Welcome. When I first set out on this diet, I lost weight effortlessly without a single calorie counted. Now that I'm with striking distance of my goal weight, and have been for the last year or so, things stopped moving altogether, even with strict calorie counting. I recently just said "screw it" and stopped logging my food. I'm just eating clean when I want, and how much I want. If I lose weight then great. If not, then I already know it's not worth the effort to try any harder anyway.

So, I say it's not stupid to count calories. But you may not have to.

In the beginning of my keto Primal MFP journey I made the mistake of letting MFP calculate my calories, and of course I was like most newbies and entered a 2 pound per week weight loss goal... so I was undereating for the first 6 months. Yes, I initially lost weight fast but then stalled badly in the first half of 2013. So now I calculate my own calories (and yes, I eat at a deficit but not a large one- 164 pounds currently and set 1600 calories) and I am doing very well. I only have about 15-20 pounds left to lose so it is expected that it will go slowly.

My best advice would be:

1. Adhere to your eating plan MOST of the time (lots of cheats and treats will derail many of us)
2. Set a calorie goal with only a small to moderate deficit. It's not a race.
3. Eat back some of your exercise calories.
4. On days where you are very hungry, don't be afraid to go over your calories, but stick to healthy foods (watch the sugars-yes that means fruit!). Sometimes you really do need some extra fat and protein, so don't deny your body.

I don't count calories eating this way for a couple of reasons..................

The first and main reason is because when I do count calories eating this way, I am way under eating most days.

Secondly, I find I stress and obsess and that stalls my weight loss tremendously.

I just go with the motto of eating the best quality I possibly can. Eat when hungry and don't force myself to eat when not hungry.

^^^ I couldn't get the quotes to work right!!!




Ok before I say this I want to say I count calories and it helps me stay on track and encourages me to eat proper healthy food.

But overall, counting calories is silly. It is impossible to precisely know the amount of calories in food or the amount we are burning each day. Let me put it in mathematically terms. Say you have a 1% error rate in calories, so in a 2000 calorie diet you are off by 20 calories. No big deal right? Lets look at that 20 calories over time.

+20 calories a day over a year a 2 pound gain (still not that big of deal but a gain no less)
+20 calories a day over 5 years is a 10 pound gain
+20 calories a day over 10 years is a 20 pound gain
+20 calories a day over 50 years is a 101 pound gain.

Obvisously there are days when the error rate would favor the other direction.

IMHO The whole point of primal/paleo is about allowing your bodies regulatory systems do their job by supplying it with the food its meant to have. In other words, keeping blood sugar even to control insulin release to discourage fat storage, in turn your body become more sensitive and better at producing leptin (your full hormone) and slows the production of the gherlin (your I'm hungry hormone).

Just my 2 cents...

Are you sure it was "eat at a deficit" they were saying was stupid, and not "counting calories"?

It was both, one person's exact words were "Counting calories to eat at a deficit is stupid. Just eat well and you'll BE well." And while that may be true in terms of overall health, I still have pounds to lose to be at a healthy weight and as much as I care about being healthy...part of that to me is being at a good weight.

However, it can't magically make you lose weight while eating at or above maintenance. Sorry, biology doesn't work that way.

That's what I thought lol, but then when I have people telling me "not to worry about it" I started questioning things :P...even moreso when these people are completely ripped and attribute it all to primal eat/working out.

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Your friend is right, in a sense. When the body is working properly, it should be able to self-regulate, and you shouldn't have to worry about counting calories to lose weight. After all, for the entirety of human history until a few decades ago, people stayed within a normal weight range naturally, without counting calories. You shouldn't have to count calories (or do the whole "weigh every gram" thing) in order to eat at a deficit and lose weight.

I've been on MFP for a few years now, and until last year, I had been trying to lose weight basically the "calories in, calories out" way. Supposedly, macros shouldn't matter, and I'd be able to lose weight. I hadn't messed with MFP's macro settings except maybe to increase protein, but neither did I really try to be within them much. I just tried to hit my protein goal and let what would be, be.

At the end of the day, every single day, I'd be at my calorie maximum (which wasn't small - around 2000) and wanted to gnaw my arm off. And worse? I wasn't losing weight (or inches).

Several years ago, I was diagnosed with PCOS, but hadn't been on Metformin for quite some time, so I went to my doctor to see about running the tests again and maybe going back on it. She basically laughed me out of the office and told me I was just eating too much, and that I should be eating around 1600. Hahaha...no.

I was starving at the 2000+ MFP and the TDEE methods were giving me, there was no way in hell that I'd be able to cut out another 500 calories.

Enter the Primal Blueprint and LC/HF. I decided to try it, and started eating more fat and fewer carbs. Even without going full keto, or even what some would consider "low carb" (at the time, I think I was at a goal maximum of around 125g of carbs), it was far easier for me to eat far less. Not only was I able to be comfortable on the doctor's recommendation of 1600, there were days were I struggled to eat that much, and would, if left to my own devices, only eat about half that. Suddenly, 1600 became an "eat this much" instead of "eat this little" goal.

One of the things I did at the beginning was keep track so that I could learn to gauge how much I was eating, because it felt like I'd eating something like 3000 calories or something crazy, but when I put it into MFP, it'd come out to be more like 1000. Later on, I started doing it to track carbs to try to bring them down under 75-100g.

Now, (in part with the help of Metformin, at the moment, due to the PCOS and what it's done to my endocrine system) I'm losing weight without tracking, because I'm listening to my body and eating Primally.