To count calories or to not count calories?

Sounds like you need to figure this one out for yourself. Try not counting & just eat healthy. If you lose weight, it works for you. If it doesn't, then you probably need to count.

For me? I need to count.

According to my reseached, people who log the food they eat, are more successful in weight loss. It personally keeps me accountable. However, I could see how people can get obsessive with counting their calorie intake. It's not for everyone. Good luck!

I always see contradicting tips about this. Some people say to count your calories. You need to be calorie deficit to lose weight and counting calories keeps you on track. Others say to ditch counting calories because it can get stressful and even obsessive- just eat healthy. The thing is there are a lot of people that either went the counting calorie route or the ditching calorie route and either side ended up with success stories. I try to keep my food logs on here, but it's not something I can be really consistent on.

MFP is a calorie and macro tracking resource (app/web)

people who stick around are likely to be the ones for whom tracking has worked or is working

what's right for you is up to you

if you're struggling with tracking consistently, why not try to set yourself a shorter term target:
>Tomorrow, I'll weigh and log everything I eat
when you can do that try:
>the next two days, I'll weigh and log everything I eat

and build up, when i started logging, i found it really hard on weekends, I promised myself to log "this weekend" and I managed and over the 10 days I logged I lost, and since i've been keeping it up

sometimes i get less accurate in measuring, and that's fine as long as i'm still loosing, but when my loss slows down the first thing i do is get more accurate about my logging

good luck

When you workout, calories are subtracted from your daily goal. Do you have to maintain eating at that calorie goal? Because for some reason it feels like when I burn 300 calories when I work out and eat 300 or more to maintain the daily calorie goal, it feels like I'm maintaining, not losing. Can someone tell me how this works? I know eating too less calories is really bad, but I want to lose, not maintain.

You lose weight by creating a deficit between the calories you need to maintain (the total calories you are burning) and those you eat. In general, a deficit of 3500 in a week (500/day)=one pound lost. If the deficit is too high you will lack energy (on average) and over time your body will counteract this by reducing the amount you are burning (reduced metabolism). So, for that and other reasons, you don't want too high a deficit, although what's right depends on how overweight you are.

Ideally, you create the target deficit with a combination of cutting calories and increasing exercise (and thus the amount burned). A lot of plans calculate it that way, and this prevents you from having to cut calories too drastically. What MFP does is that no matter how much you say you plan to exercise, the starting goal will assume that you do no exercise (since a lot of people don't). But that means calories are cut much more (500 per day for each pound you are trying to lose in a week) than in plans where exercise is also assumed. Thus, as you exercise, you get calories back, resulting in a deficit that's made up partly of calorie cutting and partly of exercise.

Why it's not counterproductive is that the new goal you are given still includes the very same deficit.

Be careful, however, that estimates for calories burned from exercise are often too high. Use your judgment.

......this is a calorie counting site

Actually, it's a health and fitness site too.

and a dating site.

Indeed. And social site.