The Challenge of Calories

Calories suck.

Whose bright idea was it, anyway, to measure the energy provided by food this way? It was probably the same type of person who thought it was a good idea to expect everyone to understand the numbers on the food labels, without further education.

Think about it:

If one gram of carbs and protein is 4 calories and one gram of fat is 9 calories, you’d need a calculator to figure out how many calories you consumed, for each macronutrient, each time you consume something. At least they give the number of grams of each macronutrient, and the total calories on the back of the package.

But then there's serving size. Now you have to do more math to calculate the actual number of calories, fat, protein, and carbs, based on how much you ate. You'd better hope serving size is measured in a easy means of measurement, otherwise break out the scale, because you'll need to do some weighing too.

What a pain.

The Complexity and Importance of Calorie Tracking

It's no wonder calories are seen as some sort of puzzle in the fitness and nutrition world. It's convoluted and a pain in the ass to monitor consistently.

You can bet that the vast majority of beginners are completely overwhelmed and turned off by the idea of tracking calories.

This is especially painful because tracking calories is the single most powerful tool for weight control you have.

So, let's forget all the stuff you have learned up till this point about calories. We can strip away all noise and hopefully come out with a stronger grasp on how to use calories to hit your goals.

What Exactly is a Calorie?

A calorie is a unit of energy that measures how much energy food provides to the body.

That’s not that scary. Okay, let's elaborate further.

Eating more calories gives you more energy, eating less gives you less energy.

Well, what does this have to do with weight?

Your body stores excess energy as fat. Your body burns fat for energy when you don't have enough.

There we go. Practical knowledge about calories:

You eat calories for energy and if you eat too much your body stores it as fat, and if you eat too little, your body will burn fat to get more energy.

The thing about storing energy as fat is that it comes at the cost of health. While some fat is necessary and healthy, your body doesn't do well at turning off the storage mechanism when it has enough. This energy storage continues to build up until the fat causes significant health issues. These health issues cause you to look less healthy and lead to a decline in aesthetics when combined with the increase in fat itself.

The Challenge of Accurate Calorie Counting

What we eat, is usually in our control, but the reality of today’s food is that it is difficult to accurately gauge the calories you are eating. Grocery products, restaurants, and fast-food places, while sometimes they appear to be transparent, often display inaccurate numbers, or convolute the actual calorie content (looking at you serving size). Fortunately, the numbers provided are good enough to make progress, despite their inaccuracies.

Why Track Calories?

The idea of tracking calories is surely uncomfortable to think about, and you may have even dismissed it as something that only elite fitness people do. There’s a reason they do it though. Tracking calories is the single best way to control your weight loss and gain. The reason tacking works so well is it gives you an accurate (enough) number to manipulate up or down based on your needs.

Most people who are trying to lose weight underestimate how many calories they are consuming.

Most people who are trying to gain weight overestimate how many calories they are consuming.

Since you now know the body's response to over- or under-eating leads to weight loss or weight gain, it doesn’t take too much more thought to realize that inaccurate calorie guesses can easily lead to low progress towards your weight goal.

Caloric Balance and Weight Goals

If you want to lose weight (and fat) then you need to consistently consume fewer calories than you burn.

If you want to gain weight (and muscle) then you need to consistently consume more calories than you burn.

You might be wondering about burning calories through exercise. This was intentionally left after the diet portion of this newsletter because it is FAR easier to control calorie consumption than it is to burn more calories. You would need to spend many hours doing cardio and weightlifting each week to burn the calories that a balanced, calorie-controlled diet will avoid altogether. Yes, you should be doing weightlifting and cardio anyway, but it should not be for their calorie-burning properties.

Calories are best controlled by reducing or increasing food consumption. 

Trying to out-run a poorly controlled diet, will lead to frustration and could result in you eventually quitting because “nothing is working”. You must control your diet to manipulate your weight.

Practical Steps to Control Calories

Here’s how to do it:

1. Find some high-protein, healthy recipes to prepare at home. Usually, online recipes will include calories per serving, which will save the effort of calculating the calories in each raw ingredient. Keep in mind, however, just like restaurants, these calculations can be inaccurate.

2. Calculate your TDEE at the Lucid Fitness Website. TDEE is the total amount of calories you burn in a day, with your activity levels taken into consideration. This might seem daunting, but the calculator does all the math for you, just punch in your details.

3. If you want to lose weight, subtract 500 calories from your TDEE. If you want to gain weight add 500 calories. This will be your target daily calorie consumption. 500 calories are about a pound lost or gained per week. It may seem slow but any more aggressive will be unsustainable. It took you a while to get to where you are, so you'll need time to get better.

4. Using the recipes from step 1, design a day of meals that is relatively close to your target calorie goal. If your target calories are 2000 calories, try to get 2-3 meals that add up to 2000. It doesn’t need to be perfect since you’ll be adjusting as you go.

5. Weigh yourself each week to see if your weight is moving in the correct direction. If your weight is going in the right direction, great! If your weight is not moving in the correct direction or not moving at all, after a couple of weeks, then you can subtract or add another 100 calories from your daily calories.

6. Repeat steps 4-5 until you hit your weight target.

Final Thoughts

Thats it! Well, it might seem like a lot when you’re first starting, because not only will you be unfamiliar with calories, but you likely won’t have any recipes lined up. That’s okay because, after a few weeks of work, you’ll be a few pounds closer to your weight goals, and will have a bunch of recipes you enjoy.

If your meals don’t add up perfectly, it's fine to add a snack to fill the gap, but only if you fall short of your target. For example. if you find your three meals are 1800 calories, and you need to eat 2000 for your weight-loss goal, you can add a 200-calorie snack to fill the difference. Obviously, you want the snack to be nutritious, whole food so that the calories provide more nutrition, but the idea is to hit your calorie goal every day. Not under, not over.

If you are feeling daring, you can download a calorie-tracking app like MyFitnessPal and track at a far more granular level, but for true beginners, the six-step process above may be more actionable and less daunting than a tracking app.

You’ll hear a million arguments online about why this won’t work, and even more excuses as to why it can’t be even tried. Honestly give it a shot and see for yourself. You will find that over time your weight moves up and down at your command when you control your calories. This is one of the hardest parts of fitness and nutrition, so the more experience you get working with calories the better.

Just don’t give up.