Calories counting: why is it still so demonized?

Have you ever baked a cake? Or anything else that requires you to follow a recipe? I’m sure you have.

When you bake, you know that there’s ingredients, how much of them, and how you put them together. So, if a cake needs three eggs, what happens if you put ten eggs, or no yeast, or one third of the flour, or put salt instead of sugar? You fuck it up, yes.

The same way, it’s easy to fuck up fitness progress if you don’t balance the right ingredients.

We all know that fitness progress is the combination of three elements:

• Nutrition
• Exercise
• Rest

All three are non-negotiable, as you can’t have progress if either of them is overlooked. In this article I’ll be focusing on my experience with nutrition, bearing in mind the goal of losing fat.

Two important premises: one, I speak about nutrition and not diet because, quite frankly, I still need to find a diet that works. In the last years we’ve seen many pre-fabricated diets becoming fashionable, such as paleo, keto, whole30, dash, mind, and so on, and while it can work for some, the reason why I don’t believe in these “diets” is because nutrition is an individual approach that needs to be customized on a person’s specific characteristics and goals, rather than being an umbrella list of meals. And, more importantly, eating well needs to be a long term process, and most of the times, pre-made diets are simply not sustainable on the long run. On the other hand, focusing on nutrition and eating well as a lifestyle, customizing meals according to a person’s goal and taste, will give you achievable results that you can maintain more easily.

Second premise, I talk about losing fat, not losing weight: while weight is an important indicator, it’s not the only factor describing a person’s progress. The weight means nothing if it’s not combined with body composition, body fat and muscle mass percentage, and so on. A few weeks ago, for example, my weight was going down, but for the wrong reasons: I was losing muscle mass. So don’t let the scale trick you.

With that said, I mentioned in a previous article how a game changer for me was working with a professional coach, who makes custom made training plans for me every six weeks. Training is good regardless, sure, but if you really want results, working with a professional can really help, much more than training without a plan.

So, if working out with a plan is necessary, why do we so often overlook planning our nutrition?

Nutrition in fitness should follow a scientific approach exactly in the way a workout program should. After a while, eating healthy for me was not enough: there can’t be fat loss without calories deficit, and when I started counting calories I’ve noticed that while I was eating healthy, I was making a lot of mistakes. For example:

• eating too much of healthy food will not give you the calories deficit needed for fat loss. If I need 2200 calories a day to lose fat, and I eat 3000 calories of healthy food, it’s still a calories surplus;
• eating too little prevents you from losing fat. There, I said it. This is one of the biggest “what the hell” I’ve ever realized in my life: I was eating too little in order to lose fat. When you eat too little and your body goes into starvation mode, it starts consuming as little calories as possible to conserve its energy stores. Therefore yes, calorie deficit is necessary, but not to an amount in which your body goes into starvation mode.

How would you know if you are eating the right amount of food, if you’re not counting calories?

Ever since I started, it really was a game changer: I see progress happening more regularly, my energy levels are skyrocketing, and I feel confident I’m doing the right thing. I’m counting calories and grams of proteins of every single meal and yes, it is a tedious process, but wouldn’t you like to scientifically know, without a single doubt, that you are following the right approach?

Counting calories can be overwhelming at fist, but after a while it becomes more and more natural, the same way you progress with working out.

And yet, calorie counting is still seen as crazy, obsessive, compulsive, exaggerated behavior: why?

Why do we all agree that working out is necessary for fat loss, but monitoring calories is seen as obsession?

I don’t have an answer for you yet; I know fore sure that calories/macros counting needs to be normalized. The way I see it, the crazy behavior is going random and expecting results, rather than following a scientific, data-driven approach.

And let me tell you: ever since I started counting calories, not only I actually eat more than before, but I have a much more relaxed relationship with food.

So, next time you see someone weighting food on a kitchen scale, do not judge, or call that person obsessed: it is simply following a plan in a scientific way.

Follow me for more tips and tricks on how organizing calorie counting, coming soon!