Counting Calories

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts & Ideas, uncategorized |

Have you ever heard about counting calories? Sure you have. Have you ever thought about actually doing it? Of course not - it’s a pain in the ass! Never being able to eat anything before weighing it and looking at the declaration so you can determine the total amount of calories. This seems to be a lot of work, especially if you have to do it six times a day. No more eating at restaurants or drinking a beer at the local bar. Unless you are a fitness freak, this is not what you want to spend your time on, right? Well maybe you should. Not for the rest of your life, though.

I did this once, and believe it or not, I actually kept doing it for some three months. Let me tell you, this is really annoying. First I spent a few weeks, trying to figure out the total amount of calories I would be burning every 24 hours. This took a while, but finally I got it right. Afterwards I was trying to keep my calorie intake equal to this daily amount. If I wanted to lower my body fat percentage slightly, I would simply decrease my daily intake with a few hundred calories. Obviously the same goes for putting on weight, just the other way around. Being able to control this easily was a very nice feeling, but definitely too much work to keep it going forever. So what is my point, exactly?

Well, it’s not that I have ever had any serious problems keeping the right weight. But after I stopped counting calories, I still knew pretty well how much I should eat every day to keep the right weight. Since I had been eating exactly what I needed every day for about three months, I had developed an intuition for it. It’s now been about two years since I did my counting, and I still think of this as a long term benefit.
I especially believe that it can be a huge advantage when you grow older. It’s no secret that the average person’s metabolism slows down the older he grows. I believe this is often the reason why people go on low calories diets, or other extremes such as Atkins for instance. Despite what science tells us, I find it hard to believe that such choices are healthy, a least over a longer period. For me, it seems rational to eat equivalently to the body’s consumption. By adjusting the amount as time goes, it should be pretty easy to keep your desired weight.

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