I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When you’re watching your weight, counting calories is one of the hardest things to do. It’s 100% necessary, but can become the most mentally draining exercises you can partake in. I’ve found myself in places where I will reconsider a bite of an extremely satisfying, lean and healthy sandwich I prepared myself as I’m recalculating the calories of my day in my head. It’s maddening. Not only can it drive you completely insane, but it’s a frustrating catalyst, making it near impossible to continue a healthy track for the rest of your life. But again, it’s necessary. You need to know how many calories you consume to lose or maintain your weight. Weight is nothing more than an excess of calories. Eat more than you burn, you gain; eat less than you burn, you lose. But if you don’t know what you take in, you’re likely going to gain. With the daunting task heading up to us all, here are some things you can do to make your life easier.Before we get too into this, I should note that I wont be getting into the burn of calories just yet. That’s for another day. This is just for the sake of consuming your fuel.
- Make a “yes”, “no” and “rarely” list of common foods
- I’ve always been baffled that the foods I’ve always thought where “good” for me have a tendency to not actually be all that great for me. Whereas to the contrary, foods I’ve assumed were “bad” can sometimes be a lot better for me than I’d imagine. The trick here is to know the calories of common foods and put them into one of three buckets: “yes”, “no” and “rarely”. Where anything that is or relates to a “no” food, you simply wont eat (though there’s little that is simple to saying “no”, I’ll be the first to admit). A good example I use all the time is cheese. It’s a good assumption that any chesses addition (to a burger, salad, etc) is 100 calories, 5-10 grams of fat and more cholesterol than I’d like. So, that’s always in my “no” bucket. Yes, cheese. Same with milk. Loads of sugar per gram and given I would normally drink about three servings, I’m also looking at about 300 calories. I have to remember doing this drops good calcium and protein from that meal. It’s not a big deal as long as you get that stuff other places (and if you’re thinking healthy, you probably will). So, there’s a lot of things in my “no” bucket: anything fried, sugar, mayo … the list goes on. All of these things I added to my “no” bucket one at a time, once I felt I had the last item handled well. The first was sugar. That took a while. Next was most dairy (sugar and calories), followed by fried stuff and the list goes on. So now, let’s pretend we’re sitting down at one of my favorite restaurants: Red Robin. If you’re anything like me, you hate altering the menu and look like an overly-healthy schmuck. It’s a double-edge sword like that. Eating crappy is yummy and acceptable (until you get too fat) and being too healthy gets some stray looks, too. It’s simple enough to ask for a burger with “no dressing or cheese and a water”. You don’t sound overly healthy and you likely just dropped 400-500 calories from your meal (2 slices of cheese, 200 calories; 2 servings of milk, 200 calories; 2 servings of mayo, 100 calories). When you start to get over looking like the overly-healthy schmuck, ask for fruit instead of fries and chicken instead of beef. The point is very simple: don’t waste time on counting calories with respect to everything that’s in your meal. To the contrary, know what’s in your “yes”, “no” and “rarely” buckets and order respectively. You’ll be good.
- Find a few meals you don’t mind eating often
- This is a little tougher for some than others, but something that’s worked really well for me. Basically, I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch and two snacks every day. It really doesn’t get all that old and I know exactly how many calories I eat every single day. I’ve found something I like, works well for my lifestyle, is relatively inexpensive and keeps me satisfied throughout the day. Certainly, it takes a bit of upfront thought, but I don’t have to worry about much of anything thereafter.
- Find a good per-meal calorie maximum
- Basically, you should know how many calories you should eat in a day. You can easily convert that number to even calorie slices you will allow yourself each meal. Say you want to stick to something around 1500 calories (mostly because the math is simple). Say you want to eat three meals. 3 / 1500 = 500. Therefore, you should try to stick to 500 calories per meal. Easy. The intent here is rather than tracking each of your calories all day throughout the day, you only have to care about the meal you’re eating right now. Stick to that number and you’ll be fine.
- Counting lost calories is way more fun on the way out
- I’ll write much more about this later. But keep in mind that it’s way more fun to count how many calories you burn than the ones you take in. I’ve attributed this to the fact that we, as humans, want to eat and eat until we are full when there’s enough food to do so. It’s a very difficult task to stop this cognitive instinct. It almost goes against everything we’ve been pre-programmed to do. On the other side, humans are also designed to burn fuel. And after you get over a few introductory hurdles, it becomes a lot more fun. Fun not only to burn the calories, but to count how many you’re leaving behind. So keep that in mind as you’re counting up that hopefully, sometime soon, you will again be counting down and it’s the total at the end of the day you should concern yourself with the most.
With all of this, I hope the basic idea was left behind. Find simple ways to make your eating life a little more basic. Find ways to prevent calorie-counting-induced stress on your life so you can concentrate on the things that actually matter… like life. Eating is a struggle, this I know just as well as anyone else who has struggled with it. Yet, it’s a struggle that’s manageable when you find creative ideas that work with you and what you like to do. Good luck out there.