I’ve always wondered that…
Nope.
Actually, it turns out that the most important factor in losing or gaining weight is whether you’re in a caloric deficit or surplus.
Counting calories is probably the least useless part of nutrition. It’s a pain to do it accurately, and you’ll have to alter your daily caloric intake over time as your body adapts, but again, nope.
but say you wanna lose body fat, is it safe to go 10-20 percent below you daily caloric intake?
Pick a starting point, do it for a couple weeks, and see what happens. If you lost a couple pounds, stay the same calorie-wise. If you didn’t, drop a couple hundred calories.
There isn’t a caloric point that’s going to work every day for the rest of your life, so just pick something and go. If you want to lose weight, I think body weight times 12ish is a fine starting point.
I did that once. I followed tom venuto’s guidelines in his “burn the fat, feed the muscle” in which he suggested to drop 15 to 20 % of your daily caloric intake in you want to loose fat. It actually worked. I went from 21 % body fat down to 12 percent in a period 4 months, and of course that included muscle mass loss. While i was happy with my body fat loss, my skin got paler (i’m actually dark), i always felt cold, but never felt weak or sleepy. Did I experience symptoms of anemia? All I’m saying is that its probably not healthy to drop drastically calories…
If you’re dropping 10% of your bodyfat then putting 5 on then dropping again regularly and over a long period of time then it’s probably going to impact.
If you dropped a bunch of fat and maintained it, you’ve most likely come out ahead.
You can either pick a number of calories and drop them per day, or you can monitor weekly calories. I do a 24 hour fast most weeks and I believe it has several benefits (nothing supernatural or extraordinary as some would have you believe), but overall, unless you’re depriving yourself of essential nutrients for long periods of time, caloric intake is the centerpiece of all successful diets.
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The only way to drop weight is to take in less energy than you use.
There are many strategies to accomplish this. Counting calories is one of the better ways for most people to fail miserably.
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Yes.
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The thing about counting calories is you pretty much always have to guess what your maintenance is. You have absolutely no way of knowing for sure, unless you do that thing where they keep you in that room and monitor all your calories and energy expenditure.
Really just need to pick a calorie target, hit your daily protein and see what happens.
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I’ve found it useful simply because you become more aware of what and how much you eat. Both are pretty useful whether you want to get leaner or add muscle without getting too fat.
I think it boils down to, if you know, you can control.
Totally agree. I think the point we’re all making is you’re going to have to adjust based on what’s happening anyway; my main point was your starting calories don’t really matter to the point it’s worth stressing over because you’re going to have to adjust based on how you’re progressing.
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I believe I might be a bit of an outlier when it comes to this.
Although people advocate against calorie counting because for most it just gets too impractical, I somehow managed to make it work for me.
I’ve been counting calories for more than a year and weighing everything I eat at home (whole eyeballing what I can’t measure for practical reasons).
It’s very convenient for me, because I can very effectively make changes to my diet without having to guess. However, I feel like I wouldn’t be comfortable going back to eating while not counting calories, thus I don’t plan on doing it for the time being.
No, it is not useless. It’s also not mandatory.
This article talks more about when and why.
It can be fine. But if you’ve decided to eat 10-20% less calories, then you really do need to count your calories in the first place.
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I tried losing many times without long term success. I finally decided to count. I use the myfitnesspal app.
I tracked calories for a week and generated an average daily calorie count. I cut 100, nothing. I cut 200 nothing. I cut 300, weight came off fairly steadily. when it plateaued I cut another 100 and continued. I went from 245 on Feb. 4th to 227 this morning. The goal is to get to 215 and lift as a 220 by alternately gaining 10 and trimming 5 to make weight.
For training, Westside was unsustainable as there wasn’t enough volume on ME days and if I added volume, having 2 lower body days of Squat/pulls buried me - not 25 years old anymore. I went with an Ed Coan style powerbuilding training template with limited volume on the main lifts and bodybuilding type work for assistance.
Squat and Bench have suffered a 10% loss due to weight drop deadlift is constant (easier to attain starting position).
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I’ve heard people say you don’t need to count calories.
Technically that’s true.
You also don’t really need a speedometer in your car if you always drive under the speed limit. If you keep getting tickets though…it’s time for a speedometer.
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And if you still continue to get tickets?
You get the analogy
You start taking the bus (?)
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buy a hovercraft, obviously
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