When Calorie Counting Doesn't Work

What happens when you are carefully counting, measuring, and weighing out your food, and the scale just won’t budge?

Every person has a RMR which stands for Resting Metabolic Rate. What this means is that if you were to lay in bed all day, you still need to consume a certain amount of energy to keep your heart, lunges, kidneys, and vital organs running. When you consistently consume under this amount, your body is resourceful and finds ways to keep running. Your bodies job is to keep you alive, when it isn’t getting the energy it needs to survive, it slows itself down to preserve energy. Although, your fitness tracker might have said you burned 300 calories, your resourceful body could have slowed itself down. When you only burned 100 calories.

Every person’s body digest and absorbs food differently. Processed, cooked, or raw food is going to be broken down an absorbed in the body differently. Packaged foods with calorie labels can be wrong up to 30% of the time. Food measured in a lab doesn’t take account for how different bodies process the energy. Then add in how humans are not the best at remembering information. Even when we think we are tracking what we eat, we can misremember up to 1,000 calories. Do that for a few days and no wonder why the scale isn’t moving.

The easiest and most effective way to lose or gain weight is to ditch the calorie counting and rely on your own body. Your body gives cues as to when it is hungry, full, thirsty, and tired. Your job is to listen to what It needs. This concept is simple yet can feel over whelming. How do you listen to your body, when most of us have gone years with ignoring what it is asking for. It is going to take a little patience as well as practice.

Eat until 80%, 100%, or 110% full depending on your goals. Eating to “80% full”. Clients eat until “just satisfied” instead of “stuffed” or “full”. This is usually 2-3 bites before they would feel full. Eating to 110% full is ideal for people who are wanting to gain muscle with very little fat. For most people this is around 2-3 bites past when they felt full. Focus on eating foods such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans and legumes, lean proteins, nuts and seeds, and other healthy fats makes it easier to regulate appetite and helps improve satiety. Your body is phenomenal, your job is to listen to what it needs and to respond accordingly.