Bold claim? Well not really. Every weight loss nutrition plan/book/gimmick anyone has ever bought has one goal for the consumer: get them in a calorie deficit so they lose weight. So why not skip the middle man and just count calories and guarantee you’re in a calorie deficit.

Let me first state that I don’t believe everyone needs to be counting calories to lose weight. However, I would say that I haven’t had a client track their calories and not be successful, whereas I have had many clients who haven’t wanted to do it or refused to do it who have been unsuccessful with their weight loss.

If you can GUARANTEE weight loss by spending 10mins of each day on your phone inputting your foods, why the hell not?!

So this is a quick guide to make calorie counting as painless and easy as possible.

First of all you will need to down the app MyFitnessPal onto your phone. To my knowledge this is the best free calorie tracking app around.

When people think of calorie counting they think of spending hours meticulously weighing food on scales but there really is a surprisingly small amount of times I break out the scales. Here is my bullet proof plan for using the app without making the process to time consuming or spending ages in the kitchen weighing and measuring foods:

  • Set a calorie target than ensures you’re in a daily calorie deficit (you can do this through the app or you can input a target set by your trainer manually under “goals” section of the settings)
  • Make use of the barcode scanner when adding foods – this makes the whole process so much easier – for example if you’re making a meal with chicken breast simply scan the packaging and then choose your portion size (e.g. 1 breast or if the pack weighs 500g and you had half of it then input 250g chicken breast, no need for weighing anything).
  • Use a standard measure when weighing foods for the first time – this can either be something in your kitchen or you can buy a set of cup measurements from the supermarket and just use that system which is loads easier! For example if you want to have the same amount of porridge every day then weigh it out into a normal size mug and then you can just eye ball it into that mug each time rather than using the scales.
  • When making meals/eating foods you eat frequently, save them under your meals section. If, like me you have the same breakfast most days then it makes sense to save that breakfast rather than putting the items in individually every day. Even if your portion sizes change you can still load up the saved meal then edit quantities which will still save you a lot of time and effort.
  • When cooking bigger meals/family meals make note of of the total ingredients then take an educated guess at how much you had. For example if you cooked up a chilli with rice and you think you had about a ¼ of the total meal, then put in ¼ of the ingredients into myfitnesspal – in this example the only thing you’d really need to weigh would be the rice everything else could be done form the packaging.
  • Don’t bother adding your green vegetables to MyFitnessPal – you can if you really want to track your veg intake, but for all that grief I wouldn’t bother weighing out each vegetable I added to my meal. A lot of other veggies are pretty easy to add though (i.e. you can add 1 onion or ½ bell pepper without actually weighing anything out).
  • Accurately measure out portions of fat or high fat foods. Fats contain 9 calories/gram compared to carbs and protein only 4kcal/gram. Therefore, making sure you don’t overdo the portion sizes of fats is important if your trying to restrict calories. Some examples might be using a teaspoon when adding oil or if your buttering toast then you can pop them on the scales before and after weighing them to see how much you use.
  • ASSESS YOURSELF REGULARLY. This is so glaringly obvious but people don’t do it often enough. If you have a goal of weight loss then obviously you should see if your plan is working towards that goal. If your weight isn’t going down then you’re not in a calorie deficit therefore either reduce your intake or increase your output of calories.

Good luck!

Joe Birch BSc MSc Pn1