The Case for Tracking Your Calories
Have you ever tracked your calories? I had done it on and off for a long time. I didn’t track in the way I do now, but I still had some experience. All too often it is deemed “bad” or “obsessive” (which it very well can be) by people who promote a more intuitive approach to eating. It is also sometimes deemed as the “holy grail” from the more flexible dieters, which I do not agree with. Tracking calories is simply a tool you can use to get a better understanding of the energy content and macro/micronutrient breakdown from the foods you are consuming.
Now, I’ll start off by sharing my biases. I do track my calories and I think it can be very useful. That being said, it’s not for everyone. Some people can just eat intuitively. They tend to eat less when they are less active and eat more when they are more active. They eat when they’re hungry and stop eating when they are satisfied. They are the people who don’t always clean their plates, even when their plates are made up of “junk food” or as I like to call it, more palatable food. I think telling those people to track what they eat when they aren't even trying to change their body composition is simply an exercise in futility.
So, what is my case for tracking your calories? Well, this case is more geared towards anyone who has been struggling with their diet for a long time, hops from fad diet to fad diet, and still falls victim to the taboos they’ve created around certain foods. For those people, tracking your calories for a period of time is something I recommend giving the old college try. I actually am not recommending you track to lose weight, you can lose weight from it, but thats not the point. The point is to build your awareness around what you’re eating. To build a mental library of roughly understanding the calorie content of food. To understand what macronutrients are making up your meals. To understand that you can eat whatever the hell you want, but you can’t eat as much as you want without perhaps having some body composition changes.
Tracking calories isn’t much different than tracking your spending. I used to struggle with saving money when I started working. I would get paid and then like clockwork, my account would be at or near $0 by the next paycheque. Sometimes, I’d even flirt with the wild side and send that shit into overdraft. The thing was, I had no idea where this money was going. It would just vanish. I wasn’t balling out and buying new fancy clothes or going on shopping sprees. I also had minimal bills. It didn't make sense. What I was doing was the financial equivalent of snacking all day. I wasn't accounting for the financial nibbles, sips and handfuls — and the volume at which I was doing it made it quite expensive. A couple over priced coffees, some meaningless purchases from Winners, $7 dollar beers going down like water on a Friday night, a high volume of low cost take out and all of a sudden that paycheque was gone.
The same thing can happen when we mindlessly eat. A 200 calorie latte here, a 100 calorie handful of chips there and sometimes we do it enough that we perceive that we haven’t eaten much but we’ve somehow managed to gain weight? How? Well you probably ate your normal sized meals which brought you around maintenance and then you dabbled with some innocent snacking throughout the day and unknowingly ate in a surplus. You may do that two times a week, but the other 5 days you ate around maintenance or even in a slight deficit. Regardless, you’re in a slight surplus for the week, even though you don’t feel like you ate a lot. You do this on and off for a year and somehow you’ve gained and kept on an extra 5 lbs. This result can leave you in purgatory if your awareness around food is lacking. You will remember all the bland chicken salads you ate and feel defeated about how you still gained weight. Understandably so. But you may also forget all of the grazing you did because it seemed so insignificant, when in fact it was significant.
The potential benefit of tracking your calories comes into play here. Just like how setting a financial budget comes into play. You start to quantify your habits and paint a clearer picture about what’s been holding you back. You also get to have the great experience that any food can be eaten while maintaining your weight. Maybe you’ve told yourself that you can never eat pizza. Yet, you track pizza one day and realize that a couple medium slices is about 600–700 calories (obviously this is highly contextual) and that your average diner is around 500–600 calories. Wait… So you’re saying I can eat pizza every day for dinner and manage my weight? Yes. Yes you can. You probably can’t eat a whole box, but you if you portion it out, you can. Would I recommend it? Probably not. But surely you can. You might be hungrier since that pizza is a more calorically dense food, but that doesn’t mean it’s fattening. It just means it’s easier to overeat. Which is another reason I like tracking. It’s hard to intuitively eat our favourite foods. They are highly palatable, typically have a lower volume to them and are often handheld. This triad combination can be a lethal one when it comes to trying to managing your portions. So I delegate that shit to the math. My feelings are compromised in that situation. I can’t be impartial around pizza - myfitnesspal can be though.
The more you do this, the more you start to dispel the labels you have assigned to food. You’ll stop calling donuts “bad” and start questioning if its worth it. If you need around 2000 calories per day and that donut takes up 25% of that in 6 bites, it is worth it? Sometimes it will be. Sometimes it won’t be. There is no right or wrong decision there. There are only informed and ignorant decisions. If you say you can’t eat donuts because they are inherently fattening and “bad” then I would call that an ignorant decision. If you say you prefer to not eat them often because they aren’t that filling while being calorically expensive, then I would call that a more informed decision. I’ll tell you this, Pizza every Friday is worth to it me. A large bowl of cereal for breakfast is worth it to me. Having an occasional snickers bar as a snack is worth it to me. Alcohol is usually not worth it to me. Maybe for you, wine with dinner is certainly worth it and you couldn’t care less about having pizza. It doesn’t matter. This all comes down to personal preference.
All I know is that tracking my calories and gaining a deeper understanding of the energy content in my food was my first step to “food freedom.” What is that you may ask? “Food freedom” is a headspace you can get to with food where it seemingly isn’t controlling your life anymore. Where you can be around certain foods without obsessing over them. Where you can eat them and not feel guilt, or not eat them and not have FOMO. Where food becomes food and you stop labelling it as “good” or “bad”. Finally, where you may start to prefer eating whole foods because you like them and they make you feel good, not because you’ve beaten yourself into the submission of “having” to eat them.
For me, that place once felt like a distant utopia that would be forever out my reach. Today, it feels like a place that I am en route to. Something I never thought I would say out loud, let alone share publicly. There are several things that have helped me progress in this realm, so I’m not trying to act like tracking calories is going to solve all your problems around food. It won’t. But what I can say is that it has truly helped me in my pursuit to establish a healthier relationship with food. It helped me strip away the taboos I put around it, and helped me gain confidence in an area of my life that I once felt powerless within. For me, that made it worth the minor inconvenience of tracking. It might not be worth it to you or even be necessary - that’s a decision for you to make. I’m just writing this to help make that decision a little more well informed.
Cheers🍻
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