Counting The Cost Of My Fry-Ups - A Calorie Counting Odyssey

I’m not really a numbers guy: I just scraped GCSE maths and any time I see a number with more than five digits I start zoning out. So when it came to losing weight, calorie counting never really appealed to me, what with it being solely based around long, fiddly numbers and a constant log of them. I usually preferred to just go on healthy ‘vibes’, like ‘this looks healthy’, ‘this tastes like shit (so must be healthy)’ and ‘this looks green (and tastes like shit [so must be healthy])’. 

‍Losing weight is long and hard

When I was in my early 20’s, and my furious metabolism could burn off a stuffed crust Domino’s as easily as a wispy rice cake, healthy vibes worked quite well, and I didn’t even think about it. Now I’m in my 30’s and my sweaty metabolism goes into panic mode the minute I pick up a slice of ham, I always need to think about it, all of the time. And it’s boring and arduous, but then really so is the process of trying to gradually wick away body fat from your body. Despite what any crash diet, weight loss tea, or insane exercise plan will tell (or sell) you, losing weight is long, and hard. 

And that sucks! But if it already sucks (and it does), then you might as well do it effectively, and from experience of trying a whole host of crash diets, weight loss teas and insane exercise plans, calorie counting, as boring and arduous as it is, is the most effective weight loss format I’ve tried. 

Calorie counting actually works

I’ve been calorie counting since the start of the year and I’ve already lost a stone. To be fair I was the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life after Christmas, but with a combination of using this calorie counting app called Lose It!, walking 10k steps a day and drinking way less brandy, I’ve managed to lose the weight and keep it off. 

Yes, it’s pretty annoying and tiresome searching for and inputting everything you’ve eaten and drunk, every meal, every coffee, every day. It, like step counting, can also lead to some weird behaviours as you base your whole life around numbers and nothing else. I’ve sometimes realised I had a few hundred spare calories at the end of a day and ate some cheese, just for the sake of it, rather than because I was hungry or actually wanted cheese. It also can make you obsess over the numbers, counting how many calories in this by how many is in that, and not making the right choices diet wise because all you care about is the lowest calorie count, and not the right thing nutritionally. 

But if you keep to your calorie count each day, it’s pretty hard (unless you’re really trying or doing something weird) to not be vaguely healthy anyway. Things like healthy fats and protein do take up a lot, but if you stick to three mostly balanced meals a day and the odd snack then it kind of sorts itself out. Calorie counting just makes you realise how much you’re actually eating each day, and makes it easier for you figure out things like portion size, and how much protein you need in a day. 

Beat the greasy spoon craving

For example, I love a fry up, but after putting in a whole fry ups worth of goods into my counter, I realise that I don’t have a tonne of calories left to play with that day. So I either go lighter for the rest of my meals or burn something off with exercise. Before calorie counting I thought a fry up might be something like 800 cals worth, now I know my local greasy spoon one is more like 1,300, and it contains about 50 grams of protein, which makes up a third of my 150g daily aim. That is some weirdly specific and quite helpful information that I would’ve never known about before calorie counting, and it’s just good to be conscious of it, even if it still shouldn’t completely dominate your life. 

As I said at the start, losing weight is a long term plan that you should be doing over months, if not years, to do it right, i.e. keeping it off and not just bouncing it straight back on after looking slightly more lean for about a week. That takes perseverance, effort, and being mindful of what you put in your body. As boring and cliché as that sounds, there’s just no other way around it. For me personally, having a ‘this many calories go in, this many calories need to be burnt’ system works a lot better for me mentally, longer term, than any other system I’ve tried. But as usual with the most boring methods, they get results, and everyone kind of secretly knows it, but they just can’t be arsed to actually do them because they’re…boring. But if you’re fully committed to shedding a bit of timber, it’ll definitely help.