If counting calories works for you and it's nor driving you mental, good for you, but I will give you some good reasons why you should stop counting them.
Counting calories limits bad AND good food. For example: you eliminate junk/fast food and processed meat (sausages) out of your diet, but you also elimanate nuts and seeds, avocado, healthy fats in general, which are essential for our health and overall well being. Burn all the low fat diet books, please! :) 100 cals of lean protein or 100 cals of carbohydrate or 100 cals of alcohol
are not the same. They have different effect on your hormones and metabolic rate.
Quality food determines your energy levels, health and physique.
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Real food doesn't need to be packaged, but when you are counting calories, you
may be encouraged to eat packaged (processed) food, because it already has all information about calories (fyi: nutritional labels can be off 20 %) and you don't need to search nutritional facts on the internet and lose precious time. Which leads to another point -
counting calories does not guarantee you're getting enough nutrients you need in a day. Like I said: 100g of veggies is not the same as 100g of hamburger.
Your body is extremely intelligent, it's already equipped to tell you when to eat and what to eat. With counting calories you ignore your natural satiety cues. For example: you already had all the calories for a day, you have a workout in the evening, but afterwards you don't eat anyting just because you already had all the calories for that day, even though your body tells you it need something to eat. Bare in mind that
your body is not a bank (it doesn't have a system inside that will count how many calories you had ;)) and if it needs food, provide your body the food it needs. Some days we need more food, some days we need less, depends on how active, inactive we are or what are we doing in a day.
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Fewer calories you consume, body burns fewer calories - if you consume more good quality calories, your body burns more calories. If you undereat on good calories and if you overeat/undereat on bad food, less calories you burn.
Calorie restriction in the long term
will slow down your metabolism and will not help you maintain weight/fat loss in the long term.
Do you count calories?
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