even then it depends on the intensity of those activities as well. For example, running at your maximum speed will burn more calories than a light jog for the same number of minutes, yet it is difficult to know exactly by how much.
It’s almost impossible to know exactly how much energy you are expending doing different activities, outside of a sports laboratory environment. Smart watches are notoriously inaccurate at estimating calorie expenditure during exercise. All we can really do is try to estimate your TDEE using equations and make those equations as specific as possible.
Online calculators or default calorie target settings in apps such as MyFitnessPal are too simplistic to be accurate. They often give targets either higher or lower than they really need to be because their calculations are based on limited information. If the target is too high, the user won’t get the results they are looking for and give up on calorie counting. If the target is too low, the user will find the diet too restrictive and their lives will become miserable, they’re also unlikely to stick to calorie counting and they will not get any results from it.
Solution: If you’re going to count calories, make sure you’re aiming for the correct amount of calories for your goal.
You can estimate your TDEE by calculating your BMR first (using an equation that requires your age, lean body mass and gender), and then estimating and adding the energy you would use for the amount of exercise and incidental movement you do across an average week using other equations. There are online calculators that can do this for you, or you could get a nutrition professional to do this calculation.
Alternatively, you can find your approximate TDEE by tracking everything that you would normally eat (and drink) across a whole week as accurately as possible. Ideally you should stay the same weight by the end of the week. Take the average number of calories which you consumed, and you can assume that to be your approximate TDEE. Use this number to set your calorie target for whatever your goal is.
Reason 2: It’s nearly impossible to accurately record the number of calories you consume across the day, for a few different reasons.
Food databases on calorie counting apps are often inaccurate. Some apps include data that has been input by other app users and these entries do not go through a verification process. Also, nutritional information often varies slightly for the same foods but with different brands. Nutrition labels are also allowed to be inaccurate to a certain degree.
The more ingredients a food (or a meal) contains, the more varied the nutritional information is likely to be within a food tracking database. For example, if you search up ‘cake slice’, you will find hundreds of options with wildly varying nutritional information. It’s extremely unlikely that you will select the option that accurately matches the food choice you consumed.
Calorie counting requires a lot of effort from the individual user. You will need to weigh and log every ingredient of every meal to have the most success. This basically means that any time you eat a meal that has not been prepared by you, it will be impossible to accurately track. The more frequently you eat out or have takeaways, the more you can assume that your food tracking will not be accurate. If you are not tracking your food accurately, you could easily be consuming a very different number of calories than what you think you are.
Solution: If you’re going to count calories, be prepared to commit to the extra effort required to count accurately.
Not even dietitians, nutritionists, personal trainers or body builders can be 100% accurate with their calorie counting, but the more effort you are willing to commit to being accurate, the more likely you will achieve your desired result. A set of kitchen scales is essential for accurate calorie tracking. Do your best to eat as much food that you have prepared yourself or at least food that has nutritional information on the label, making it easier to track. Use the ‘recipe’ or ‘meal’ feature on your food tracking app to enter meals that you make which have multiple servings.
Is it really worth it?
The goal of calorie counting should be to gain information about your own metabolism, eating habits and the nutritional information of different foods, so that soon enough you won’t have to count calories to make informed food choices.
If calorie counting is something that you want to try, start at the level of commitment you feel ready for, whether that is tracking your food every day or every second day, or once a week, or up until dinner time. Often it’s better to start with a goal that will take only a small amount of effort, yet that you are still likely to see a result from. You can work your way up to being more strict if you feel like you want to. Eventually, you can taper off how strictly or how often you want to track your food, until you don’t really need to do it at all.
One of the benefits of counting calories, is that no foods are technically off limits. If you want to have some ice cream, you can just weigh out a serving and then enter that into your food diary, then work the rest of your day of eating around however many calories were in that serving. And if one day goes a little off the rails because you ate too much, you can adjust your calories for the rest of the week so that it’s not going to stall your progress.
Although the act of counting calories can seem quite strict and tedious, it actually allows for more freedom of choice than other methods of dieting.
Another benefit of calorie counting is that it reduces the amount of guessing required related to the serving sizes of different foods. For example, a person trying to lose weight who is just ‘going low carb’ or ‘eating clean’ might not actually be eating in a calorie deficit because they are consuming large portions of high calorie foods like nut butter, coconut cream and fatty meat, and then they will be confused about why they are not losing weight. A person who is accurately tracking their calories will find it easier to troubleshoot stalls with their progress.
With calorie counting, it’s definitely easier to make sure you are eating the right amount of food for you to reach your goal as long as you have the correct calorie targets to begin with and you are tracking as accurately as you can a majority of the time.
Are there alternatives to tracking calories?
Of course there are! Nobody needs to track calories, and if it’s something you do not want to do, then I would not blame you as it does require a lot of commitment. However, if you have a specific body composition goal in mind, such as gaining or losing weight, then it might be beneficial for you to at least have a degree of calorie awareness, which will come from self reflecting on your current diet and making adjustments as to how you could adjust either the frequency or the calorie density of the meals you are eating without overhauling your whole diet.
Take a moment to reflect on your eating patterns as a whole and consider whether you experience a significant amount of emotional eating, social eating, convenience eating or overly restrictive eating. If any of your eating behaviours seem out of alignment with your natural hunger cues, or seem to make you feel worse for a particular reason, have a think about why that might be and brainstorm potential solutions to that issue.
A lot of the time, simple behaviour changes such as becoming more consistent with meal prepping, getting takeaways less often and finding ways to manage emotions without using food are effective enough at improving the quality of your diet and helping you feel a lot better about the way that you eat. You may or may not see the shifts in body weight that you initially thought that you wanted, but if you are improving your health through better nutrition as well as improving your mindset around food, that should be the biggest win.
In conclusion, counting calories isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but there are some people who it will work for and many people for whom it simply won’t!
However, as a method of dieting, counting calories can be a straight forward and flexible solution that allows you to eat whatever food you like in the correct amounts for your goal, whilst learning a lot about the nutritional composition of the foods which you most commonly eat. It can be a great tool to help improve confidence making food choices when you are not tracking your food, because you build an ability to recall the calorie density of different foods.
That being said, I would usually suggest that people work through their biggest eating ‘challenges’ before jumping into calorie counting, because that tends to be the best way to create long lasting habits. Sometimes, just by simply tweaking habits, people can achieve great results without ever needing to count calories at all.
There are some people who simply shouldn’t count calories at all, and that includes anybody who simply doesn’t feel good about the process of counting calories or is unlikely to realistically commit the amount of effort required to do so. These are not faults of the individual but it would probably be wiser for those people to try another approach.
