Calorie tracking or food journal

[Anonymous]

Calorie tracking, done accurately, is a guaranteed method of weight loss.

1. First calculate your TDEE. You can google and use a free TDEE calculator. Put in your height, weight, and for the love of god please be realistic about your activity level. Most of us are sedentary. I am 5’3, 115 lbs, female, sedentary, so my current maintenance calories are 1,435 calories per day OR more accurately, 10,045 per week. When I was 160 lbs, my maintenance calories were about 1,700 per day or 11,900 per week. So at that time, my deficit goal was 1,200 calories per day (8,400 calories per week), a deficit of 500/day or 3500/week. **A 500 calorie deficit per day (3500 per week) equals 1 lb of weight loss per week.** To achieve this, it is super important to (a) know your actual maintenance calories and (b) know and stick to your deficit calories if you want to see results. The weekly calories matter a lot. If you eat at a deficit 5 days a week but at a surplus the other 2 days, you will maintain (not lose!) because you cancel out your deficit for those five days.

2. Buy a food scale. We are all terrible about guestimating serving sizes. Blame your own denial, American portions, whatever. But buy a cheap food scale and weigh all of your ingredients (weighing is massively more accurate than volume).

3. **Track everything!** Some things that seem very small are HUGELY calorically dense. Cooking and finishing oil, salad dressings, butter, etc have so much more calories than you’d expect. Just two tablespoons of olive oil is 240 calories. If you don’t track stuff like this, you are likely eating over your allotted calorie amount.

4. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Be honest with yourself about what you are eating. Maybe even confront why you are eating it. Understand that you will often feel hungry while in a calorie deficit. That is OK.

5. If all else fails, get on a GLP-1.

Food journaling can be nice and maybe it has its own value, but nothing will beat tracking and counting calories. If you actually want to lose weight, that’s the way to do it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is real for me, so please help me decide.

Which one is better for me right now? I’m attempting a 3-week food journal or tracking so I can show my doctors that nothing is moving the needle.

1. Calorie tracking. I was aiming for a 500 cal deficit. I figured out my steady state is 2000-2200. So I figure I will attempt a range of 1500-1900.

2. Just a food journal. This has the plus of allowing me to be, ironically, more accurate? Not more accurate… I mean. It’s hard to track calories accurately. A simple food journal with no quantities helped me lose 15 pounds a couple of years ago.
The less work of a food journal that helps me see overall patterns but not measuring food, helps me track things I eat out, or the random meal served by my friend at a dinner party. Instead of being unable to track that meal.

This second thing is better in some ways…. But it’s not working anymore. I gained all my weight back. Plus recently another 5 lbs pretty rapidly.



**this is a real, and sort of upsetting, debate in my head. Please help me go forward.

If you want to show your doctors that "nothing is moving the needle" then you need to trach with 100% accuracy and consistency. I can list everything I ate today and it would look great but if I don't include quantities then it really doesn't mean much.

Another thing to track is your consistency. if you have a calorie deficit goal but only really hit that target 60 or 70% of the time then that is important to know because eating in a deficit M-f then overeating all weekend will definitely make losing a LOT harder.