eat right and no need to count calories

Intuitive eating. Many people can, quite a few can not. So, like many things you will see here, it depends.

Look up Freelee the Banana Girl, she'll blow your mind! If not for all seriousness then for fun. She's crazy.

I have a number of friends both here on MFP and in person who are Vegan even mainly raw Vegan who are overweight, one would be classified as Obese. Yes a person can get fat on the so called healthy foods just as much as they can with the so called unhealthy foods. It may be somewhat more difficult, but it is just as likely.

keziak1 wrote: »

I've read in a number of books and articles, one today, that if you are eating right (or healthy or clean or however you call it) then you don't need to measure food or count calories.

That works for some people. Doesn't work for most people.

vismal wrote: »

keziak1 wrote: »

I've read in a number of books and articles, one today, that if you are eating right (or healthy or clean or however you call it) then you don't need to measure food or count calories. Since this is a calorie-counting site I assume you have not found this to be the case? Is it likely one will continue to carry excess fat even when eating healthy, if calories aren't controlled too?

There are several problems with this. First what is "right", or "clean", or "healthy"? Are nuts healthy? They are calorie bombs. How about avocados, are they healthy? Again calorie bomb. Eggs? 70 calories each. What about milk? 90 calories a cup for skim, even more for 1, or 2 %. Bananas? Roughly 110 calories a piece. No matter what you eat, if you eat too much of it, you will not lose weight.

Said it so much better than me, lol ( one day i will learn proper English...promise)

suelegal wrote: »

sorry all foods are not "healthy" no matter how they are eaten. Generalizing like that gets people into trouble.

Care to elaborate?

There are many good reasons to choose to eat organic and/or "natural" foods. Weight loss isn't one of them. Organic butter and heavy cream and honey and eggs from backyard hens are all wonderful and delicious and quite caloric.

I think that small farms add to the quality of life locally, and gardening and raising livestock are noble pastimes. That doesn't mean that they will make you lose weight. "Clean" (I hate that term) eating has its own virtues. Weight loss isn't automatically one of them. The people who keep asserting so are actually doing a disservice to the idea, because it's so obviously Woo and bro science.

Echoing what others have said...but it depends on what your goals are. If you are interested in fat loss you will need to be in calorie deficit and that gets very tricky if you are simply estimating. It's surprising how quickly calories can add up even with small portions and it is absolutely contingent upon the actual food item you're going to eat. If you are just eating better and including more nutrient dense rather than calorie dense food then you may not need to weight and count your calories....it's about your defining your goals and setting your course. Good luck ~!~

It's actually not a terrible question.

Billions of people in the world maintain a healthy weight without ever counting calories. Most of them just intuitively don't eat too much.

However, if you're here because you're overweight (and by your profile, I see that you're trying to lose 87 pounds), then the simple truth is that the reason you got to be overweight -- the reason we all got to be overweight -- is that we consumed more calories than we burned. Maybe not a lot more. Maybe there were medical or other reasons for it. But that's what it comes down to: Calories In exceeding Calories Out. And that means that, for most of us, simply eating intuitively doesn't work.

There's a saying that "nobody ever got fat on broccoli". But you might be surprised at how easy it is to overeat on so-called "clean" foods if you're not mindful. And if you're already overweight and trying to lose weight, then eating too many calories -- whether those calories come from cookies or broccoli -- will prevent you from being successful at weight loss.

Is counting calories the only effective way to lose weight? No, of course not. There are lots of methods that people can and have used successfully. But, whether you count them or not, to lose weight, Calories In have got to be less than Calories Out. That's just how it works. So counting them is a useful tool for many of us to effectively take off the extra pounds -- and to keep them off once they're gone.

I'm sure you could lose weight without weighing/counting/logging if you ate the same relatively low calorie dense foods every day in the same small bowl. <snooze>