By Matt Cardwell
Answer Fitness
What gets measured gets managed – Peter Drucker, management and business icon
Calorie counting.
Outside of the debate over whether there is a “fat burning zone” in cardio, there are few words that spark more passionate debate in the fitness community than whether people should count calories.
The pro-calorie counting camp argues that it’s virtually impossible to make successful changes in a person’s diet without knowing exactly what they are consuming each day. The anti-calorie-counting group counters that counting calories is not only tedious, unnecessary and often-de-motivating, but a surefire path to developing either OCD or an eating disorder.
And like all grand debates, the truth typically lies somewhere in the middle.
Why Calories Matter
If we set aside some of the more esoteric debates around the metabolic differences between certain macro-nutrient combinations, we should all be able to agree at some basic level that calories-in and calories-out is the first place anyone should focus when it comes to cleaning up their diet and losing body fat.
To deny this would require you to basically throw out everything science knows about the conservation of energy and thermodynamics – and basic biology.
So if calorie consumption is at the root of fat gain or fat loss, then calories do matter a great deal.
What Exactly Is Calorie Counting?
When I say “calorie-counting” what I’m really referring to is detailed, daily tracking of food. This usually requires measuring and/or weighing food, whenever that’s possible.
While calorie counting seems to often get associated with weight or fat loss programs, it can also be a powerful tool if you are trying to gain lean body mass, strength or improve athletic performance.
It’s not unusual to fix training plateaus or perform performance in the gym or sports with tweaks to diet. In fact, it’s probably the first place anyone should look when they’ve hit a wall in their progress.
So even if you eat clean and are already very fit, you can benefit every now and then from short-periods of detailed food tracking.
Why Track Your Food?
Tracking your food and calories creates three things:
1. Awareness
2. A Target or Goal
3. A Method for Measuring Progress
Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.
Awareness
Awareness is always the first step in changing or fixing something. If you aren’t aware of a problem, it will persist.
In the case of diet, there are multiple layers of awareness that people need to have in order to make improvements. At the most basic level, you have to understand what you are actually eating. Study after study shows that most people underestimate how much food and how many calories they are actually consuming each day.
Just the act of keeping track of your food for a week or so creates awareness. Forget about whether that food is good or bad. Just learn what it is.
Websites likeSparkpeople,The Daily PlateandFitDayhave made it easier than ever for you to log your food. As you do this, you’ll develop a heightened awareness for a number of things:
- Nutritional labeling
- Portions
- How many calories you are actually consuming
- Your own perception gaps between what you think you are eating and what you really are eating
- Macro Nutrients, their ratios and the relative energy/calorie density of things like sugars versus protein.
- Trouble spots in your diet, for instance areas of calorie-density like the two sodas your drinking each day, or the 1,100 calories in that“healthy” vegetarian sub from Blimpie.
Once you have that awareness, it’s actually pretty easy to develop a plan, since you’ll know exactly what you need to work on. But without that awareness and baseline, you’ll be aiming in the dark.
A Target or Goal
One of the biggest benefits of tracking food is that the awareness we just discussed will probably reveal that 80 percent of a person’s improvements to diet will come from making better choices around 20 percent of the foods they are eating.
Create a plan to fix those things and you’ll have a target.
For people who already eat fairly healthy or are trying to optimize their diet for certain athletic or fitness goals, it will be much harder to diagnose areas of improvement without more detailed tracking. If you’ve already ditched all the junk, and you still are hitting a wall, it’s more important then ever to dig down into the details to progress.
Once you identify the worst offenders, you can then start to look athealthy substitutionsand make good calculations what you need to eat to hit your fat loss or lean body mass goals.
Again, because most food tracking tools now do all the calculations for you, setting a daily calorie consumption goal is really a cinch. Same goes for tracking and tweaking macro-nutrients.
Continually Measuring Progress
Losing body fat or gaining lean muscle is a slow, gradual process that’s measured in weeks and months, not days or hours.
One of the benefits of tracking food alongside other metrics like % body fat, weight and lean body mass is that it allows you to look back and see your progress, which can be very rewarding and motivating.
It also lets you spot the areas where you continue to struggle and come up with adjustments to fix them. Food tracking gives you visibility into the whys, not just the whats.
Should Everyone Count Calories and Track Food?
In general, I’m a proponent of everyone tracking food and calories for at least an initial period of time when starting a new fitness or diet routine.
Whether a person wants or should to track food the rest of their life is really a matter of how effectively they can align their perceptions to the reality of what they eat.
In most cases, I think an initial round of tracking (generally about 4-6 weeks) is beneficial to nearly everyone, especially people who are just starting to clean up their diet after years of poor eating habits. Awareness is so important in these cases, and it’s difficult to create that awareness without daily accounting and visibility.
How long to continue detailed tracking is really an issue of how easily people are able to “unlearn” their bad habits and adopt the new ones.
It takes about 30 days to break a pattern, so depending on how responsive you are to what you are learning from food tracking, a detailed log might become unnecessary within 4-6 weeks. At that point, your intuition and “feel” for what you are eating may be enough to carry you along.
“Recalibrating” with Calorie Counting and Food Tracking
Once a person has cleaned up their diet, short periods of food tracking (typically 7-10 days) every few months can be useful for checking “portion” creep and “recalibrating” your diet.
Even highly fit people with a very solid sense of portions and knowledge of nutrition can fall victim to portion creep. We live in a super-sized society, and over time, that can start to rub off, distorting our sense of portions.
Going back in and tracking your food for a week can help you spot developing trouble spots and get your portions back on track.
When Calorie Counting Goes Too Far
While some people decide to track calories for the long-haul, this typically isn’t necessary. After a few months, most people should have a pretty solid idea of how they need to eat and in what amounts to support their goals.
Athletes, competitive bodybuilders or figure competitors can benefit from more regular and ongoing food tracking, since more detailed tweaking can be competitively advantageous. However, outside of periods when you have to be in peak condition, ongoing food tracking isn’t typically necessary.
Obsessive or compulsive calorie-counting or food tracking can also be a symptom of more serious underlying issues, like a developing or existing eating disorder. So if you are a trainer, you need to be conscious of how your clients utilize this tool, and be on the lookout for additional signs of possible eating disorders.
Even here, it’s important to remember that food tracking and calorie counting isn’t the cause of this behavior, but typically a symptom of a pre-existing or underlying condition. While it could be reinforcing certain unhealthy behaviors, for most healthy people, it’s not going to cause OCD or eating disorders in people who weren’t already susceptible to them.
Remember, the real goal of calorie-counting and food tracking is to get people to a point where they no longer need to use this tool on an ongoing basis to eat healthy and stay fit. Aside from occasional recalibration periods, long-term food tracking probably won’t be necessary for most people.
For more exercise, diet and fitness tips visitAnswer Fitnessor follow Matt on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/thefitnessnerd
By Matt Cardwell
Answer Fitness
What gets measured gets managed – Peter Drucker, management and business icon
Calorie counting.
Outside of the debate over whether there is a “fat burning zone” in cardio, there are few words that spark more passionate debate in the fitness community than whether people should count calories.
The pro-calorie counting camp argues that it’s virtually impossible to make successful changes in a person’s diet without knowing exactly what they are consuming each day. The anti-calorie-counting group counters that counting calories is not only tedious, unnecessary and often-de-motivating, but a surefire path to developing either OCD or an eating disorder.
And like all grand debates, the truth typically lies somewhere in the middle.
Why Calories Matter
If we set aside some of the more esoteric debates around the metabolic differences between certain macro-nutrient combinations, we should all be able to agree at some basic level that calories-in and calories-out is the first place anyone should focus when it comes to cleaning up their diet and losing body fat.
To deny this would require you to basically throw out everything science knows about the conservation of energy and thermodynamics – and basic biology.
So if calorie consumption is at the root of fat gain or fat loss, then calories do matter a great deal.
What Exactly Is Calorie Counting?
When I say “calorie-counting” what I’m really referring to is detailed, daily tracking of food. This usually requires measuring and/or weighing food, whenever that’s possible.
While calorie counting seems to often get associated with weight or fat loss programs, it can also be a powerful tool if you are trying to gain lean body mass, strength or improve athletic performance.
It’s not unusual to fix training plateaus or perform performance in the gym or sports with tweaks to diet. In fact, it’s probably the first place anyone should look when they’ve hit a wall in their progress.
So even if you eat clean and are already very fit, you can benefit every now and then from short-periods of detailed food tracking.
Why Track Your Food?
Tracking your food and calories creates three things:
1. Awareness
2. A Target or Goal
3. A Method for Measuring Progress
Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.
Awareness
Awareness is always the first step in changing or fixing something. If you aren’t aware of a problem, it will persist.
In the case of diet, there are multiple layers of awareness that people need to have in order to make improvements. At the most basic level, you have to understand what you are actually eating. Study after study shows that most people underestimate how much food and how many calories they are actually consuming each day.
Just the act of keeping track of your food for a week or so creates awareness. Forget about whether that food is good or bad. Just learn what it is.
Websites likeSparkpeople,The Daily PlateandFitDayhave made it easier than ever for you to log your food. As you do this, you’ll develop a heightened awareness for a number of things:
Once you have that awareness, it’s actually pretty easy to develop a plan, since you’ll know exactly what you need to work on. But without that awareness and baseline, you’ll be aiming in the dark.
A Target or Goal
One of the biggest benefits of tracking food is that the awareness we just discussed will probably reveal that 80 percent of a person’s improvements to diet will come from making better choices around 20 percent of the foods they are eating.
Create a plan to fix those things and you’ll have a target.
For people who already eat fairly healthy or are trying to optimize their diet for certain athletic or fitness goals, it will be much harder to diagnose areas of improvement without more detailed tracking. If you’ve already ditched all the junk, and you still are hitting a wall, it’s more important then ever to dig down into the details to progress.
Once you identify the worst offenders, you can then start to look athealthy substitutionsand make good calculations what you need to eat to hit your fat loss or lean body mass goals.
Again, because most food tracking tools now do all the calculations for you, setting a daily calorie consumption goal is really a cinch. Same goes for tracking and tweaking macro-nutrients.
Continually Measuring Progress
Losing body fat or gaining lean muscle is a slow, gradual process that’s measured in weeks and months, not days or hours.
One of the benefits of tracking food alongside other metrics like % body fat, weight and lean body mass is that it allows you to look back and see your progress, which can be very rewarding and motivating.
It also lets you spot the areas where you continue to struggle and come up with adjustments to fix them. Food tracking gives you visibility into the whys, not just the whats.
Should Everyone Count Calories and Track Food?
In general, I’m a proponent of everyone tracking food and calories for at least an initial period of time when starting a new fitness or diet routine.
Whether a person wants or should to track food the rest of their life is really a matter of how effectively they can align their perceptions to the reality of what they eat.
In most cases, I think an initial round of tracking (generally about 4-6 weeks) is beneficial to nearly everyone, especially people who are just starting to clean up their diet after years of poor eating habits. Awareness is so important in these cases, and it’s difficult to create that awareness without daily accounting and visibility.
How long to continue detailed tracking is really an issue of how easily people are able to “unlearn” their bad habits and adopt the new ones.
It takes about 30 days to break a pattern, so depending on how responsive you are to what you are learning from food tracking, a detailed log might become unnecessary within 4-6 weeks. At that point, your intuition and “feel” for what you are eating may be enough to carry you along.
“Recalibrating” with Calorie Counting and Food Tracking
Once a person has cleaned up their diet, short periods of food tracking (typically 7-10 days) every few months can be useful for checking “portion” creep and “recalibrating” your diet.
Even highly fit people with a very solid sense of portions and knowledge of nutrition can fall victim to portion creep. We live in a super-sized society, and over time, that can start to rub off, distorting our sense of portions.
Going back in and tracking your food for a week can help you spot developing trouble spots and get your portions back on track.
When Calorie Counting Goes Too Far
While some people decide to track calories for the long-haul, this typically isn’t necessary. After a few months, most people should have a pretty solid idea of how they need to eat and in what amounts to support their goals.
Athletes, competitive bodybuilders or figure competitors can benefit from more regular and ongoing food tracking, since more detailed tweaking can be competitively advantageous. However, outside of periods when you have to be in peak condition, ongoing food tracking isn’t typically necessary.
Obsessive or compulsive calorie-counting or food tracking can also be a symptom of more serious underlying issues, like a developing or existing eating disorder. So if you are a trainer, you need to be conscious of how your clients utilize this tool, and be on the lookout for additional signs of possible eating disorders.
Even here, it’s important to remember that food tracking and calorie counting isn’t the cause of this behavior, but typically a symptom of a pre-existing or underlying condition. While it could be reinforcing certain unhealthy behaviors, for most healthy people, it’s not going to cause OCD or eating disorders in people who weren’t already susceptible to them.
Remember, the real goal of calorie-counting and food tracking is to get people to a point where they no longer need to use this tool on an ongoing basis to eat healthy and stay fit. Aside from occasional recalibration periods, long-term food tracking probably won’t be necessary for most people.
For more exercise, diet and fitness tips visitAnswer Fitnessor follow Matt on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/thefitnessnerd