Counting calories can be an easy and reliable way to lose weight. As long as you’re eating within your calorie “budget,” you can eat a variety of foods while still making progress. However, calorie counting should only be a temporary practice. Those who continue counting just to maintain their weight can develop unhealthy mindsets and behaviors like orthorexia, the obsession of always needing healthy foods. To live a balanced lifestyle, you need to eventually stop tracking and eat intuitively. So how can you eat intuitively without gaining all the weight back?
Creating a mental “calorie index,” focusing on whole foods, and speeding up the metabolism will all help to maintain weight without counting calories. Each strategy has their own benefits and can all be used at the same time to make sure you keep all your hard earned progress.
Reset Your Palate and Focus on Whole Foods
Calorie Dense vs. Nutrient Dense Foods
Understanding the difference between calorie and nutrient-dense foods can mean the difference between weight maintenance and weight gain. As the names imply, calorie-dense foods have more calories than micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) Nutrient-dense foods are the opposite – they have more micronutrients than calories. I diet that’s mostly made of calorie dense foods will be much harder for weight maintenance. This is especially true since most calorie dense foods are considered hyperpalatable.
Hyperpalatable foods simply mean food that tastes very good. This is obviously subjective, but many processed foods have been engineered to not only taste good, but to be addictive. Think of the Pringles slogan, “Once you pop, you can’t stop!” This is fitting since potato chip companies invest literal millions into making their foods as addictive as possible. The crunchiness of the chip, how much dust is left on your fingers, the sound of opening the can, and every other minor detail is perfected to keep people buying their product. On top of being addictive, they also pack tons of calories with little to no nutritional benefit. This doesn’t make Pringles evil; it just means you have to be very mindful of your servings of hyperpalatable food.
The easiest way to resist the hyperpalatable trap is to eat mostly whole foods. Although many whole foods can still be calorie-dense (corn, potatoes, rice, meats, etc.), it’s much harder to overeat since they’re not hyperpalatable like chips.
How To Make Whole Foods Taste Better
If the idea of eating mostly vegetables, fish/meat, fruit, etc. sounds bland and boring, you may have an altered food palate. An altered food palate is the result of allowing too many hyperpalatable foods into your diet. For example, many people will find bananas extremely sweet when they’re kids, but once they’re introduced to ice cream and soda, bananas taste like nothing. Resetting the palate will make eating healthy feel less like something “you have to do” and more like something “you want to do.” Here are a few steps to transition from processed to whole foods.
- Identify one of the hyperpalatable foods you normally eat
- Replace it with a whole food alternative (ideally nutrient-dense, not calorie-dense)
- Wait up to 2 weeks to get fully use to the new food
- Repeat for other hyperpalatable foods
It’s important to go one food at a time because removing these foods too quickly can result in some symptoms of withdrawal. Fatigue, lack of focus, and strong cravings are some of the many possible side effects you can experience. After a couple of weeks though, you’ll be fully accustomed to the new foods.
Build a Mental “Calorie Index”
Simply being aware of how many calories different foods pack gives you the freedom to eat without tracking. For example, a lot of people use olive oil in their diets because it’s healthy. However, many of them don’t realize that a single tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories. They assume it’s little to no calories, so they don’t bother measuring it out when they prepare it. This lack of awareness can be very dangerous if you’re not going to continue tracking.
Although the end goal is to not track at all, tracking the foods you’re most unfamiliar with can help build awareness. You should be able to look at a plate of food and guestimate it’s calories within 200 calories of it’s actual contents. If you find that your guesses are normally way off (500 calories more or less than the actual calories), consider tracking for a while longer until you can get the gist of what you eat most often.
Speed Up Your Metabolism for a Flexible Lifestyle
One of the main reasons maintaining weight can be so hard is because of metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation occurs when the body slows down it’s metabolism to match the calories you’re eating regularly. For example, if I burn 2,000 calories a day, then I need to eat about 1,500 calories to lose weight. However, if I stay on this diet for months, the body will slow down to only burn 1,500 calories a day. This is also the reason it’s harder to lose weight when you’re older. Thousands of years ago, this was a vital process that kept humans from starving to death in the winter, where food was scarce. Now, it makes it so you can now only eat 1,500 or less to maintain your new bodyweight, which can easily be surpassed during a single night out with friends. Nobody like’s inviting the overly health-conscious friend, so speeding up the metabolism can allow you to maintain weight without giving up your social life.
There are two main ways to speed up the metabolism again to allow some flexibility: strength training to build muscle and reverse dieting.
Strength Training for Muscle
Muscle helps speed up the metabolism because:
- It costs a lot of calories to keep on your body compared to other tissue like skin and fat, so you’re burning more calories on autopilot
- Muscle makes your workouts much more effective by making you push harder for much longer
Also notice we say strength training specifically, so not all exercises will build muscle equally. Strength training is any workout routine that has you lifting more and more weight each week. You can start with as little as one workout per week, then add more days as you build the habit. For details on how to start strength training once a week, see the article here.
Reverse Dieting
Reverse Dieting is a much more complex process, but it results in the flexibility to eat more calories every day. The idea is to slowly increase your calories each week to get your metabolism burning more calories. Going slowly is key since the goal is to maintain your bodyweight the entire time. Also, this does require you to start tracking again. However, once you’ve sped up your metabolism, it will be significantly easier to stop tracking without risk of eating over your calorie goal.
Dr. Layne Norton describes this process in his book Fat Loss Forever (https://amzn.to/3snQdXx). Here is a basic outline of the process:
- Start taking your weight every day in the morning, then record it somewhere easy to access (phone, notepad, etc.). At the same time, track your calories, and try to eat whatever calories you maintain your weight with.
- At the end of each week, you have to do two things:
- Take a weekly average of your weight. Daily weight is inaccurate because it can be influenced by food, water, etc. However, an average will factor those variables out, making increases and decreases more likely to be from bodyfat.
- Increase calories by 100 for the rest of the week. So if you ate 1500 the entire week, bump it up to 1600 the next week
- Continue adding calories week by week, and pay attention to your weight. If your average weight stays roughly the same or decreases, you’re in a great spot. If it increases, you have two choices:
- Wait longer before increasing calories. So instead of once a week, increase once every other week
- Increase calories by only 50 each week
4. As long as calories are increasing and weight is staying the same, continue the process. You can stop when you get to a calorie level that gives you the most freedom. This will likely be between 2,000 to 3,000
For more details about reverse dieting and how it works, check out Dr. Norton’s book on amazon.