First 7 Days of Your Diet — An Alternative Approach to Calorie Counting

alternative to calorie counting
Written by Serdar Tuncali

It is tempting to go full force on your weight loss journey once you make the decision. You start on Monday, eat as little as possible and exercise as much as possible. Maybe you read a motivational quote and you feel strong and determined. You want to see the results as soon as possible.

That’s understandable, but keep in mind that weight loss is a long journey. You are going to have that body of yours for the rest of your life. The results you get within the next few weeks is insignificant compared to the rest of your life. For a successful weight loss, you have to think in terms of short-term, medium-term and long-term.

Goal Setting for Weight Loss

Short-term: Next 12 to 16 weeks. This is the amount of time required to have meaningful results. If you want effective and lasting results, don’t make four-week-long fat-loss plans just before your vacation. These short-term plans are for people who are already in shape to fine-tune their bodies. 

Medium-term: One year. Twelve months is enough time to transform your body significantly. With the proper plan and consistent effort, you can lose a significant amount of fat and/or build a significant amount of muscle. If needed, you can fit 3-4 short-term cycles into your medium-term plan with a week of a mental and physical break in between each cycle. 

Long-term: Rest of your life. Once you reach your goals, you want to maintain your shape for the rest of your life. It may be hard to maintain a magazine-cover-worthy shape for a lifetime, but if you get to know your body, you can maintain a healthy weight almost effortlessly.

By spending a week at the beginning of your weight-loss journey educating yourself about your body and your food choices, you can achieve a lifetime of success without following any diet.

Calories and Weight Loss

If your goal is to lose fat, you must be in a calorie deficit consistently.  However, it is practically impossible to calculate your calorie intake and calorie output accurately. The best we can do is guess and adjust. 

 Your day-to-day calorie expenditure depends on many factors such as your daily activities, exercise, and diet. Based on your day, there can be hundreds of calories difference between two days. Furthermore, calculating the calories you eat can be inaccurate. 

Ask yourself this: Do you even know how many calories you burn and how many calories you eat in a given day? What if we removed the hard-to-track unit called “calorie” and replaced it with an easier unit? For example: “Monday.” “How do you track a Monday?” you ask. 

An Alternative to Calorie Counting

If you are like most people, chances are you have a daily routine for every day in the week. Maybe your weekdays are very similar to each other, but weekends are different. You may have certain activities on certain days of the week. 

If you can tie every day of the week to a proper meal plan, knowing you will be in a calorie deficit, you don’t have to track your calories anymore. You just track days.

Before we can have this plan, we need to know our daily habits, how many calories we burn on average and how many calories we eat on average. It’s like planning a cross-country trip. You can either get in your car and start driving due east, or look at the map and plan each day on where to stop, where to eat, where to get gas, etc. 

Now let’s learn how to spend your first seven days to create your road map.

Seven Days of Calorie Counting — Self Audit

For most people who work on a regular job, their weeks are almost identical. However, if you work a regular Monday-to-Friday schedule, your weekends will look very different than your weekdays. 

During the first seven days of your journey, you will identify your daily habits and how they affect your diet and weight. This is some sort of a self-audit. The goal here is to find out how much you need to eat to maintain your weight and cut from there.

If you plan on exercising to help you lose fat, you should pick a program or an exercise class that you think you can maintain for a long time. For example, if you haven’t worked out in years, starting a high-intensity Crossfit class may not be a good idea. (A good exercise routine for fat loss is full-body strength training 3 days a week and walking 4 days a week. All you need is 40-45 minutes a day.) 

Once you have a weekly plan of activities and exercise for the week, now it’s time to track your food intake for each day. The goal here is not losing or gaining weight in a week. What we are trying to achieve is finding out what and how much you eat to maintain your weight.

Just eat regularly. Eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Try and listen to your body’s hunger and fullness signals. Note how factors such as stress and exercise change your appetite. On average, your maintenance calories should be 13-15 times your body weight in pounds. Try to stay within this range.

Accuracy of Calorie Counting

Since calorie information on restaurant meals are inaccurate, it is best to stick to home cooking and simple meals. You are going to use a kitchen scale to weigh every food and track its calories. Try using a smartphone app such as MyFitnessPal.

If you think you can eyeball serving sizes and guess calories, take the peanut butter challenge:

Take a peanut butter jar, remove the lid and place it on a kitchen scale. Tare the scale to zero and take the jar off the scale. Using a spoon, take what you think is one serving of peanut butter from the jar and put the jar back on the kitchen scale. The number you read (it will be negative) is the amount of peanut butter you just took. Now compare that number to 32 grams, which is one serving of peanut butter.

By eyeballing and estimating, you can end up overeating hundreds, even thousands of calories every single day. These calories accumulate and end up as fat on your body. 

One study looked at obese individuals who reported calorie intake and calorie expenditure. Subjects, on average, underestimated their calorie intake by 47 percent and overestimated their calorie expenditure by 51 percent. These subjects were convinced that their metabolisms were broken and that’s why they couldn’t lose weight. However, their resting metabolic rate (RMR) were within 5 percent of their expected RMR.

How to Find the Ideal Calorie Intake?

Weighing every single food item and tracking every bite might sound laborious. Actually, it really is. However, you are going to educate yourself and your eyes on what a serving size of pasta, bread, peanut butter, steak or chicken looks like. After the first week, you are going to be much more accurate with your serving sizes.

For the first seven days, you are also going to weigh yourself every day. This is important because your weight will fluctuate from day to day. If you weigh yourself on two random days and compare the weight, you won’t know whether you gained/lost fat or your weight just fluctuated. 

During these seven days, it is best to stay away from very high-intensity exercises, as that might affect your weight due to hydration levels and inflammation.

At the end of seven days, you are going to take an average of your weight and average of your calorie consumption. If your weight was stable over the course of a week, the amount of calories you consumed in these seven days is your maintenance calories. Going forward, you need to cut 20-30 percent from this number.

For example: If you ate 2,500 calories on average and your weight was stable over the course of seven days, you need to eat 1,750-2,000 calories a day to lose weight.

How to Cut Calories Without Counting Them?

In order to cut those calories, all you need to do is to find the least necessary calories from your daily eating habits and cut them out and/or replace them with lower-calorie options.

For example: If you add sugar and milk to your morning coffee, switch to a zero-calorie sweetener and cream. Other switches you can make are:

  • Regular soda to diet soda.
  • Regular ice cream to low-calorie ice cream.
  • French fries to roasted potatoes.
  • Thirty-percent hamburger to 10-percent ground beef. 

As you can see, you can cut hundreds of calories from your diet without making major habitual changes. These small changes are more likely to stick compared to starting a brand-new diet that is completely different from that which you are accustomed. If you look into your diet and make some positive changes every once in a while, you will be eating a very healthy diet in no time. 

For example: If you drink two cans of soda a day, you will cut out almost 300 calories a day by switching to diet soda. Maybe in the future, you will switch from diet soda to sparkling water. But until then, you will lower your calories effortlessly. 

Starting Your Body Transformation

A perfect diet plan might help you lose weight, build muscle, lower your cholesterol and blood pressure and increase your overall health. However, it won’t do any of it if you couldn’t stick to long-term. That’s why making small changes in your habits will yield much better results. 

If you can improve by 1 percent every week, by the end of the year you will have improved by 68 percent. Improving by 1 percent doesn’t take much effort. If you tried to improve by 60 percent, to begin with, you probably couldn’t have maintained it. 

 Now that you are equipped with the tools you need, go ahead and start your body transformation journey. The journey itself may not be sexy, but at the end of it, you will be!

About the author

Serdar Tuncali

Serdar Tuncali is a science-based fitness enthusiast. He holds a bachelor’s of science degree in Pharmacy and a master’s of science in Clinical Research Management. He works at Mayo Clinic as a senior research technologist and has authored several publications in top scientific journals.