Are you tracking calories? Doesn’t matter if you don’t as it can become an obsession some times. Tracking calories on my fitness pal will never be 100% accurate as it’s an educated guess from the food industry as to how many calories are in foods. It also doesn’t take into account how you slept, how hard you trained, time of the month, if you’re hungover, if you’rr recording the right amount of foods. There are so many variables that could go wrong.
However – Tracking calories can be useful at certain times i.e if you’re doing a shoot or have 6 weeks to get in shape for your holiday as it can speed up results as you have a good idea of energy output to input.
If you never tracked foods it might be useful to track a day of calories when you have a huge binging/ boozy weekend and see for yourself really how many calories can easily be consumed. Up to a weeks worth of calories can be consumed over two days.
If you’re traveling with work and know foods choices will not be good, tracking calories can be a good option as for a few days you can stay in your calorie target with bad foods, yet still be making progress. This obviously isn’t perfect and shouldn’t be done longer than a few days but as soon as you are home from traveling you can stop tracking and eat healthy nutritious foods again.
You don’t have to track calories at all but I hope these examples show why people do it and how it could help you in your physique goal.
Ryan