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The way the majority of people do it can be boring, complicated and sometimes disincentive. However, notice that we are writing “sometimes” and not “always”. The calorie control doesn’t always have to be complicated, although it is the strongest weapon at the nutrition problems.
Maybe you have never tried it or it seemed too complicated but in reality it can be a breeze. Use these tips for improving your eating habits and enjoy the results without getting bogged down in numbers.
1. Start with what you eat
It is not important where your fitness journey should lead you, the part of eating should begin where you are right now. Make a simple eating plan based on what you eat without thinking of the great changes or calories. Ignore “daily goal” which apps or caloric calculators calculate you and don’t care about BMR and TDEE for now.
Remember, we are quick and dirty on it. Write down the amount of meals which you know that you will consume during the day. If you are about to make some changes, make them qualitatively, not quantitative. In other words, stick to full-featured meals and avoid the low-quality processed food and try to maintain the sugar low.
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2. Try mobile app
Thanks to modern technologies, calorie counting doesn’t include much of manual counting. Applications such as MyFitnessPal count calories for you. You can even combine foods into meals and this will save your time.
Do you have an activity tracker? Use this tracker with calorie tracking which enables you to see the difference between received and burnt calories, not only the total counts. It won’t be exact for 100% – mostly when you lift weights and use ordinary tracker for step counting – but it won’t be exact in the same level for the whole time and this will give you proven overview.
However, here is the key: Be honest to yourself and try everything.
3. Identify obvious patterns formulas
The common reason of failure in the eating plans is that we have a tendency to disestimation for example of how much food we eat during cheating. Maybe our “irregular treat” has become an everyday thing or what you have thought was 200 calories of greek yoghurt isin reality 500 calories.
You definitely will have days when you don’t stick the plans – whether it is planned cheat day or spontaneous evening with friends. Notice also what is happening with you when you are eating more than you had planned. Are you eating fries and wings everytime when drinking beer, even when your intentions were different? Alcohol weakens our ability of good meal choice so you should limit it a little.
If you are hungry or you need more than the daily amount of food, try to add satiating protein or healthy fats.
4. First, quality baselines, then adjusting
If you are watching your receive for several days, you will probably find out that it is included in constant range. This is you basic receive.
If you feel good at the plan (you are not hungry, you don’t see any changes on your body), the plan you have created is close to your true caloric maintenance needs. From this point, you can now play on.
You think that you have low caloric intake? Try smaller portions, or change oils, nuts and seeds, or milk products for the choices with lower calories proportion. Are you hungry all the time? Maybe you don’t eat the sufficient amount. Try to increase your permanent receive or change the food.
In this point, you can designate the goals for daily amounts. Try 100-500 calories less or more than you routinely consume and you will see how you will feel. If you use the application for activity tracking, you can decide of goal amount deficits or excessives of daily receive.
5. Stick to a few core meals
If you try to calculate the exact amounts of ingredients for each meal and write them down – calorie counting will be time consuming. It will be more efficient to structure your menu around a few basic meals that will make it easier. This will help you make estimates and make it easier to write data.
No, it doesn’t mean that you have to – or you should – eat the same meals all the time. No way! But to have the basic meal list with numbers and ingredients which are remembered, will ease everything.
Maybe it sounds boring but after some time, you can eat the same. By doing this, you will achieve that you have to write down 3-6 meals into an app. Repetition can be satisfying if you choose the meals you like.
Don’t try to be too perfect. Healthy nutrition shouldn’t be about denying. If it will help you, you can have one or two slices of cheese.
6. Get familiar with pre-portioned meals
Yes, packaged food often costs more than meat produced on the mass scale but if you don’t have time for #mealprepsunday, the choice of healthy pre-packaged meal will help you to save energy and time. Its nutrition facts are labelled on the package and are probably included in database of application. The good choice for start of you pre-preparation of meal are the packages of nuts, protein bars, poultry, forcemeat, dried “jerky” meat, tuna in can, slices of pre-processed meat, eggs, protein, guacamole, hummus and peanut or another nut butter.
If the calorie tracking won’t be complicated for you, you can plan the meals more quickly. Your goal should be to avoid worrying.
7. Write your the most frequent meals into app
This is one good tip! If you know what you will be eating, to add the meals into list is perfectly invested time which can be used otherwise in the future. Save your meals and all you have to do is to click on “Breakfast” and it will automatically add oat flakes, protein and eggs. Some apps even enable to automatically fill the whole day.
You can change some aspect of your meals by time but remember, the basic meals and their nutrients can help at the portions creation which will be appreciated from the long-term aspect.
8. Don’t concentrate only on calories
Weight loss has a lot to do with calories but other factors are important too. Use application for watching of dietary fibre receive, consider also watching of water receive. If you give your time to all these aspects, you will notice a big difference in how full you feel even when consuming the same calorie amount.
If you have the calories under control, play with micronutrients and examine your habits. Do you need the almond in your oat flakes to stay full until lunch? What will happen if you replace them with protein powder? Is your addition of carbohydrates correct or there are saturated fats mostly?
We know that boring and repetitive eating plan can help you. The change of one ingredient in food will show whether it helps or harms.
9. Finish up and move on
If you have crystalized your plan, you will observe positive changes on your body, find out what made this difference and integrate this information into long-term, maintaining plan. Create the alternative meals in your application and become master in pre-preparation of portions. Maybe you will be able to stop counting.
Yes, it is true, stop counting! You can occasionally get back to it in order to check or reestimated your condition but you should be able to stop using the application since your technique of measuring meal “eyebally” have improved.
Think of it this way: Skill you have achieved thanks to understanding of numbers is more important than numbers themselves.
And what about you? Do you count calories? If these article helped you, support it by sharing.
[1] Bodybuilding – https://www.bodybuilding.com/
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