When Calorie Tracking Fails
This should be more obvious
If calorie tracking worked for you, it would be obvious. But for many people, calorie tracking and overt calorie restriction does not work.
For many people like Carl, intuitive eating isn't just "almost as good," it's actually better. Now let’s drill down into why this may be. Calorie tracking (the precursor to overt and intentional calorie restriction) can lead to:
Eating too much on days your body needs less
Eating too little on days your body needs more
Eating too little to support effective training
Stress surrounding one of the most enjoyable activities in life - EATING!
Your body is not a static machine. You cannot actually predict how much energy it needs each day with high precision. Some days your body may be able to process a higher amount of energy even though you’ve done less training. Some days your body may not be able to process as much energy even though you’ve done more training.
So if you ate the same amount every day, irrespective to these changes, you’d end up getting fatter some days unnecessarily, while not consuming enough food to properly recover from training other days.