When I wrote about my first steps towards a better diet, I mentioned nutritional labels. The grander theme is the power of knowledge, which is what, to me, calorie counting is about. I didn’t realise the importance of that power, however, until a friend dropped a knowledge bomb on me that shocked me shitless.
One night, midway through Semester 2 of my second year of uni, I was watching football with a mate at K-Bar, our local uni bar. I told Ed about my dietary plight, as I ordered a pizza. While I knew that pizzas weren’t a health food, he seemed a bit shocked, after I shared my goal of losing weight, that I ordered one. When I asked why he was so shocked, he told me that pizzas could have up to 1,000 calories.
With that little tidbit weighing on my conscience, I had far and away the least enjoyable pizza of my life. But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by his knowledge. Getting deeper into our chat on diets, he showed me an app called MyFitnessPal. He didn’t use it consistently himself, but he said it has helped him make better food decisions in the past. Essentially, you either scan a barcode or manually enter the name and amount of the food you’re having, and it tells you all the nutritional details about it. You can then track your calorie and nutrient intake for the day, taking into account step count or exercise you add, and set plus or deficit goals.
Initial roadblocks and workarounds
I downloaded the app, got home, and immediately started scanning the barcode of every packaged food I had. I ran out of steam pretty quickly, because even though it saves you a lot of manual entry work, it’s a lot more work than just not caring. I also ran into quite the pickle: I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, which don’t always come in packages. Having never paid attention to precise amounts or weights in my life, I couldn’t accurately estimate how many grams of broccoli I just added to my dinner.
I didn’t want to let that stop me though, so I tried a few things. First, since losing weight was my goal, I made very conservative estimates. If I wasn’t sure, I’d tell the app I was having huge amounts of carrots, even if it was closer to 100g. If I could be fucked, I’d sometimes Google what a typical serving of a certain fruit or veggie would look like.
Other times, the app lets you select a large, medium, or small unit of said food, like a medium onion, rather than however many grams of onion that is. Either way, I soon learned that by far the majority of my favourite fruits and veggies were ultra light on calories anyway, so I could eat as much as I was conservatively estimating and get fuller without too many extra calories.
As for exercise, I was always scared that my intensity of whatever chosen exercise wasn’t as high as what the app assumed. So I played the same game, only the other way round: I’d tell the app I played 30 min of football, even if it was more like 40.
Altogether, it was a bit of an effort, but knowing it worked for Ed made me that much more motivated to keep it up and give it a fair go. I’m glad I did, because with that attitude, I soon picked up things that made it easier.
One of my housemates, Jim, often used a kitchen scale. I never bothered to notice before, but now that I was desperately trying to figure out what the fuck 85 grams of potato looks like, I used it a few times, before getting my own. You can easily get a good one for under $20 on Amazon – or even less if you explore second hand options like eBay or Facebook Marketplace, which I sadly didn’t at the time.
Con: Eating out gets complicated
Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I became aware of further roadblocks. What if I ate out? Or at a friends’ house? For eating out, some popular items are in the system, like a Whopper or a Big Mac. But any local restaurants that aren’t at least national chains, you’re shit out of luck. You could ask exactly what’s inside, or guesstimate, but do you really want to be that guy bringing his kitchen scale along to a meal, deconstructing it, and weighing all the ingredients? Or the guy asking how many grams of which type of blue cheese they added to your burger? Hats off to you, if you exist. But I was shy, and it’s a huge effort. Probably a good thing for my friendships too.
Anyway, eating out was usually a treat for me then, so it was probably best for me not to know what was in my triple burger. Having said that, if I wasn’t freaking out about knowing I just consumed over 1,000 calories, I couldn’t help but mentally try and calculate what it would be, and my mental estimates were way worse. So in a way, tracking, despite the effort, actually calmed my mind – and that was even further reason to make better food choices.
I soon stopped bothering if I wasn’t at a popular eatery. I didn’t eat out or at friends’ that often anyway, so as long as I was tracking the majority of my meals, that’s still a massive difference from before. Plus, over time, using the app made me better at estimating calories and nutrients in different meals! Sometimes, I wish I didn’t have that knowledge because parties with barbies inevitably meant at least four big plates of food throughout the night. I stopped caring whenever I was remotely tipsy, which was nice, but then I’d spend the whole next day re-counting in horror what I ate.
Pro: I stopped bingeing!
While caloric hangover was far from pleasant, I came to terms with accepting the occasional binge if I was over at someone’s. Again, I wasn’t there that often, it was free, and, amazingly enough, I stopped having binges by myself! Since the day I started tracking, I did not have one solo binge.
Seeing that magic number of remaining calories allowed on screen made me feel accountable to staying under it. It helped that, for the most part, I didn’t go to bed hungry. By eating mostly low-carb meals, I was getting a good helping of protein and more fat and fibre than before. Though I could have used even more fat and fibre, it was a good enough mix to keep me reasonably full. After getting used to going to bed slightly hungry during my more intense dieting days, even mostly full felt luxurious and sustainable. That combination of fullness and accountability made it easy and even exciting for me to stay under.
Con: Justifying sweets regularly
The danger came when I started using the app to justify having sweets. Sometimes, even after all my meals for the day, I’d have over a hundred calories to spare. I should have either called it and had a bigger deficit, or at least fill the gap with something healthy, getting a greater variety of nutrients. But, perhaps subconsciously missing my binges, I wanted some way of treating myself. Or maybe, my cooking was terrible, so I felt like I didn’t treat myself without a sweet.
I soon started to have lower calorie meals, smaller portions, or go for walks to open up the slack for me to have something sweet. I think this may have been a big part of why I didn’t binge anymore: the fact that I was treating myself often enough and thus enjoying my baseline diet. When I was losing weight before that, I’d skip whole meals and probably go way under my calorie amount, which was fast but not fun, so I kept falling back.
Pro: Eating more and enjoying myself during the day/starve self less
Now, seeing objectively that I can have lunch and even maybe a treat while still remaining under my limit, I was no longer scared of an extra meal a day. Instead, I embraced more balanced hunger levels throughout the day, no longer needing to go through the middle of the day starving and lethargic. Of course, it was a bit more work with an extra meal to cook (or buy), but absolutely worth it.
As for snacks and sweets, I’d never have more than allowed while remaining under my calorie max for the day. If I could afford two Oreos, I wouldn’t even think of the third. Given that I usually awaken an insatiable desire for more (MORE!!) when anything sweet tantalises my tongue, I think this hard boundary helped me enjoy the sweets that much more. No longer able to get lost in that ephemeral feeling of embarking on a journey of infinite candy, I had to savour every bite.
Pro: Slowing down and enjoying the journey
Now that I was enjoying the journey, I didn’t need results as fast. As someone who was previously able to lose weight very quickly, I needed to get used to this. But counting calories is what finally gave me sight of the bigger picture: if I lose a lot of weight, but then binge regularly, the binges are no longer an anomaly. They’re a part of my dietary habits, and they’re destructive. No matter how good my “baseline” diet, it’s a bad combination. Treating myself just enough to not give into desire again allowed me to behave sustainably and improve long-term.
Knowing that I was under my alotted daily calories, even if by just a little bit, made it that much easier to not get impatient and starve mysself to lose weight faster. If anything, some placebo may have kicked in, where, if I ate as little as I used to when losing weight, but were to see that I was several hundred calories or even a thousand under my allowance, I may feel hungry just knowing that.
That it’s ok to slow down wasn’t something I realised straight away. Part of me was unsure of the results; now that I was changing so slowly, I couldn’t notice it easily myself. But a girl that I was into, Leigh, noticed. When I saw her at the end of second year, she complimented me on my apparently visible weight loss. That was an awesome validation, which spurned me on because that’s when I realised the pay-off might take time, but it does arrive. And isn’t it way better to enjoy yourself while still getting a payoff, rather than getting it quickly but suffering to do so and always falling back?
Either way, this idea of enjoying the journey and thinking holistically was one that I carry with me to this day. If anything, I’ve tweaked the specifics of how I interpret and implement this idea to be healthier over time, but that core lesson was insanely valuable. Nevertheless, there was a danger to my interpretation at the time.
Sweets, even a single one a day, simply aren’t healthy. Without wanting to go too in-depth here, one Snickers (a standard treat of mine in the day) has about 28g of sugar. Guidelines differ, but the WHO recommends no more than 25g of added sugar a day. Once we take into account the fact that many everyday foods naturally contain a certain amount of sugar, and that hidden sugars are added to plenty more, anything on top of that, let alone a processed, half-sugar based rubbish food like candy bars, is just asking for trouble. If I’m eating the equivalent of a Snickers almost every day, that means I’m chronically over the recommended limits. I may not be as insanely over the limit as during my binges, but it’s not much better.
The biggest test: losing my new superpower for three months
As my second year of uni came to an end, I landed a Summer internship at a bank in Frankfurt. One of my favourite parts of the company (hell, the only thing I liked) was their incredible canteen, which all employees got access to by paying a recurring fee (for the amount and quality of food you get, it was well worth it). Unlike the occasional meal out, however, eating in a canteen was now the norm (bar weekends), which meant almost permanently being unable to track my calories – just as I was getting really into the groove.
After a minor freakout, I learned that my new eating habits were still going strong, even without the ability to count. I could at least track my home-made breakfast, my arvo snack of fruit, plus whatever shitty canned food I’d get myself for dinner. Still, not being able to track a single lunch, and frequent weekend meals out, was a terrifying prospect.
It didn’t help that when I say this canteen was incredible, I mean it. Every day, you’d have three delicious and, for the most part, reasonably healthy main options. But that was only the beginning. There was a fourth option – a salad bar. This part never changed, but it didn’t need to. It seemed to have every nutrient under the sun – every vegetable you could dream of, eggs, seeds, nuts, feta cheese, dressings, you name it. Many people went for that if they didn’t like the main three options. Not me – oh no, I was a pioneer, a true innovator in the art of stacking my plate. I’d get whatever main option I fancied, and then top off at the salad bar with anything and everything that wasn’t on my plate yet. Nobody else did it, but nobody told me it wasn’t allowed either!
Unlike my previous buffet binge bonanzas, I only stuck to the healthy stuff! (At least what I thought at the time was healthy: mostly on point, but with some lessons yet to learn). Admittedly, you weren’t allowed to go for seconds, and even if you were, the pressure of wanting to look semi-professional would have stopped me.
Etiquette aside, I believe that even if I’d had the option to go for more, the calorie counting mindset would have successfully stopped me. Given the sheer variety of ingredients I added, It hurt my brain to retrospectively try and calculate how calorific my lunch was, and I’m sure I missed out on things I sprinkled throughout, like sweetcorn. But, as I learned before, most veggies are close to negligible in isolation, so it was mostly the dense foods like meats, cheeses, sauces, and carby sides I had to remember I ate. I sometimes took photos to remember what I piled on the plate, so I could try tracking it later.
Con: conservative estimates pushed to the extreme
Estimating my lunchtime calories got easier with time, as the salad bar options were more or less the same, and only the “big stuff” changed. The one problem with not knowing the exact weight of that day’s fish filet or steak was that I had to estimate. Remember how I was conservative even with the app? With nothing but my brain to rely on, I went even harder, and mentally assumed not only a bigger piece of meat than I had, but that it was more calorie-dense than what the app would sat. Being borderline close to my daily limit was upsetting if I had to estimate, so I did anything I could to be reasonably confident I was staying under.
This might not sound so bad in itself. After all, if my goal is to lose weight, then these estimates help me stay under while also not freaking out about being over. But combined with another mistake I made, it caused some problems:
Con: not knowing when to stop
My ultra-conservative estimates worked, though perhaps a little too well. When I met some old friends to watch Germany play Italy at the 2016 Euros, they commented on how tiny I looked compared to my usual self. Some were downright concerned. It made sense: Most of my teen and adult life, I hovered around the 74-76 kg mark. When I lost weight before my second year, I was around 72 at my lowest. Before meeting my friends for the game, the scale said 68kg. That would have caused me concern but I ignored it, because I genuinely didn’t believe it – I assumed I’d had way more food than that and couldn’t fathom having lost so much weight so quickly. I thought the scale was faulty. Now that my friends were worried, I realised it must have been accurate.
Still, I didn’t see a problem. Encouraged by Leigh taking notice and knowing that my weight loss worked and was visible to others, I kept going. Excited by no longer being on a fatty trajectory (being underweight was never something that crossed my mind before), I “locked in” my new weight and 30″ waistline (down from 33″ at my highest) by buying some new clothes with that sweet, sweet internship salary.
I became so used to the satisfaction of staying under that top calorie limit, and waking up feeling lean the next day, that I never paused to think about when I should stop. After all, I got into calorie counting in the first place to make better choices, avoid binges, shed some weight, and become more consistent. I already shed more than just “some” weight, and yet I kept going. Being so used to staying under, even a slight plus felt scary. I kept assuming that my weekend drinks and bigger meals were so calorific I’d have to make up for them during the week – that I couldn’t afford a single plus or even balance during the week.
Only when Leigh, in my third and final year of my Bachelor’s, commented on how disconcertingly small I looked, did I realise that my friends might have a point. I finally gave in and changed my goal in MyFitnessPal to “maintain”, which immediately increased my calorie limit by a bit. I could still stay under that if I wanted, but I no longer had to stay under an already deficit number.
Sudden U-turn: bulking
I remained under my “normal” weight for that whole year, but at least I didn’t further lose weight. That is, until February, when I had severe food poisoning. For two weeks, I barely ate. Next time on the scale, I was down to 66kg. That, together with Leigh’s comment weighing on my mind, made me start purposefully bulking. For the first time in my life. Which also meant that I had no idea how to do it. Excited by the idea, I bought heaps of peanut butter and a newly discovered Bounty chocolate powder. I didn’t eat that much more during the day, or have bigger meals or snacks. It was just in the evening that I relished the opportunity to indulge in some chocolatey, peanut buttery goodness without guilt.
For those nights, I didn’t bother tracking – I just wanted to enjoy myself and be on a big plus. But remember how calories are not the enemy when trying to lose weight? Well they’re not exactly your friends when trying to gain. I mean, you need them, and lots of them, to make gains. But focusing purely on calories like I did ignores the quality of the food you’re ingesting.
Not all calories are created (or digested) equal; they’ll likely influence your body shape differently. I wanted to gain weight while maintaining or improving on) my physique. Had I purely focused on sweets, which I may have done if I didn’t love peanut butter so dearly, I’d have just gotten fatter. While there are better things for bulking than peanut butter, at least I did slowly get back to my ~68kg “recent baseline”.
It’s crazy to me that I had the tool right there. I could have just switched the app’s mode to “gain” and gained with quality foods, over a longer period, in a non-destructive way. I seem to just have been so single-mindedly focused on losing, then keeping off, weight, that I never considered that the lesson of enjoying the journey applies both ways. In the meantime, I can confirm that it does, because over the past few months I’ve bulked slowly over time, without a single sweet on the way.
The binges return
Anyway, back to early 2017: Once I reached my recent baseline again, I stopped buying the extra sweets – at least on a near-daily basis. But, perhaps having re-gained my taste for chocolatey goodness, perhaps because I discovered a whole new store with cheap, good sweets I never tried, I had some binges again.
Bite for bite, I still tracked every other calorie I ate, but when it came time to indulge, I’d ignore the app altogether. Just like before I started tracking, I’d do pretty well for about a week, before having supermarket trolleys’ worth of sweets in an evening. Unlike before, I didn’t starve myself during the day, I just tracked to make sure I was on at least a slight minus, which was easily doable. I can’t recall exactly when I gave in again, but it was around the Summer holidays, so it must have been around May or June – a year and a few months after I started tracking in early 2016.
The end of the tracking experiment
I was still afraid to gain further weight above my “new baseline” on purpose, so any non-binge day had to be a minus. But whether I’d have maintained gravitational equilibrium on that binge-slight minus cycle, I’ll never know, because only a few weeks later, after graduating, I went on holiday, and we all know the rules change on holiday. First I travelled the UK with mum, which meant no binges for that period but lots of food and smaller, but more regular sweets throughout. No amount of hilly walking could combat the constant intake.
Next, I went on a trip to Morocco with one of my best mates. Having insanely huge piles of home-cooked Moroccan stews and tajines for every meal was hard to work off, no matter how much we surfed and walked and smoked hash and played cards. It was only a 5-day trip, but the sheer scale was enough to push me over 70kg again. Because it was largely through good, fresh food (although we most certainly indulged in our fair share of fig bakes and jam croissants), I roughly maintained my physique.
Not minding that, I didn’t try to cut down again after that – but I also didn’t continue gaining. I started a job in Hamburg. Because we ate lunch out almost every day as a team, tracking was hopeless. I don’t remember whether I tried semi-tracking again for a while (at least tracking the stuff I made at home), but it was at some point around here (July or August 2017) that I stopped bothering. It wasn’t surprising that I also kept up the occasional weekend binge here.
A brief look at the post-tracking era
I don’t mean to bore you with my entire weight history. I do, however, feel that at least a snappy summary of my weight and physique post-tracking helps me reflect on and my behaviour before and after tracking. It puts things into perspective and helps make the final judgement call. Without further ado, Hamburg soon became Melbourne, where I moved for my Masters. Within a pretty short time-frame, I got back to my old, late teen/young adult baseline of the mid-70kg range. Like before, I ate a lot during the break (before my degree started). Some was good stuff, but there were regular sweets and the odd binge. Unlike before, I locked in my new, higher weight with some new chinos and jeans. Other clothes soon followed, and I hovered around the 72-76 range until today, with subtler ups and downs.
During my degree, I once again stayed on campus, and once again had to constantly fight temptation of desserts in the canteen. I was pretty good at not eating them most days, but still had my binges – some phases with more of them, some with close to none, but the next one was always on the horizon.
Things got better when I graduated and moved out, and no longer had access to limitless “free” sweets. But after less than three months of that, a certain virus reached Australia and we entered lockdown, during which I made (and finished) a new massive dessert (or three) every weekend. It wasn’t until we left lockdown and I happened to read more about nutrition that I’d go without binges AND without occasional baseline treats long term. I haven’t had a single self-inflicted binge since October 2020 (7 months at the time of writing), and without tracking.
Verdict: I don’t need it right now, but it was worth it for the lessons
So what does this tell us? That tracking is not the answer? Well, not exactly. On one hand, I’m currently in a very good place without any tracking. This is thanks to a mix of a consistent low-carb, high-fat diet and having improved my cooking skills, so I enjoy most of my meals without the need for sweets. I can easily bulk or lose weight, sans tracking, with no mental or physical difficulty. On the other hand, I did learn a lot from my time tracking calories, much of which I apply to this day. There’s also a bunch of ways in which could have tracked a lot more effectively.
From obsessively scanning every food I ate (and I ate a big variety), I got a good feeling of the caloric content of most of my staple foods. With a year of practice under my belt, I still remember a lot of that, so even when I don’t track, I have a feeling for how calorific things are. In some cases, I was pleasantly surprised, learning that I could have way more of certain things. In other cases, I became scared of healthy foods just because they have a lot of calories – foods like oils and nuts and seeds. By avoiding anything that was too high in calories, I was missing out on nutritional variety. Remember, calories are not the enemy. Had I added higher-calorie, but healthy foods to my diet, I’d have felt full for longer, enjoyed myself more, and not felt as strong an urge for sweets afterwards.
Focusing purely on calories meant that I ignored other important ingredients, like sugar content. When I was looking for “better” breakfast muesli brands, I bought those with the lowest calories. What I didn’t realise until later, however, is that those tended to have a higher sugar content, so even if I stayed under my limit thanks to them, I was destroying my body and setting myself up for a sugar crash, just to feel hungry again.
On that note, another thing I learned was the difference between hunger and appetite. I’ve written before about my monstrosity of an appetite; how I can keep going and going and barely feel full. Especially as a twenty-year-old, I could eat a big meal, and only minutes later salivate at the idea of another. I’d often dream about dinner just after finishing lunch. But by setting hard boundaries thanks to MyFitnessPal, I realised that I don’t suffer that much between meals. Yes, I could eat, but hunger feels different. Even without tracking, I can now better listen to my body’s signals. If I want to bulk, feeding my appetite might be good. But if I want to maintain or cut, it’ll have to be hunger, not just appetite. This is especially helpful when it comes to saying no to free (or scarce) food – office donuts and the like.
Ultimately, how well it works depends on how you use it and where you’re coming from. I recently met someone who tracks calories specifically to indulge, not to deprive themselves. Sometimes, if she happens to be under by a big enough gap, she’d treat herself – something she might not dare to without that knowledge. Similarly, given that I came from a massive-minus diet just before tracking, I actually got to eat more. And while the app was an effort, it was a lot less effort than my constant questioning of “gee, I wonder how many calories was in that?”. And just the fact that we have an app to do it all in one place, as opposed to using paper and pencil or a spreadsheet, and Googling every ingredient’s calories, is a godsend. The extra effort is a drop in the ocean compared to what it once was.
On the topic of effort, if you eat out a lot, and you start to cook more at home to make it easier to track, then that’s another fantastic change. Yes, it’s an extra effort, but by far the majority of your meals should be cooked at home if you want to be sure you’re eating the right stuff. Again, cooking at home should help you choose the most nutritious ingredients, rather than the lowest-calorie ones.
So what would I change if I tracked now? Well, I’d try and look at the bigger picture: not just calories, but am I getting a good dose of all my nutrients – macros as well as micros. For everyday life, I’m reasonably confident in getting a good balance of fat, protein, and fibre. But I’ve long been intrigued by trying to go keto. For that, I’d struggle without tracking, as the carb intake, as well as carb-to-fat ratio is very strict on that diet.
Overall, I’m glad I tried this, especially for as long as I did. Even though I’m perfectly happy without it at this point, I do feel like I owe a lot of what I know today to my time tracking – both the nutritional knowledge I gained, and learning from the mistakes I made.
Have you ever tracked your calories? If so, how was it? If not, would you consider it, and why?