9 Tips to Simplify Calorie Counting
Calorie counting is a tool that should make your life easier, not harder. Learn what actions to take to bring your calorie consumption down and start seeing the results you want.
The way many people do it, calorie counting can sometimes be difficult and discouraging. But note that I said “sometimes,” not “always.” Controlling calories doesn’t have to be difficult, yet it is possibly the most potent tool we have for fixing nutrition. Remember, each of the macronutrients of protein, carbs, and fats all have their own calorie worth. You can’t nail one component of your diet without the other!
Maybe you’ve never done it because it seems overly hard and you don’t feel competent with a food scale, but it can actually be pretty simple. Use these basic methods to change your eating habits and notice benefits without getting bogged down in numbers.
Whey protein provides considerable nutritional heft for low calories. If you’re tracking your nutrition, it’s a necessity!
1. Begin with Your Real Eating Habits
No matter where your fitness path leads you, the dietary element of it should start where you are now. Create a simple meal plan based on the way you already eat, without making any large adjustments or worrying about calorie targets yet. Ignore the “daily goal” that applications or calculators will set for you, and don’t bother about BMR and TDEE equations yet.
Remember, we’re going quick and nasty. Just put together the amount of food you know will get you through the day. If you’re going to make any modifications at this point, make them qualitative, not quantitative. In other words, stick mostly to natural foods, remove utterly junky processed stuff, and do your best to keep sugar pretty low.
2. Use an App
Thanks to current technology, counting calories no longer has to involve much real counting. Apps like CalorieKit compute calories for you. You can also put foods together into meals, which is a great time saver.
Have an activity tracker? Use the built-in calorie counter that lets you see calories in against calories out, not just totals. It won’t be 100 percent accurate — especially if you lift and use a basic tracker that just counts steps — but it will be wrong in a consistent way, providing you a trustworthy baseline.
But here’s the key: Be honest and log everything.
3. Spot the Clear Patterns
A typical reason meal plans fail is that we tend to underestimate how much we consume during indiscretions. Maybe your “occasional treat” has become an everyday thing, or what you thought was 200 calories of Greek yogurt is more like 500.
It’s startlingly easy to more than double your calorie consumption, which is why counting calories is so much more effective than just writing down what you eat in a food journal. If you experience huge surges, consider choosing new delectable items to indulge in.
Inevitably, you will have days where you don’t stay to the template — whether it’s a planned cheat day or a spontaneous night out with friends. Pay attention to what else is going on when you eat more than you expected. Do wings and fries always come after alcohol, despite your best intentions? Alcohol inhibits our ability to make smart eating choices, so it might be worth reducing the days you drink.
If you discover you’re not eating enough to keep satiated on a day-to-day basis, look for ways to add some satiating protein and healthy fats to your routine.
4. Set Your Baseline, Then Make Adjustments
After tracking your consumption for a few days, you’ll probably see it fall into a constant range. This is your baseline.
If you feel good sticking to the diet, (you aren’t excessively hungry, and you aren’t observing any changes in your body composition) the template you’ve established is close to your true calorie maintenance needs. From here, you can experiment around with stuff.
Think you need to lower calories? Try reducing your portion sizes, or seek for areas you can exchange oils, nuts, dairy, or grains for less calorie-dense options. Hungry all the time? You could not be eating enough. Try boosting your baseline or tossing in an occasional refeed day.
At this point, you can specify targets for daily calorie totals. Try shooting for 100–500 calories below or over your baseline, and watch how it makes you feel. If you use an activity tracker app, you can select on a goal range for your daily calorie deficit or excess.
5. Focus on a Few Core Meals
Trying to figure out the proper ingredient measurements for each meal and writing it all down can make calorie tracking time consuming. A more time-efficient method is to build your diet around a few important meals that are easy to track and prepare the same way every time. This helps reduce the guesswork and cuts down on data entry.
No, this doesn’t imply you have to — or should — eat the same thing all the time. Far from it! But having a basic lineup of dishes with quantities and components you know by heart makes everything easier.
It might sound dull, but you could even try to eat the same item daily for a while. Doing this means you’ll only have to enter 3–6 meals into the app once. And speaking from my experience, the repetition may be gratifying if you pick items you want to eat.
Don’t attempt to be too flawless, though. Healthy eating shouldn’t be about depriving yourself. If having a slice or two of cheese at lunch helps you get through the day, do it.
6. Learn About Pre-Portioned Foods
When it comes to going from eyeballing your servings to measuring them, pre-portioned foods can be a lifesaver. I’m not talking about single-serving packets of chips, but the idea that food needs to come without nutrition labels to be nutritious isn’t necessarily true.
Yes, packaged goods often cost a bit more than bulk produce or meat, but if you ain’t got time for #mealprepsunday, picking nutritious pre-packaged things can save you time and energy. Their nutrition information is marked right on the container, and they’re presumably already recorded in your app’s food database.
Good selections to help kick off your meal-prep journey include individual packets of almonds, protein bars, chicken sausages, burger patties, jerky, canned tuna, sliced deli meats, eggs, protein powder, and single-serving cups of guacamole, hummus, and peanut butter.
Once calorie tracking stops seeming like a struggle, you can start creating more meals from scratch. Initially, though, your goal should be to prevent feeling overwhelmed by doing what makes life easy.
7. Pre-load Your Staple Meals in CalorieKit
This is a serious pro tip! If you know what you’re going to consume, logging it the long way is time better spent elsewhere. Save your meals, and all you have to do is click on “Breakfast” to autofill your oats, protein powder, and eggs. Some apps will even allow you autofill an entire day.
Over time, you may adjust certain components of your meals, but memorizing the essentials and understanding their numbers will help you learn to eyeball food portions, which will help you stick to your method over the long run.
8. Pay Attention to More Than Just Calories
Weight loss has a lot to do with calories, but other factors are as significant. Use your smartphone to monitor your fiber consumption, and consider measuring your water intake, too. Getting more of both of these can make a major difference in how full you feel, even when eating the same number of calories.
Once you’re on top of calories, tinker with your macros and analyse your habits. Do you need those almonds in your oatmeal to keep full till lunch? What happens if you replace them with protein powder? Are your carb refeeds on point, or are they more like saturated-fat refeeds?
This is when a dull, repetitive eating plan can work for you. Changing one variable at a time will let you know quite quickly if it’s going to assist you or hurt you.
9. Complete the Task and Move On
Once you’ve fine-tuned your template and begun seeing your body composition go in the proper direction, look at what caused the difference and integrate that information into a long-term, sustainable template. Create some alternate meals in your app and become a pro at prepping your servings. Maybe you could even quit counting.
That’s right; stop counting! You can always check in now and then to make sure you’re on track or reassess if you hit a plateau. But as your ability to estimate improves, you should be able to rely less on the app and trust your judgment more.
Think of it like this: What you learn from understanding the numbers is much more important than the numbers themselves.
