How to Control Your Calories Without Counting Them Forever

There is no getting around the fact that if you want to lose body fat, at some point you need to take control of how many calories you eat.

Where I think things go wrong is that people immediately translate that into calorie counting. They assume getting leaner means weighing food, logging everything into MyFitnessPal, and knowing exactly how many calories were in lunch.

That works. If I gave you exactly the right number of calories, measured all of your food, and you followed the plan, you would lose weight.

The problem is that life isn't that simple.

You go out for dinner. You go on holiday. Work gets busy. Someone else cooks. You have children. You have a weekend where you quite reasonably don't want to enter the weight of a potato into your phone.

So the more useful skill isn't simply learning how to count calories. It is learning how to control them.

And ideally, over time, doing more of that without having to count them at all.

Why controlling what you eat matters more than trying to burn it off

At its most basic, fat loss is simply calorie balance.

You consume energy through food and drink, and you expend energy through everything your body does: keeping you alive, moving around, digesting food, and exercising.

If you consistently eat more than you expend, your weight will go up. If you consistently eat less, it will come down.

You can obviously affect both sides of that equation, but for fat loss I generally want people to focus primarily on their intake.

The reason is fairly straightforward.

At my weight, if I go out and run hard for an hour, my watch will tell me I've burnt somewhere around 1,000 calories. That requires an hour of hard running, creates fatigue, requires recovery, and generally takes quite a lot of effort.

Eating 1,000 calories isn't difficult at all.

Trying to exercise your way out of overeating is therefore a fairly inefficient strategy. Exercise is brilliant for all sorts of reasons, but controlling how much you eat is a much easier lever to pull if the objective is getting leaner.

The question is how.

I think there are two ways to control calories

I broadly divide calorie control into two categories: internal control and external control.

External control is the obvious one.

You put a fence post around yourself. You decide that you are going to eat 2,000 calories. You weigh your food, use MyFitnessPal, measure portions or follow a meal plan. Rather than having to decide whether you've eaten enough, the system decides for you.

Internal control is less precise but much more flexible.

You pay attention to whether you're hungry. You notice your appetite. You eat more slowly. You become better at judging portions and stop when you feel satisfied rather than when you are completely stuffed.

Both work.

In fact, I think most people can benefit from some combination of the two.

But if we're thinking long term, I want people to become very good at the internal side. You can take that anywhere. You don't need scales, an app or a perfectly controlled environment to eat slowly and pay attention to whether you're actually hungry.

That is ultimately a far more useful skill than becoming excellent at entering food into MyFitnessPal.

Before changing your diet, pay attention to it

This is why the first thing I normally get people to do is simply track what they eat.

That doesn't necessarily mean calories.

Taking a photograph of every meal for a couple of weeks is often enough. A simple food diary works as well.

The important thing is that you become conscious of the fact that you're eating.

That sounds absurdly basic, but it isn't.

If you repeatedly forget to take a picture because you have already finished half your lunch before remembering, that tells us something. You weren't particularly conscious of what you were doing.

You were eating while working, walking around the kitchen, looking at your phone or doing something else entirely.

And if you aren't paying attention to your food, it is very difficult to start making better decisions about it.

I don't want somebody journalling every meal for the rest of their life. The point is to use it long enough to create some awareness.

Two weeks is often plenty.

Hunger is a normal part of losing weight

The next thing is becoming more comfortable with hunger.

People quite understandably treat hunger as something they should fix immediately. The moment they feel it, they eat.

But if you're trying to lose weight, some hunger is inevitable.

That doesn't mean walking around ravenous all day. It simply means recognising hunger as a normal physiological sensation rather than an emergency.

I like comparing it with sleepiness.

Towards the end of the day, you start to feel tired. You don't immediately become concerned. You recognise that you've been awake for a long time and eventually you're going to sleep.

Hunger should work in roughly the same way.

You become hungry. You eat. The hunger disappears. Then you allow enough time to pass for yourself to become hungry again.

Imagine doing the opposite with sleep. You wake up at seven, nap at ten, again at one, again at four and once more at nine before trying to go to bed at eleven.

By eleven you're probably not particularly sleepy.

People often do something very similar with food. They never actually allow themselves enough time to become properly hungry.

Hunger and appetite are not the same thing

This is where it becomes important to distinguish hunger from simply wanting to eat.

Genuine hunger tends to build gradually, and relatively simple food will satisfy it.

If I put a piece of fish, some potatoes and vegetables in front of you and you think that sounds fantastic, you're probably hungry.

Appetite is usually more specific.

You don't just want food. You want pizza. Or crisps. Or chocolate. Or whatever happens to be in the cupboard.

It can appear quite suddenly and it is often connected with something else.

You're bored, stressed, tired, pissed off or simply looking for a bit of entertainment.

There is nothing wrong with that. Food isn't just fuel and pretending otherwise is not particularly helpful.

But there is a difference between I need to eat and I would really enjoy eating that.

Becoming better at recognising which one you're experiencing makes calorie control considerably easier.

How you eat matters almost as much as what you eat

Once somebody is paying attention to their food, one of the biggest things I work on is eating speed.

I am naturally a fast eater, so I have to pay attention to this myself.

Almost everyone who comes to me struggling with their weight also tells me that they eat quickly. I don't think that's a coincidence.

If you bolt your dinner in five minutes, you don't give yourself much opportunity to register what you're eating, enjoy it or notice when you've had enough.

So slow down.

Sit down properly. Put your knife and fork down occasionally. Eat things that require a bit of chewing. Try not to have lunch while simultaneously clearing your inbox.

None of this sounds remotely sophisticated.

It is also unbelievably powerful when somebody actually does it consistently.

Because once you slow down, portion control becomes much easier.

You can begin to notice the difference between being satisfied and being stuffed.

The first means the hunger has gone.

The second normally means you've carried on eating for quite a while afterwards because the food was still there and it tasted nice.

There is no rule saying the plate has to be empty.

Make your calories worth eating

Food choice obviously helps as well.

If you're trying to control your intake, I generally want the bulk of your food to be relatively minimally processed and physically filling.

Eat vegetables. Eat proper meals. Eat food that requires chewing.

And be particularly careful with calories you barely notice consuming.

Sugary drinks, alcohol, large coffees, shakes and similar things can add a surprising amount of energy without producing the same satisfaction as eating food.

That doesn't mean a protein shake is bad.

If you're struggling with hunger while trying to lose weight, though, I would generally rather you ate those calories.

At the same time, don't turn the whole process into some miserable exercise in eating the blandest food available.

Food is a pleasure.

If your diet consists of chicken and rice for three weeks because you've decided food is now just fuel, there is a very good chance that at some point you are going to implode.

The answer is to plan food you actually enjoy and then be a bit clever about where you spend your calories.

Curate your calories around the bits of life that matter

This is one of the most practical ways to make all of this easier.

Not every meal matters equally.

If you don't particularly care about breakfast on a Wednesday morning, there is no reason to spend a huge proportion of your calories there.

If sitting down for dinner with your family is the part of the day when you really enjoy food, save more for dinner.

The same applies across the week.

If your weekends are more social and you know you're likely to eat more, you can eat slightly less during the week.

Suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that somebody wanted to average 2,000 calories a day.

They don't need to eat exactly 2,000 every single day.

They could eat somewhat less Monday to Friday and have more flexibility on Saturday and Sunday. Or they could keep breakfast and lunch fairly predictable and leave a much larger allowance for dinner.

There is no prize for making every day identical.

The point is to create a structure that fits your actual life.

This is where external control becomes useful

None of this means calorie counting is bad.

Sometimes it is exactly what somebody needs.

If your portions are completely out of line with what you require and you genuinely have no idea what appropriate eating looks like, some objective information is incredibly useful.

Track your calories.

Weigh things for a while.

Use hand portions.

Work out roughly what your protein, carbohydrate and fat intake should look like.

It gives you some firm boundaries.

I tend to think of this as adding structure when the internal controls are not precise enough.

That can also become increasingly useful as somebody gets leaner. If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, relatively broad improvements to your eating habits can create a substantial difference.

If you're already fairly lean and trying to get very lean, there is much less room for error.

At that point you may need to be more precise.

The mistake is thinking that because you used MyFitnessPal to lose weight, MyFitnessPal now has to supervise your eating for the rest of your life.

It doesn't.

Use as much external control as you need.

The goal is to combine the two

Even when somebody is counting calories, I still want them learning how to eat properly.

Eat slowly.

Pay attention.

Wait until you're hungry.

Choose food that fills you up.

Stop when you're satisfied.

Those skills still matter because eventually life will create a situation where you cannot accurately track what you're eating.

You go to a restaurant and nobody can tell you exactly how many calories are in dinner.

That's fine.

You still have all of the internal tools available to you.

Equally, if you're relying mainly on hunger and portion control but your weight hasn't changed for six weeks, you have some objective information: what you're doing isn't currently producing a deficit.

At that point, add a bit more structure.

This is why I don't think there is one correct way to diet.

You can move backwards and forwards along the spectrum depending on what you need.

Then you watch what happens

Once the basic system is in place, the rest is trial and error.

Weigh yourself consistently and look at the trend.

If you're making progress at roughly the rate you want, don't interfere.

If nothing is happening, something needs to change.

Perhaps portions have crept up. Perhaps weekends are doing more damage than you realised. Perhaps you've started drinking more calories. Perhaps you've stopped waiting until you're hungry and you're eating because the clock says it is time to eat.

Make an adjustment and watch what happens.

That's really all there is to it.

There will be bad meals, bad weekends, holidays, stressful periods and weeks where none of it goes particularly well.

Your system has to be able to survive those things.

Because the ultimate objective isn't to become exceptionally good at being on a diet.

It is to become good at controlling how much you eat.

Start with awareness. Learn to recognise hunger. Slow down, eat proper food and get better at stopping when you've had enough. Then add calorie counting, portioning or meal planning where you need firmer boundaries.

Use as much structure as necessary, but no more than necessary.

That is a much better route to getting leaner and, more importantly, staying there.