TRACK — The Simple Art Of Calorie-Counting

Calorie-Tracking: What About Going Out?

Am I Allowed to Eat This Burger?

Alice goes on a date with her boyfriend Charlie. They plan to dine at a romantic Italian restaurant near the big river that divides the city and have delicious ice cream afterward. However, she is a bit nervous about what she is allowed to eat because she still wants to hit her calorie goals.

Here’s a surprise: Sometimes it’s ok to not track. Maybe even better. Ruining an experience because you are worried about reaching your calorie or macronutrient goal is simply not worth it. Enjoy yourself sometimes. Order pizza or burger, eat ice cream or go out and have lunch at a restaurant. What’s important to learn is that once you start to calorie-track you should follow the principles of it for the rest of your days.

What are 56 times eating out compared to 365 days of a year.

Hit your calorie goals most of the time and you will do fine. Calorie counting is all about feeling amazing and being healthy. There is this notion that if you want to lose weight you have to suffer. I will now drift away from the topic of “Going out”, but I think it’s necessary to talk about this topic too. Celebrities publicly sanctify their strict diets to reach their physiques. They tell stories such as they ate “Chicken Broccoli and Rice, five times a day, 7 days a week”. And there might be some truth to it. Coaches give them these diets because they have to look a certain way in a certain (often extremely short) period of time. However, such diets are not sustainable. Just look at some of the examples of Hollywood actors. First, there will be Buzzfeed and Men’s Health articles talking about their great body transformations for their roles. Then, a few months after the movie premiered some paparazzi shoots pictures of the same actors showing them in the worst shape of their life. BuzzFeed again.

Luckily, you are going to be smarter after finishing this book.
Losing weight isn’t hard.
It doesn’t take “Not the fun calories”, as Hugh Jackman stated in an interview.
It doesn’t take suffering.
It’s challenging, yes. But far from suffering.

Another example from Hollywood: In one of the episodes of Zac Efron’s Netflix show he talked about his bad relationship with carbs. Long story short, he got to the extreme point where he didn’t eat them anymore, even long after the filming of Baywatch was over. What I love are the few words before the confession: “I’m so happy that I’m eating carbs again”. Imagine in what situation a person has to find oneself.

As with a lot of things in life, we have to see food stoical: Neither good nor bad.

Final words on my Hollywood rant, enjoy healthy AND delicious meals most of the time, and occasionally have something more calorie-dense and “unhealthy”.

You might ask what about alcohol and partying? That’s a bit tricky. Alcohol has a lot of calories, unfortunately, and isn’t really healthy too. Therefore, the best advice might be to drink as little as possible. But like all of the above, if you drink alcohol only casually you will be fine. If you like partying a lot, then you might develop a strategy on how many Calories you can consume throughout the day. I don’t want to support alcoholism, hence, there won’t be any further tips.

To summarize all of this: Go out, have fun, and don’t worry.

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