Calorie Counting - Curse or Blessing?
Counting calories for over a year has been part of my daily life. I deliberately did not write anything about it yet. Why? Because it's an incredibly difficult topic for me.
First of all, yes, to lose weight, you have to eat less calories than you consume. Based on height, weight and level of activity, you calculate your basal metabolic rate and then try to stay below that magic limit with daily calories. Be it through less food, or through exercise to balance the calorie balance.
Slimming simply broken down to numbers. Even Weight Watchers uses this system with points rather than calories.
When I started counting calories, I learned so much about my food. I used the app MyFitnessPal and entered every meal to see how many calories it has. So I could see what I could eat to stay below my 1600 kcal turnover. Sometimes I was shocked by how many calories I had in my usual dishes! Two slices of bread with butter and 2 slices of cheese for almost 550 kcal ?! I was shocked! Little by little, I learned how much salary and macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, fat) my daily meals had.
I still find this process of dealing with food very insane and instructive. to be able to better estimate portion sizes!
Now comes the big BUT ...
... I could not stop counting calories.
I was obsessed, jede.einzelne.Mahlzeit. to enter in my app. I sometimes planned for whole days for calories and spent up to an hour a day in MyFitnessPal to screw around my macros. Eating out was barely fun because I did not have a kitchen scales to measure all the ingredients, then put them into my app.
I wanted absolute meticulous control about my diet. One day was good if I stayed below the 1600 kcal. At the same time, I also did sports 4-5 times a week, but mostly I was too tired, because I lacked energy. I had no relation to my hunger sensation, but just ate for numbers in my app.
At some point, I realized that my behavior is not healthy and that I have to learn to listen to my body again. Because I have hardly lost with the calorie counting. At that time I had reached the -30 kg, and my weight settled down to 65 kg. I just had constant pressure to stay below the 1600 kcal mark.
The causes:
- The calorie and especially the macronutrient details in the app are not always accurate. Most of the time the app shows too few calories for each food!
- To stay below the magic number, I eventually cheated myself and typed fewer until the numbers were right.
I fought with an app for a year, made my mood dependent on a number every day. After several failed attempts, I finally managed to break away from calorie counting. For 2 months, I have not documented my meals in the app, but am learning to listen to my hunger again.There's going to be an extra post about this weird phenomenon!
I know very well how big a serving of food X has to be to get an average calorie count for my meal ( 400-600 kcal, 3 times a day + 1 x dessert). I've learned a lot about nutrition through calorie counting and what foods I want to avoid in everyday life. I still add some meals to the app to better judge how big I can make my portions. Luckily, very rarely.
But please, take care. Luckily, I realized early on that my meticulous behavior was starting to get dangerous. If you can not stop adding any meal to your cell phone and spend all day planning your meals, then your alarm bells should ring! As I said, as long as you are reasonable with calorie counting, you can learn a lot about your diet. But an app should not determine your life!
