Research shows that the most effective ways of losing weight without counting calories is to track what you eat everyday, learn how to feel full after eating, and eat mainly unprocessed foods.
Imagine that you have been overweight for your whole life. You've thought about losing weight a few times but nothing ever worked for you. You set a goal for yourself to lose weight at the start of the year and this time you're motivated. You go on a diet, start counting calories, lose weight, and finally reach the weight that you planned too.
You’re excited and start to eat everything that you couldn't eat while you were on a diet. You also stop counting calories because it is hard, it takes too long, and you don't want to anymore.
But then before you know it you start gaining weight again.
It is not only you. This is a vast majority of people who try to lose weight go through this same problem.
An article published by the American Psychological Association looks at studies on weight loss with more than a two year follow up.1 The results showed that over the following two to five years after losing weight the average dieter gained all but 2.1 pounds that they had lost. The control group, the people who did not diet, only gained an average of 1.2 pounds.
It is very hard to maintain weight when the only way that you know how to is by counting calories every day.
But studies have also shown that you don't need to count calories.
Another study published by JAMA2 analyzed the effect of eating low-carb high-fat(LCHF) and high-carb low-fat(HCLF) while focusing on eating whole, unprocessed foods without counting any calories. The results of the study showed that both LCHF and HCLF lost the same amount of weight and the main factor in their weight loss was switching to whole, unprocessed foods.
Now let's look into some of the problems that calorie counting has when you look into weight loss.
Then another article3 titled “Death of the Calories” goes in depth on the problems of calorie counting.
You will never actually know the true number of calories that you eat everyday.
There is no doubt in my mind that calorie counting can work for the few people who can track their calories correctly everyday. The problem is that counting calories correctly everyday will be difficult or impossible for most people. And counting calories will only be the long term solution if you are willing to do it for the rest of your life.
We can look at the studies to prove why calorie counting is difficult. This study4 published in PubMed Central lists the most common problems people have with keeping a food journal:
As someone who used to count calories, I dealt with these problems all the time. So instead of counting calories, I did research and found some of the most effective ways to lose weight without calorie counting.
I know that these next three tips are some of the most important things that you can do to lose weight without counting calories.
Knowing exactly what you are eating everyday is the first step to recognizing what is wrong with your diet. Once you become aware of the things that you're eating, you can make the changes needed to start losing weight.
This article from ScienceDaily5 cites a study that states people lose more weight when they start tracking their meals and they also lose more weight than those who do not track at all.
Another study from the Journal of Diabetes Research concludes that people who track consistently(>66% of meals) lose more weight than those who track rarely(33%) or inconsistently(33% -66%).6 Tracking meals can help you lose weight because you become more conscious of all the things that you eat. If you are not counting calories, it would be very hard to remember exactly everything you ate in one day. When you start counting calories you know exactly how much you are eating. This is part of the reason why you lose weight.
We will look back at the study from PubMed Central4 on why people struggle to track their meals. The study says people struggle to track meals because of database reliability, eating context: like meals made by friends or restaurants, losing the habit: forgetting to track, and contrasting difficulty in meal entry where tracking meals from different sources becomes much harder. These are problems that come exclusively from calorie counting.
This means that if people tracked their meals in a more simpler manner then people would be able to track what they eat more consistently. It is important to find a way of tracking your meals that is easy and sustainable for your own lifestyle.
There are two methods of meal tracking that can help you easily maintain consistent meal tracking without having to count calories. You can write down what you eat or you can take a picture of the meals that you eat.
When talking about writing down the meals that you eat there are different ways that you can do it to fit your lifestyle. The article from Science Daily has a quote on ways that you can do it: "Keeping a food diary doesn't have to be a formal thing. Just the act of scribbling down what you eat on a Post-It note, sending yourself emails tallying each meal, or sending yourself a text message will suffice. It's the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps you become aware of our habits, and allow your change our behavior”
Starting a food journal does not have to always be with a pen and paper. You can keep track of what you eat using your phone which you will most likely always have around you when you are eating. You can track what you eat using the simple note taking app that comes with your phone, using a calendar app such as Google Calendar, or the dozens of other apps that help you write down what you ate. Find a method of writing down meals that is convenient for you so you can do it every day.
The other thing that you can do is take a picture of the meals that you eat. Phones today come with a fast, high quality camera so you can quickly take a picture of the meal that you are eating. Since you will most likely always have your phone around you will always have a reliable way of recording what you eat.
One of the benefits of taking a picture of the meals that you eat is that it is instant. No longer will you deal with having to go through and take the time to write down the name of the meal or all of the ingredients that you use. You can take a picture in a second and continue on with the rest of your day.
Another benefit of tracking what you eat with pictures is that you get a visual reminder of how much you eat. When you track what you eat by writing down your meal you would have to rely on your memory to remember exactly how much you eat. Getting a visual reminder of what you eat will allow you to better reflect on what you eat when you look back at it later.
Photo food journaling is a good alternative to only keeping a food journal using words. You could do this by creating an album within your phone gallery for all of the food that you eat. Some note-taking apps allow you to post text with pictures that might help you if you want to add notes to what you eat. There are even some apps specially designed as a photo food journal where you can track with photos in a more organized fashion. You might even be able to create a page on social media where you only post the meals that you eat.
A popular trend that has been growing recently is people posting the meals that they eat on social media. Posting what you eat on Social Media is helpful because you can hold yourself accountable to others and you can connect and create relationships with other people who might be going through the same thing as you.
This trend is especially popular on Instagram where every post is already a photo. On Instagram it is possible to create a page separate from your main profile where you can post pictures of all of the meals that you eat. When you use certain hashtags you can connect with other people in the community who posts the same type of meal pictures. With this, it is easy to find a supportive community of people who help you eat healthily and help remind you to track consistently.
There are some who have lost weight that they have never been able to with the help of Instagram dieting.7 Connecting with a community or group can make losing weight easier for you.
Whether you track using a traditional text-based food journal or a photo food journal I have learned that it is also beneficial to track contextual details around the meals that you eat. Contextual details might be like what time you eat, how long since your last meal, did this meal make you hungry, or even who did I eat this meal with. Tracking this type of information will help you to better reflect on the meals that you eat to determine whether or not the meal was good for you.
When you make it a habit to track your meals you gain insight into the eating habits that you have. You should choose a method of meal tracking that will work consistently in your own daily life. Traditional food journaling, as well as photo food journaling, have their own benefits and disadvantages if you choose to follow that method. It will be beneficial for you to track more than just what you eat using self-reflection.
Self-reflection is an often underlooked method to help with weight loss. Self-reflection is the process of understanding why you think and act the way that you do. The best way to self reflect on the things that you eat is to ask yourself questions. Some examples of questions that you can ask yourself are: “Am I Hungry?”, “Why Did I Eat That?”, and “Did Eating Make Me Feel Better Or Worse?” Answering those questions will help you improve your relationship with food and give you control of what you eat.
Asking yourself “Why Did I Eat?” helps you find the reasons why you eat the things that you eat. It would make sense to think that generally, people eat whenever they are hungry but that is not true all the time. There are many different types of reasons why people will eat something.People eat because of social events, stress, cravings, or even boredom. Reducing the number of times that you eat because of emotions, peer pressure, or other external factors and instead eat when you are actually hungry will help you lose weight.
It is important to find out the reason why you eat to make sure that you are only eating when you are hungry. The reason why we eat is to supply our body with the energy that we need to survive through the day We don’t need to eat three huge meals to make it through the day. Three small meals or even one large meal will probably be enough for most people.
Another question that is important is “Am I full yet?” It is very important to understand when you are full to stop overeating. This article from HuffingtonPost8 is an interview with Zane Andrews, a professor of psychology and neurology at Monash University who studies how food affects the brain. The interview reveals some key details about knowing when you are full.
First, it takes between 5 and 20 minutes to actually feel full after you start eating. This time period is different for every individual person. Use self-reflection to find the best strategy for knowing when you are full. Knowing the time it takes for you individually is important because this could help you stop overeating.
Another thing that Zane Andrews reveals in the article is that very rarely do people eat when they are hungry. We eat based on the social cues that we learn when we are young. A typical eating schedule would be: eat when you wake up in the morning, eat at lunch whenever you have a break, and finally eat when you get back home. This process starts when you are young and if you are not aware that you are eating mindlessly you will continue to follow this behavior for your whole life.
The final revelation from this article is that instinctively the human body does not think overeating is a bad thing. Throughout human history, food has normally been scarce which means that you would never know where your next meal would come from. It is only recently that we have had enough food for most of the population that most will not have to worry about where their next meal would come from.
Asking yourself “How do I feel after eating” will help you analyze the quality of the food that you eat to tell whether it made you feel better or worse. A high-quality meal is one that keeps you full for a long time, gives you lasting energy, and doesn’t give you cravings to eat something else later on. It is very common for someone to eat food like french fries and crave something to eat or drink soon after. Compare that to the feeling that one would get after eating broccoli or spinach. They will not get any additional cravings, stay full for longer, and will not feel tired immediately after eating.
One of the biggest problems that people have is that they eat unconsciously. For example, when people watch movies they usually eat popcorn. Do you ever get full after ordering popcorn at the movie theater? I know that I don’t. In fact, I usually get hungrier and thirstier after eating popcorn. The sodium content in popcorn is designed specifically to make you hungry so that you order more food.
So then why do people eat popcorn in the first place? Most people do it because they associate certain behaviors, such as entertainment, with the act of eating. Once eating is associated with another behavior your body begins to send signals that you are hungry when you do that activity when you are actually not really hungry.
Reflecting on feelings such as “Why You Eat?”, “Am I Full Yet?, or “How do I feel After Eating?” will make losing weight a lot easier. It is not within human nature to stop overeating because we have lived for generations without stable sources of food. Because of that a fundamental change in the way that you eat is needed to adapt to a world with an abundance of food available. Using self-reflection will make you stop eating mindlessly and start eating mindfully. Changing behavior using self-reflection is one of the simplest ways to lose weight without counting calories.
One of the most important factors to weight loss that is typically not noticed when you count calories is the quality of the food that you eat. Countless research studies 9 10 have been done to prove that all calories are not created equal, which means that your body reacts differently to food from different sources. We also know that intuitively that even if you eat something healthy and something unhealthy with the same amount of calories you will generally not feel the same after both meals.
Consider 200 calories of a muffin versus 200 calories of broccoli. Calories in calories out says that food with equal calories are considered the same by the body. But the research as well as conventional knowledge of food proves that that is just not the case. When you count calories you do not consider how the quality of the food affects the amount of weight that you gain.
Another factor that is not considered when you calorie count is that you will feel more full after eating broccoli then you would after eating a muffin. For a lot of people it would be hard to eat 200 calories of broccoli but eating 200 calories of a muffin would be very easy. The picture below will prove my point.
Half of a muffin(200 calories) vs. Broccoli(200 calories)
Scientific studies have shown in general what high quality food looks like and how people lose weight when they start eating only that type of food. This studies published previously cited from JAMA2 finds that food quality, not quantity, is the key to weight. High quality foods are whole, unprocessed foods. Unprocessed foods are foods that have been minimally altered from their natural state. Whole foods are plant foods that are unprocessed and unrefined.
A major study11 was published recently by the NIH has shown the most conclusive evidence that ultra processed foods cause weight gain. The study proved with two different groups eating the same amount of calories, fats, protein, sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fiber lost weight when eating unprocessed foods and gain weight when eating ultra processed foods. The study also proves that people who eat ultra processed foods are more likely to overeat than those in the other group.
The people who ate an ultra processed diet gained two pounds over a two week period and those who ate a minimally processed diet lose two pounds over a two week period. The meals offered by both groups contained the same total amount of calories, fats, protein, sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fiber. People were allowed to eat however much they want but people in the ultra processed group always ate more. The groups switched between both diets and the results were consistent among ultra processed and minimally processed. This is the outstanding proof that ultra processed foods are directly responsible for weight gain.
Another way to find unprocessed foods is to find single-ingredient food. Food such as milk and butter which contain a single ingredient are most likely unprocessed. Reading food labels should help you find foods that are unprocessed. If there are ingredients such as chemicals that you cannot buy in the grocery store then you should probably try to stay away from it.
It is important to know what types of food are processed so that you can avoid eating them. Processed foods can usually be thought of as food that has been baked, frozen, dried, or canned. Typical examples of ultra-processed foods are cereal, soda, cold cuts, sweets, granola bars, bread, and pasta.
You are more likely to eat high-quality food when you cook at home. Most restaurants and fast food places are likely to carry food with preservatives because they can store food for a longer time which saves them money. A study12 published in PubMed Central shows that people who take the time to cook at home are more likely to lose weight than those who eat out. Eating high-quality food will make you more full and keep the hunger off for longer.
Even though we have a general understanding of which types of food classify as “high quality” I encourage some experimentation to find out which foods work best for you. There have been some studies to determine whether or not genetics play a role in the diet but I have not found any to be conclusive one way or another. In general, it is best to start with unprocessed foods and then bring in the foods that might be more processed after and see how your body reacts to it.
There is definitive evidence out there that ultra-processed foods are responsible for weight gain. If you can make a single change that will have the most impact on your weight loss you should consider removing ultra-processed meals from your diet.
It is also important that you replace the ultra-processed foods with natural whole foods. For example, if you want to eat broccoli it will always be better to eat fresh broccoli than trying to eat prepared, frozen broccoli. Small changes such as that may lead to big changes in your body weight when you are trying to lose weight.
These are the three tips that I use to lose weight without counting calories. If you liked the content of this post please join the weekly newsletter to get content like this sent directly to your email every Monday. The next blog post will be coming at the end of February.