Why You Shouldn't Count Calories

Counting calories is the phenomenon by which people track their caloric intake by keeping records of everything they eat every day. They do this so they can calculate the amount of calories they need to accomplish their body goals (whether they're bulking, cutting, or maintaining). Counting calories can go from helpful to neurotic real quick if you find yourself counting the number of Equal packets you're putting in your coffee.

Calorie labels are woefully inaccurate. Casey Neistat proved that in a random convenience store in NYC. In one instance, a sandwich that claimed to be 228 calories was proven to be 548 calories. THAT'S HUGE. It's not about the extra 250 calories, it's about the fact that it is twice its advertised amount. So if you eat 10 of those sandwiches all day to hit your cutting calories of 2500, you're actually eating 5000 calories a day. Holy shit! You will get fat REAL quick unless you're running marathons everyday.

Your calorie expenditure changes every day, so why does your caloric intake stay the same? Some days you take the elevator, some days you take the stairs. Some days you lift weights, some days you do cardio. Some days you're walking around at work, some days you're in bed all day watching Netflix. It doesn't make any sense to eat the same amounts of the same foods everyday when you will not be expending the same amount of calories every day.

Social events will kill you. When you're going out with some friends you haven't seen in years, are you going to make them sit around as you enter your calories into your iPhone app? Are you only going to take 2.3 shots of vodka because that's how much you have left in your daily allotment? Weddings have some of the best food you can get, but you can't enjoy yourself if you're restricting your menu to celery and broccoli. This restriction only makes sense if you're a bodybuilding competitor in peak week, a morbidly obese person who needs to control their eating, or an Olympic athlete a day before your competition (or maybe not...).

Most people getting into fitness go through their counting-calorie stage. I did it for about 2 years. My life was fine, but the restriction was unnecessary. I would have rather just gone with the flow depending on how hungry I was on any given day. As long as you have reasonable portions of healthy meals, you will be just fine.