Calorie counting...

[anna_wing]

is not something that everyone has to do for fat loss or long-term maintenance. It's perfectly possible to lose weight without it, just by exercising more and paying attention to one's daily diet. If someone is already within the healthy BMI range, does not "struggle" with their weight, and has a decently healthy diet and lifestyle, they probably don't need to count their calories either, unless it makes them happy to do it. It's a useful tool for some people, and some people just like knowing their vital statistics. Nothing is essential for weight loss except ingesting less energy than you expend. How someone wants to do it, and how long they want to take to do it, is up to them.

It probably helps not to have a strongly emotional attitude towards food, beyond bothering to eat enough of it to sustain a healthy weight.

Courtesy of a conversation with someone who was convinced that they had to count calories to lose weight, and was convinced that they couldn't do it, and therefore was convinced that they couldn't lose weight etc etc etc. I'm not sure that they even believed me when I kept saying that it wasn't a thing that I had ever done and therefore I was really the wrong person to be talking to about it...

Comments

[mtbc]

Certainly agreed, e.g., if one's aware of what one's typically eating, one can try eating a bit less or differently and see how that goes. It is helpful to do it enough to get an idea of what's rather more calorific than what though, there can be surprises in that.

[anna_wing]

Yes indeed. A lot of people don't realise that "heart-healthy" and "low-calorie" are orthogonal axes...