If you try to do that, you’ll just drive yourself crazy. If a calculator tells you to eat 2000 calories, you don’t necessarily have to be perfect and eat 2000 calories on the dot every single day. Knowing that calorie calculators aren’t 100% accurate, your intake doesn’t have to be perfect to still work. Things don't have to be perfect to work.just consistent If you still can’t figure out why you’re not seeing results and can’t manage to break through the plateau, then get some help from a good nutrition coach. If it turns out you weren’t staying very close, then clearly your first item of business is to get back on track (yes even on the weekends). Measure and log everything you eat just to make sure you’re sticking to the plan. If you’re counting calories/macros and aren’t seeing progress, the first place you need to look is your adherence. So if you’re not seeing results, it’s not the calculator's fault at that point. ![]() You know damn well you can’t say with any honesty you were sticking very closely on those days. You were tracking your food and logging 2000 calories Monday through Friday and then on the weekends you completely stop tracking and go H.A.M. Let’s say a calculator told you to eat 2000 calories to lose weight. If you’re not consistently sticking to the numbers, you can’t blame the calculator. The #1 rule for using calorie calculators or dieting in general is to be honest with yourself about your adherence to the plan. ![]() Yes, that calculator could be totally wrong, but you won’t know that for sure if you’re only semi-following it. It’s very likely you’ll need to adjust multiple aspects of your eating habits, lifestyle and environment for best results and create long-lasting change.Ī calculator definitely isn’t going to help you if you don’t follow what it suggests. Calories matter but there’s more to nutrition than just that. True story: that’s dieting and nutrition in an overly-simplified nutshell-make a small change and see what happens.Ī calorie estimate isn’t Captain Save-a-Diet.Ī calorie count isn’t going to provide everything you need to be successful. From there, I could experiment and give myself more or less food to see if there was a change. From there, you can make changes by tweaking the caloric intake either up or down to help keep you on track with reaching your goal.įor example, if I ate 2900 calories for several weeks and my weight stayed roughly the same over a long period of time, I could say that 2900 calories may be enough to maintain my current weight. By eating a consistent amount, you can determine if that was not enough or too much energy intake depending on what happens to your body as a result of following the recommendations. A 2014 study found that a large proportion of individuals, overestimated their physical activity. The people who overestimated tend to already be healthy and had lower BMI so those individuals perceived they were more active than they actually were ( Source).įor all of the reasons I mentioned, no calorie calculator can ever be 100% correct.Īre Calorie Calculations still useful? Absolutely.Īll initial calculations of calories or macros are starting points to help you eat a consistent amount food for a period of time. This generally tends to get grossly overestimated. Many require you to personally assess your activity level or how much you move throughout the day. Some formulas require certain parameters like body fat percentage which most people don’t know to any degree of certainty and most body fat measurements tools (calipers, InBody machines, bathroom scales) aren’t all that accurate to begin with. They're also entirely based on the truthfulness of the info you feed into the calculator. Individuals vary and it's impossible to know everyone's exact needs. They’re based on data collected during experiments from general populations of people to form an average and reasonable prediction for caloric needs, but there are always exceptions and outliers to these predictions. There are simply too many factors at play like: They cannot determine the exact calorie/macronutrient intake needs for an individual with 100% accuracy. Is that calculator right? The Answer is still maybe.Īll calculators are estimates and attempts to PREDICT energy needs. Here’s the long answer to that original and seemingly straightforward question. I am here to clear the air about what a calorie/macro calculator is and is not as well as how you can use what a calculator tells you to reach your nutrition goals. After all, that’s ultimately what matters in the long run. You can decide if counting works for you by how consistent you are at doing it. ![]() Calorie/macro counting works for fat loss but so do other methods and diets as long as they help you maintain an energy deficit. But I’m not here to present on whether you should or shouldn’t count calories to help you lose fat and weight.
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