Ep #118: The Truth about Calorie Tracking

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #118. If you’re tracking your food but you’re not losing weight, let’s talk about why, and what to do about it.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here, we are going to talk about food tracking today. I have talked about this a few times before on the podcast, but today I’m going to take a different angle.

I’ve seen this issue come up countless times for my clients. I’ve experienced it myself. It is insanely frustrating, and I want to pick it apart today and help you try to make sense of this. Because, quite honestly, this is one of the biggest problems I have with food tracking.

And that issue is, what happens when you’re using your food tracker, and according to the tracker you’re in a calorie deficit, but you’re not losing weight? So this right here would probably be one of the biggest issues that comes up for people who use an app like MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, My Macros+, or any tracking app for that matter.

I run into this so very often. I’ve seen and experienced the brain drama that it can cause. And I’m starting to change my tune about the utility of tracking for this very reason. So I’ve mentioned before that there are a number of tools at your fingertips that can help you change your habits and lose weight if that is your goal.

A calorie tracking app is one of those tools, but sometimes what you think is a tool or what starts out being a tool for you, like tracking your calories, with time it can become a weapon. Meaning you start using the tracker against yourself. And that’s when the tool is no longer helpful.

I’ve seen this and I’ve experienced this enough times personally, and with coaching clients, that I think we need to pull this apart. So I want to explain to you how, despite it being a tool, I want to explain how tracking your calories may be hurting you. To be clear, this is not a plot to talk you out of tracking your food, okay?

If you’re someone who can use MyFitnessPal, and use it in a way that helps you or that supports you, and use the app in a way that keeps you moving forward towards your health and fitness goals, then please, by all means, keep going. There are plenty of people out there who do use those apps successfully and use the apps to keep them honest and keep them accountable.

I looked at the apps just the other day, and as of me writing this podcast, MyFitnessPal alone has 1.9 million five-star ratings. So, clearly, there are some people out there who are benefiting from it.

But if you find that your calorie tracker is leading you astray and leaving you with loads of frustration, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about how calorie tracking is an imperfect science at best and what you can do instead, okay? I want to give you some perspective on this, help you see tracking just a little differently, and help you consider what else there might be.

Because I’ve said it before, I will say it again here, people lost weight and changed their diets before MyFitnessPal existed, okay? It is possible. It is totally within your capacity, and I want to help you see that, okay? So let’s go.

To get us going, let’s talk about the many different ways that tracking can be inaccurate. I’m getting really detailed and nitpicky here to show you all of the different ways that tracking is inaccurate, but it’s for a reason, okay? I don’t want to just go with a blanket statement of ‘tracking is inaccurate.’ I want you to understand just how inaccurate it can be and what the cumulative impact of a number of small factors adds up to.

First things first, your food label. Go into your pantry and pull out any packaged, boxed, or bagged snack, and look at the calorie count per serving. Do you notice anything about it? Most every single calorie count ends in either a five or a zero, and that’s because of the FDA rounding rule.

The FDA rounding rule means that food companies can round to the nearest five calorie increment for amounts of food up to 50 calories. And then they can round to the nearest 10 calorie increment for amounts above 50 calories. So amounts less than five calories can be expressed as zero.

If you’re eating a handful of chips and the serving is actually 124 calories, the label will read 120 calories. That’s just an example. And that’s subtle, right? You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, it’s just four calories, big deal.” But imagine doing that for every single packaged food item you consume in a day.

Imagine there’s a four-calorie difference for every single packaged food item that you eat. Do some simple math, and you’ll see what starts out as four calories can quickly add up over the course of a week to be a whole lot more.

So here’s something else that I found totally fascinating. It totally shocked me when I was researching for this episode. But I learned that the FDA’s acceptable margin of error on your nutrition label is 20%. 20%! That is insane to me. What that means is that your container of yogurt that says only 100 calories on it could, in reality, have anywhere from 80-120 calories. We just don’t know.

And again, it may not seem like much, but if you add that up over the course of a day or the course of a week, then you’re looking at up to a 20% error in your estimated total caloric intake. To take this even a step further, there’s research around this very issue that suggests packaged foods in general have a higher calorie and energy density than what the label suggests.

There are a number of interesting, if not troubling, scientific articles that have been published, and through calorimetry studies performed in scientific labs, it’s been found that packaged food have on average a 1% increased serving size than what’s listed, a 4.3% increased calorie count, and a 7.7% increased carbohydrate count than what is listed on their label.

I can keep getting into the weeds here on this, but I’ll spare you. I went down a rabbit hole on this, but you don’t need to. The takeaway is that your food labels are probably not accurate. In fact, they can legally be up to 20% inaccurate.

So next. Again, if you pull out a packaged food item and look at what a serving size is, you’ll most likely see a measurement in two different units. Take, for example, almonds. I did this experiment at home. I pulled out our bag of almonds and looked at the nutrition label. It said that one serving of almonds is 1/4 cup. And right next to the quarter cup, it said 28 grams.

Then I grabbed my measuring cup and measured out a 1/4 cup of almonds. I even made sure it was a level scoop; it was not heaping. Then I counted it out and it was 37 almonds. I grabbed my food scale and weighed out 28 grams of almonds, and then I counted those. It was 21 almonds. That’s a difference of 16. And the point here is… depending on what you use… if you’re weighing or measuring your food, you may be super surprised at the difference in what a serving size is. But if you just log in your tracker, one serving of almonds without actually measuring it out, you’re guesstimating. So if you’re going to choose, use the scale or use the grams. Okay?

If you want to get the most accurate count, use a food scale, especially for things like peanut butter. Have you ever weighed out on a food scale what a serving of peanut butter looks like? A typical serving of peanut butter is two tablespoons. But if you have a big, tall, rounded tablespoon… like what I like to do… that’s going to be more than a serving size. Okay? But when you pull out a scale and weigh it, a serving is 33 grams.

And if you go to the trouble of doing this, you will see, like me, that 33 grams of peanut butter is not a whole lot. It is certainly a lot smaller than the way I scoop my peanut butter. But if you are like me and you have a huge rounded scoop of peanut butter, but you’re only logging one serving of peanut butter, you can see what’s happening here. It’s going to be inaccurate.

According to your tracker, you logged two tablespoons of peanut butter, which is about 190 calories. But if you’re like me and you’re a generous scooper, it could easily be more like 350 calories. Again, to keep going here, if you’re tracking fruit, you’re guessing. Is your apple a small, medium or large apple? Because that too is going to affect your bottom line. A small apple will run on average about 77 calories. A large apple can run 116 calories. And how big is the banana you’re eating? A small one might be 90 calories. A large one could be over 120.

The point here is that you’re guessing. It is all an estimate. And here’s one other thing to note too, because this comes up all the time. If you’re tracking or weighing your meats, generally you want to measure and weigh them raw. Here’s why. The nutrition labels for package raw meats are giving you the nutrition information for the weight of the raw food, unless it’s stated differently on the package.

Remember that many meats will shrink while cooking. And depending on how you cook the meat, the final weight will change. So sauteing your chicken, for example, that can remove some of the water content, which will change the weight of your meat. So to be most accurate, you want to measure your meat raw, before you cook it.

Again, the reason I’m getting into the weeds here is to give you all these examples and illustrate that how you measure and log your food matters. And the food examples that I gave, those are foods that are considered healthy. We talked about almonds, peanut butter, apples, bananas, and chicken.

Even though those foods are considered healthy choices, there are still plenty of ways that eating them and tracking them inaccurately could be giving you totally mixed messages. Okay?

Another way that tracking your food can be inaccurate is when most of your tracking is done by eyeballing. Again, I just went over weighing and measuring, and the difference between using a measuring cup versus pulling out a food scale. So you can see that even there, the difference between measuring cups or measuring spoons and the scale, that difference is quite a bit.

Well, now imagine what happens when you just go and take any sort of measuring out of the picture entirely and eyeball it. You’re eyeballing what a three-ounce piece of chicken looks like. You’re eyeballing a 1/2 a cup of white rice. Or my favorite, you’re eyeballing a serving of ice cream.

As an aside, just for a second, have you ever gone and measured out what a serving size of ice cream is? If you look at the label, it’s 2/3 of a cup or 99 grams. And if you’ve ever gone to the trouble of measuring out for yourself, either 2/3 of a cup or 99 grams of ice cream, you know it is not a whole lot of ice cream. It can be really easy to eyeball your way into a caloric maintenance or even a caloric surplus.

And the pattern I will very commonly see is this. I will have a client who starts out weighing and measuring her food. And after a while of being successful at losing some weight, she’ll start to ease up and let something slide. She’ll stop weighing and measuring. She’ll stop using her scale and she’ll go back to eyeballing.

That’s when the weight loss either stalls or reverses, because we, in general, as a population are terrible at eyeballing. And if you’re eyeballing and then you’re tracking your eyeballing, it could be very easily misleading because it might look like you’re not eating that much. But in reality, you could be eating a whole lot more than you think because you’re eyeballing. Okay? And this happens all the time.

Next, another way that tracking is inaccurate is when you have meals at restaurants. And this plays out in a few different ways. First, nowadays, many chain restaurants will list out their nutrition information on the menu, which I believe is a good start. However, there is most certainly going to be variation in the serving size and preparation, so I would encourage you to take those numbers with a grain of salt.

When I was preparing for this podcast, I found an interesting article from 2013, and it was from Consumer Reports. And while it’s a little old, what it found was interesting. They had their own researchers test for the actual calorie counts in the servings of food that they were given, and it was all over the map; some on target, some more than a few hundred calories off.

And it makes sense when you’re getting food that is being individually prepared; a little extra butter here, an extra splash of oil there, and the final counts end up being wildly variable. Again, take the calorie count listed on your menu with caution. And if you’re at a restaurant where there is no nutrition information listed, well, that’s going to get even more challenging because then you are totally guessing.

So here’s the thing to know about restaurant meals. Most of them have way more calories than we give them credit for. I know this is going to sound crazy, but there has been quite a bit of research on this. And what came of it was, in most cases… not all of course, but most, depending on what you get… fast food actually ends up being less calorically dense than eating at a sit-down restaurant.

Meals at sit-down restaurants tend to come in at the highest calorie counts. There’s an often-cited research article from the American Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics that showed that the average non-chain restaurant meal comes out to about 1,200 calories; with the highest calories coming from American, Italian, and Chinese restaurants.

Remember that restaurant food is loaded with sugar, salt, and fat. You’re not in the kitchen to see how much they’ve oiled the grill before they stick your steak on it. You’re not seeing just how much cream is getting dumped into your Alfredo sauce. We just have no idea. And that’s why the stuff tastes so good. But it’s also why those foods are so calorically dense.

And beyond that, depending on where you go, the portions of food you get could be enormous and could be far beyond what you need in a day, let alone what you need in a single meal. I’m bringing all of this up to simply state that restaurant meals have the potential to make an enormous impact on your bottom line as far as your food and calorie intake is concerned.

If you’re inaccurately tracking these meals, your tracker could be telling you that you’re coming in at a much lower caloric intake than what you’re actually eating. Okay?

All right, next. Another factor contributing to the inaccuracy of tracking is if you leave stuff out. I’ll say this comes up all the time because it’s easy to do. It’s easy to forget. And sometimes you just don’t have time to pull out your app and start logging.

But let me put it in perspective for you. Imagine, in the course of a day, you have a bite of your kid’s bagel and cream cheese. Then too many Snickers bars from the break room while you’re at work. Then two forkfuls of cold, leftover lasagna while standing in front of your fridge when you get home from work and before you start dinner. Followed by a handful of chocolate chips from your pantry after dinner and before you start the nighttime routine.

And you track exactly none of that, because all of those things are small. It’s a bite of something here, a taste of something there. It may not seem like much, but in the course of a day, it all adds up. And if you do that multiple times in a week, and you record exactly none of it, well, you can see where that’s going to take you.

So just because it doesn’t go in your tracker, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. And I know that’s annoying, but it’s a hard truth. I bring this up because clients will share their logs with me, and often all I will see on it are her main meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But then we’ll get into her session and it will come out that she had a glass of wine last night, or she had a few bites of her kid’s chicken tenders a few days ago, or a couple of cheese cubes after dinner, just because, and none of that is in the tracker. So it makes total sense that the calorie count would show one thing, but your weight will most definitely show another.

And similar too, but slightly different from this, are all the little extras, that may not seem like a big deal, but ultimately add up. This is the stuff like the cream that you put in your coffee, or the side of guac that comes with your burrito, or the olive oil that you shake onto your salad. It’s all of those things.

They’re small and you might not even be thinking of them. And sometimes those little extras just don’t make it into your tracker. But again, it’s all of those little things. Even though they didn’t land in your tracker, they still count. But if you’re not being precise about it, your total calorie count may not reflect all of what you’re actually eating. All right?

Another factor contributing to the inaccuracy of tracking is when you eat a meal that you make from a recipe. So this is another place where you’re guesstimating, and I get it. If you have ever tried to track a meal that you made from a recipe, you know sometimes it is just a straight up pain in the booty to do the math, search the ingredients, divide it out, and then try to guess how much of a serving size you’ve had. That is quite a bit of work.

And so sometimes it’s easier just to not track it at all or just straight up guesstimate. But that’s also adding to the overall inaccuracy of your tracking.

Then, last but certainly not least, another way that your tracking may be inaccurate is how you factor in exercise when you’re determining calorie targets that you put in the app in the first place. So let me take a step back just a second and put this into context. Calorie trackers can operate in a few different ways. You may be able to enter your own calorie target into the tracker that you calculate yourself.

Or you can also enter your information into the tracker and then it will tell you how many calories you need to lose weight. Your tracker gives you that number by calculating your TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. And in order to calculate your TDEE, you’ll need to provide some basic information about yourself, like your gender, age, height, weight, and activity level.

Some trackers will also ask for your percent body fat, depending on what equation it uses. So even here, from the get-go, before you even start tracking any calories, here is a major source of inaccuracy. And that usually comes from how you report your physical activity level.

Remember that the calculation of your total energy expenditure is determined, in part, based on your reported level of exercise. So most calculators will give you the option to choose from sedentary, light exercise of one to two days per week, moderate exercise of three to five days per week, heavy exercise, which is six to seven days, or twice a day.

And the calculator uses a multiplier based on your activity level that you report in order to determine your total energy expenditure. So what that means is, the more you exercise, the higher your total daily energy expenditure will be according to these calculations.

But this activity modifier is misleading, and often, in my experience, it’s over reported. Meaning, we tend to overestimate how much exercise we do and how intense it is. The other problem with reporting your activity level is that this multiplier does not take into account what your activity level is like for the rest of your day when you’re not exercising. This is a big deal, and here’s why. So say you’ve got someone who exercises six days a week, but the rest of her days are spent sedentary at a desk job.

So even though you report heavy exercise on your calculator, because you exercise six days a week, the rest of your day is not active at all. But the calculator will likely end up calculating a total energy expenditure that’s too high. So then you’re starting with a calorie target that is already too high before you even do any tracking.

I’ve mentioned this before… and please note this is my own anecdotal experience. This is not at all science-based. This is just what I do to try and account for this… Whatever activity level it is that you report, I usually take it down one notch when I enter it into a calculator. So if you tell me that you’re a moderate exerciser of three to five days per week, I will take it down one and enter light exercise instead.

I’ve done it for my own calculations. I’ve done it for my client’s calculations. And I share this again to highlight that this is yet just another way that there is a whole lot of estimating going on when we’re doing these numbers, okay?

And one last place where you may find inaccuracy is when your calorie tracker gives you back calories for exercise. Truthfully, I can even widen this to say that a major, major source of inaccuracy is using any electronic fitness tracker to tell you how many calories you are burning.

So whether it’s a Fitbit, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, whatever it is, using these numbers to determine your caloric output is notoriously inaccurate. There are studies that show an error rate anywhere from 13% all the way to 115%. And what that means is that your calorie burn, reported on your fitness tracker, can be off anywhere from 13% to over 100%.

When you use those numbers as fact, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. For example, if you enter into your tracker that you burned 500 calories on your run, because that’s what your Apple Watch said, when in reality you burned more like 250 calories, well, that’s going to set you up for a problem.

You may think to yourself, “Well, my watch said I burned 500 calories on this run. So even though I’m aiming for 1,400 calories to be in a deficit, I can actually eat 500 more to get to 1,900, and still lose weight.” But that just does not work, okay?

I highlight this example because even though you may have heard it before, it comes up all the time. I had this exact conversation a handful of times last week even. I had a client tell me that her Oura Ring told her her total energy expenditure was 2,300 calories, and she was only eating 1,500 calories. Why wasn’t she losing weight? And that gave us the opportunity to talk about all the ways that these numbers are inaccurate.

So please do not eat back the calories that your tracker or your exercise equipment, whatever, says that you burned from exercise. Those trackers are notoriously inaccurate. Your exercise equipment is wildly off. And this is setting you up for frustration. I would just strongly caution you to take all of those numbers with an enormous, enormous grain of salt, okay?

All right, now that we’ve gone through eight different ways that tracking is inaccurate, you may be wondering to yourself, like I was when I was putting this podcast together, “Is it worth it?” After knowing all the ways that tracking is inaccurate, is it worth it to track your calories? Should you even bother?

I will admit in full transparency that I have been going back and forth on this. After digging through all of this and detailing all the ways that tracking is inaccurate, I was totally left scratching my head and asking, “Is this worth it?

Ultimately, here is where I’ve landed. If you can use calorie tracking in a way that supports you, then it might be helpful. If you recognize that tracking is very much an imperfect science, but you also see that it can still provide data in the form of self-monitoring, then by all means use it.

On the flip side, if you use tracking as a weapon against yourself, or if you get so caught up in the numbers, or if you have trouble seeing beyond the numbers on your tracker to the point that it keeps you from moving forward, then maybe it’s not the best tool for you.

So while I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you must track your food, because I don’t think you have to do that, what I will tell you is that some sort of self-monitoring is essential. And that is based on what we know about habit change. If you want to change your habits, change your lifestyle, change the way you eat, stop mindless eating, stop emotional eating, or stop snacking, or really change any habit, self-monitoring is key.

Because if you want to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re starting from on the map. And self-monitoring is that map. Without any self-monitoring, you’re guessing. And when it comes to habit change, guessing is not going to get you anywhere. But if you commit to self-monitoring, you can keep it simple and stick with journaling.

That just means writing down everything you eat; pen and paper is just fine. No amounts are needed. No scales or measuring cups are necessary. You simply commit to writing it all down. That’s it. Then you’ve got data.

So it may be that instead of looking at MyFitnessPal and seeing that you ate 1,500 calories in a day, which could very well be inaccurate, instead we look at your journal and see, okay, you had a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast. You had half a muffin from the work break room mid-morning. You had your salad and chicken for lunch.

And then you had a piece of pizza that your coworkers ordered. You had too many Snickers bars at the front desk of your office. You had a granola bar in the car on your way home from work, and multiple bites of pretzels and hummus while making dinner.

You get the idea here. When you write it down, even if it’s not a calorie tracker, you still get data and you can use that data to make changes. You can look at what you recorded and see, well, yes, I’m eating what I planned out, but I’m also eating a lot of extra stuff here and there. And that’s helpful information.

Or say you record everything and you aren’t snacking, but you’re still not losing any weight. So you’re eating exactly as you write in your journal, you’re not leaving out anything, but you’re still not losing weight. Well, that still tells you something. That is still data. It tells you that whatever you’re eating is not putting you in a caloric deficit. And if you want to lose weight, something will need to change.

Honestly, that is where I think food journaling can be most helpful. Because at the end of the day, I really don’t care what the numbers say. To be perfectly honest, I do not care what your tracker says. And here’s why. If you are not losing weight, then barring any medical issues, you are not eating in a caloric deficit.

It really doesn’t matter what your tracker says. It does not matter if MyFitnessPal says you came in right at 1,400 calories every day for the last month. It doesn’t matter, because if you didn’t lose weight, then you aren’t in a deficit, and it means that something is not adding up.

But if you see those numbers and you use them against yourself, or if you get super irritated and throw your hands up in the air and say, “This is impossible. I’m eating this many calories and I’m just not losing.” Well, that’s when I have to wonder if tracking really is an appropriate tool for you.

When you take those numbers as fact, instead of seeing tracking for the very imperfect science that it is, and stop there without looking for other possibilities, and the numbers are becoming a roadblock to your success, that’s when I would question if this is a tool you want to be using. Only you know how to proceed with this, so this is a decision I want to empower you to make for yourself.

Do not feel that you must track your calories in order to lose weight. So yes, I’ve had clients be very successful at losing weight while using a tracking app. But when I think about why that is, I realize it’s because they used calorie tracking as one small piece of a much larger puzzle. They use the numbers as a rough estimate, but they did not rely on those numbers as fact. Meanwhile, more importantly, they dove in and did the mindset work of self-acceptance, managing urges, and paying attention to eating habits like mindless eating and emotional eating.

And they changed their approach to meals altogether. Things like prioritizing protein, eating more vegetables and whole foods, and decreasing meals out at restaurants. It was a combination of factors that led those clients to be successful. They did not let tracking, or what their MyFitnessPal said, dictate their success.

In contrast, the clients I’ve seen really struggle with weight loss while tracking were very much using those numbers against themselves. Many of them have sworn up and down that they’re eating super low calories. So why aren’t they losing any weight? And despite me sharing all the ways that tracking is imperfect, they sometimes have a hard time seeing past the numbers.

Again, it doesn’t really matter to me what the numbers say, because whatever the number is, it’s not creating a caloric deficit. And it’s these clients for whom I will often recommend pen and paper journaling instead of using a tracker. And truthfully, there is a lot more work to be done than simply changing the system of self-monitoring.

So here’s something interesting I’ve observed, and I want to share it here because I’m guessing some of you have experiences too. It’s not uncommon that the same clients who use tracking against themselves also have tremendous resistance to giving up tracking. It’s so interesting. Even though tracking doesn’t appear to be working for them, and even though they aren’t losing weight, and they’re getting super angry and frustrated by it, they don’t want to stop tracking. And this right here could be an entire podcast in itself.

Because I think there are multiple reasons that might lead someone to resist giving up tracking, especially if you’ve done it for a long time, and even if you’re using it against yourself. I think a large factor in this is a sense of control. Logging your food and seeing numbers, even if those numbers are inaccurate, those numbers give you a sense of control.

Tracking gives you objective, measurable data. And it can be hard to argue that, even if you know all the ways that tracking is inaccurate. You may fear that when you give up tracking, you’ll revert to previous eating habits. Or you may worry that you’ll start overeating just by nature of stopping tracking.

And for any perfectionists out there, if you’re a perfectionist, it may be really hard to give up tracking because moving away from it, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time, might feel like you’re failing. You may worry that without the control of tracking, you may not be able to maintain perfect eating habits, even though there is no such thing as perfect eating.

Without tracking, it may feel like you’re floundering. You may feel like you’re losing precision. And that can be very unsettling if you’re a perfectionist or an all-or-nothing thinker. You may worry that without tracking, you may not know how much food is enough and whether you’re in a calorie deficit. Tracking your calories can most definitely create a false sense of security that you’re doing the right thing, even if it’s not amounting to any weight loss. Sometimes you just like the rigidity of it. It’s a structure. You eat this, you track this. It’s simple. It’s streamlined.

And for some people, it provides comfort. I know that sounds strange, but if you’ve been there, you know. Those numbers can give you comfort, even if they’re inaccurate, and even if they’re not leading you to weight loss. And sometimes you fear that stopping calorie tracking will lead you to spiral completely and lose all control over your eating.

Tracking may be your set of guardrails, and without those guardrails, you may feel that you don’t know what to do. If you get stuck into believing that calories are the only thing that matter, as opposed to things like food quality, hunger, satiety, sleep, hormones, then it would make sense that you would not want to give up having those numbers. It makes sense that you would not want to get rid of those guardrails.

But here’s the key thing I want you to know, and this is the key takeaway. In order to change your eating habits and lose weight and keep it off, really, in order to heal your relationship with food, the tracker is not going to do it. Okay? The tracker is not going to be your key to creating a healthier relationship with food. Instead, you have to be able to reconnect your hunger with your eating. In one sentence, that is really the crux of it: You have to be able to reconnect hunger and eating. This is so critical.

I’ve already gone over how calorie tracking can be a potentially useful tool in previous episodes, but all tools have their limits. A calorie tracking app is not going to teach you how to manage your hunger and satiety cues. It’s not going to teach you how to pay attention to what true physical hunger feels like, versus the emotional hunger of a bad day that is calling for chocolate. Okay?

And honestly, that is what most of us need in order to truly change our eating habits. It’s not having a better calorie counting app or a better barcode scanner, or having an Apple watch or an Oura ring that has better accuracy in counting your total energy expenditure. It’s really none of those things that are essential.

Instead, what is essential is that you get in tune with your own unique hunger and satiety signals and eat based on those. It means learning to eat when you are truly physically hungry. It means that you make eating for reasons other than hunger, the exception rather than the norm. I’ve said this before, and it’s really true. Most of us eat for all kinds of reasons other than hunger.

It’s a birthday, of course you have cake. It’s a night out, of course you have the extra glass of wine. It’s football Sunday, of course you have a bag of chips. It’s been a terrible day, of course you have a bowl of ice cream to numb it.

We eat when we’re happy. We eat when we’re sad. We eat when other people are eating. And often, hunger has very little to do with many of your food decisions. That is a large part of the problem, and a tracker is not going to fix that. Mindset work, however, will.

I want you to get intimately acquainted with what real, true hunger feels like for you. I want you to know by paying attention to your body, what it feels like to be satiated; not full, not stuffed, but satiated. And that truly is where trackers will do you a disservice. How many times have you used a tracker and at the end of the day had a handful of chips or a scoop of ice cream or a slice of pie because your tracker said you still had calories left for the day? This happens all the time.

You see that, according to your tracker, you’ve still got some leftover calories so you go ahead and eat the cookie. And at the risk of making you mad, I would argue that the question to ask in this situation is absolutely not, do I still have any calories left?” Instead, the question I would encourage you to ask is, am I hungry?

Do you see the difference there? The difference is huge. The difference here is letting your hunger guide your eating versus letting MyFitnessPal guide your eating. I have written a number of podcasts about this, and I will keep making podcasts about this, to give you tools to practice letting hunger guide your eating.

And no, this is not to say that you don’t ever eat for emotional reasons, but the goal is to make that the exception rather than the norm. And in order to do that, in order to have hunger be what guides your eating, it means awareness. You knew we couldn’t get through a podcast without mention of awareness, so here it is.

Awareness means you are paying attention, and you recognize that something is happening. You come off autopilot. So instead of eating because your tracker says it’s within your calorie goal, you eat when and because you are physically hungry.

Practicing awareness also means that you stop eating when you’re no longer hungry, instead of eating until your plate is clean because that’s what you’ve always done. It means you don’t have to eat everything you packed in your bag just because you already put it in your tracker, and it’s within your calorie count, when you’re not even hungry for all of it.

Awareness means you pay attention to your eating instead of doing it on autopilot. Ultimately, reconnecting eating with your hunger means you learn to trust yourself, and trust your body to provide you with information when you are hungry and when you are satiated.

And allowing your body to tell you that, rather than using a calorie tracker to tell you that, well, that can be very unsettling for some of you. It can be especially unsettling if you’ve been tracking calories for years, or if you’re used to restricting yourself, or if you have loads and loads of food rules that you’re used to following.

You may not be aware of what true hunger feels like because you’ve never let yourself feel it. You may not be aware of what “satisfied” and “no longer hungry” feels like because you’re used to eating until you’re full or stuffed. And that right there, that is where the work is.

The work is learning about what your body’s natural hunger and satiety signals are telling you, and to eat based on those. The work is not getting better at tracking. And the key feature here is self-trust. You learn to trust yourself around food. You learn to trust that you know what foods are healthy, what foods fuel you, what foods taste good to you, and you eat those.

And you practice listening to your brain, and your body, tell you that you’ve had enough. That you are satisfied. Key word here, practice. And when I say practice, you know what that means. Trying and failing until you get the hang of it.

So this is your key right here. I don’t really care if you track your calories, because what matters more to me is that you learn to trust yourself around food. And honestly, I don’t know that a tracking app is going to do that for you. I want you to be able to trust yourself enough to know how much is enough. And that comes with time, patience, awareness, slowing down, messing up and trying again.

And the more you practice this, and prove to yourself that you can trust your own brain and body, the less you will need a tracker. And that will feel liberating. All right?

If you want help with this, let’s go. When you coach with me, you will practice learning what hunger and satiety feels like. And you’ll learn to trust yourself around food. Check out my website. Go to www.KerryHollandMD.com/contact and send me a message. Let’s talk about how coaching will change your relationship with food and with yourself.

All right, thank you again for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you next week.

Hey, if you’re looking for your next great read, I’ve got you covered. Head over to CarrieHollandMD.com/books and download my list of most favorite reads. I’ve got two collections waiting for you. One is all about work-life balance. The other is a collection of books that have changed my life.

I’ve referenced many of these books in the podcast, and now you can access those titles all in one place. Again, that’s CarrieHollandMD.com/books. Check it out and find your next great read. Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.