NO MORE CALORIE COUNTING

Public exhortation as to avoiding "processed" foods is mostly about virtue signaling. I ignore these statements in the same way as I ignore explanations of "Who is God" and "There is no God" - politely.

No. I'm still pretty new to this and it's been amazing to know I'm not overeating and has made me much more aware of what I'm putting in my mouth. I'd like to lose 60 more pounds. Maybe someday when I've trained myself to know how much to eat per day but right now this really keeps me in check.

sweetangelkitten wrote: »

Panini911 wrote: »

Best of luck in finding what works best for you.

unfortunately for me, eating "healthy" without calorie counting is why i was obese most of my life. even after loosing 100lbs twice. I'm a victim of my own portion creep. even in maintenance this time around i should do check ins with the scale and diary every few weeks even if i don't do so daily.

sweetangelkitten wrote: »

spinnerdell wrote: »

Eating wholesome food when I was hungry led to a 70 pound weight gain over the years. Counting calories allowed me to lose that weight and maintain the loss. Wishing you a better outcome with your eating plan.

Why does this lead so many people to weight gain? We weren't counting calories a couple hundred years ago or even a hundred years ago... Seems unnatural to be measuring and counting, we should eat when we are hungry >,<

a couple of hundred years ago our access to food and what foods as well as our actiivty level was VASTLY different. you can't really compare the two.

Easy, don't eat the processed food

um hello - i wasn't eating much in the way of processed food. i've always cooked a ton at home and ate tons of veggies/fruit and so called health foods. i rarely ate out much less fast food and whe i did it was usually salad or fresh sandwich from a nice shop.

clearly you are not here to make friends. my post was polite and your reply was a diss? that actually dismissed what i wrote?

sweetangelkitten wrote: »

Yep, that's right! I'm done counting calories and tracking everything I eat! I'm eating wholesome foods and eating when I am hungry. Doing what feels natural! Anyone else here with me on this?

My wife doesn't track calories but she is Asian and her default diet doesn't require it. She eats 1pm to 11pm apart from coffee and eats lots of greens, soups. noodles, nuts, little protein, never sweet things.

Ive lost weight and maintained weight without counting calories but I have to really stay focused. I think counting calories is easier. I can just guesstimate and even take weekends or other random days off here and there and it still holds me accountable

janejellyroll wrote: »

ladyzherra wrote: »

Hi there! I applaud your idea to not count calories. Back in times in which people did not know the nutritional content of food, there was no calorie counting, as you write. People had to develop and cultivate a knowledge of their bodies which most of us, I believe, have lost. When one is in harmony with her body (the emotinal and mental bodies align with the physical body), then I do believe that we can intrinsically know what is right for our consumption.

However, even the issue of hunger becomes boggy when considering the contemporary way of moving through the world in a first world country. So many of us are practiced as associating other emotions with hunger, that unearthing "actual" hunger is going to take quite a journey of discovery. Hunger has become much more conflated than it was before grocery stores and easily accessible foods, for example.

I do think that the ideal life would be to NOT count calories and to eat when hungry. But each of these aspects require a very long process of excavation. Imagine being able to listen to and TRUST the body? I mean, right? That's so important...but also very challenging. So, I would keep your goal in sight but also be practical about how you can achieve it. In order to understand the path toward this, many things in the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical body need to be resolved.

Jenn

I really don't know if the reality of the average human throughout history has been that they developed and cultivated a "knowledge of their bodies." The reality for a lot of people is that they ate what was available to them in the quantities that they could afford. They weren't non-obese due to some folk knowledge we've failed to cultivate. They were non-obese because they worked hard and food has historically been a limited quantity for many.

Yep.

Two hundred years ago an American child might get an orange in his or her stocking at Christmas as a special treat. Go another couple hundred years even further back, and oranges were so rare and expensive in parts of Europe it was a custom to allow a pregnant woman to have one orange as an extra special treat once during her pregnancy. I had an orange this morning as a snack, and I have a big bag of oranges in my fridge right now.

Not to mention that the foods we eat today, even when minimally processed and called by the same names, are not the same foods. Navel oranges didn’t exist when my ancestors settled in this part of the country. And I myself am old enough to remember when a massive orange the size of the one I ate today was not a thing, large oranges were about the size of baseballs. That’s just a size difference, but the fruit itself is also sweeter and higher in sugars. Bananas today are nutritionally almost nothing like bananas a hundred years ago. Eggs, fish, beef, all nutritionally different because of a century of selective breeding and changes in husbandry.

Please don’t mistake me for someone saying that modern foods are in some way evil or lesser. They are however different from the foods humans evolved to eat. It’s not reasonable to expect that evolution should have prepared us to instinctively eat the right amount and mixture of modern foods, any more than it’s reasonable to expect your dog to know better than to eat all the chocolate out of your Easter basket and then die. Dogs did not evolve to cope with Easter baskets, and humans did not evolve to cope with modern plenty.