If you want to lose weight, you have to ensure you eat fewer calories than you burn. All diets rely on this energy balance, regardless of the food choices or groups they insist on. So whether you’re eating a Ketogenic diet, a vegan diet, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Intermittent Fasting or anything in between, what you’re actually doing is restricting your calories which is making you lose weight.
As long as you don’t make some common mistakes when tracking calories, it’s a method that works really well.
When accurately tracked, calorie restriction is a really effective way to lose weight and more importantly, body fat. It forces you to make good choices, restrict your 'high calorie’ choices to smaller quantities and brings about a much more acute awareness of how calorie dense a lot of foods are. It’s a nutritional education tool as much as a weight loss tool.
Tracking calories is arguably the most accurate way of ensuring weight loss, but only if it’s done right (sounds obvious). What some people do is get complacent though, or not understand the nuances of the method. In this article we’re going to look at a few of the common mistakes when tracking calories. These mistakes can make the method completely ineffective, so they’re worth paying attention to. It also may help you discover why you aren’t losing weight, even if you think you’re tracking calories…
You Forget About Liquid Calories
This is a really common one I come across, so I had to put it first. When people are tracking their calories, they’ll often only think about foods they’re eating and not about the liquids they’re drinking. A cup of coffee with 1 sugar and whole milk comes in at anywhere between 50 and 100 calories, depending on the cup size. Forget about 3 of those per day and you’ve underestimated by up to 300 calories.
A can of Coke is 142 calories. If you drink one per day and forgot to add it, you’ve missed out on nearly 1000 calories per week.
The obvious lesson here is…. THE CALORIES IN YOUR DRINKS COUNT! Make sure you add them. It’s more than just food.
You Don’t Consider Accurate Food Amounts
If a recipe says something like ‘add a tablespoon of peanut butter’, you have to drill down into the detail. Look at the picture below for a good example of what I mean - a tablespoon size portion can be different things to different people, so make sure you weigh the amount to know the calories accurately. What you consider to be a portion size may be WAAAAAY overestimating what the manufacturer thinks a portion size should be!
If you’re not considering accurate amounts, you may be dramatically underestimating your calorie intake, which will throw your weight loss plans up in the air. Make sure you know exactly how many calories you are eating if you want to lose weight.
You Can Get Complacent With Portion Sizes
Just like the example above, when somebody has been counting calories for a long time, they can get complacent and think they ‘know what a portion looks like’. This may be right, but even the most experienced eye can get things wrong. If you’re not losing weight, start weighing things again because you’re probably getting your portion sizes (and therefore your calorie intake) wrong, which ruins your chances of losing weight.
You Don’t Think About What the Food is Cooked In
This is another common one. Take roasted vegetables for example. They’re healthy - very healthy in fact, but they may not always be low in calories. When you roast your vegetables, you may have completely forgotten to add the calories of the oil you roasted them in to your calorie tracker.
If when roasting a tray of vegetables you use 3 tablespoons of olive oil (which isn’t actually that much for a large roasting tin), you’ll have added nearly 360 calories to your food. If you don’t record that, you’ll have totally misrepresented your calorie intake for the day.
Common Mistakes When Tracking Calories: Concluded
You have to consider everything that you eat and drink and the best way to do that is to weigh and measure your food accurately. If you aren’t doing so, you’ll potentially ruin your chances of losing weight and won’t know why. If that sounds like you, where you’ve been tracking your calories but not seeing any weight loss, take a look at these tips and see if any of them describe you and your situation!
By the way, this isn’t a new thing - take a look at this study published in 1992 that showed a discrepancy between self-report and actual calorie consumption amongst weight loss participants. It shows we still haven’t learned much!
If you want help with your weight loss, come and see us at AdMac Fitness. We have helped hundreds of people to lose weight with sensible, achievable plans. Maybe you could be our next success story!
At AdMac Fitness we’re not about fads, fashions and short term fixes. We want you to succeed properly over the long term, so with our help and advice you can get your fitness back on track! If you’d like us to help you, contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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