Agree
I did at first when I was trying to lose a lot of weight. I was 60 lb overweight. So tried to get a baseline for what I was consuming daily and then tried to figure out what I was burning and create a deficit. From that point I followed what my body was telling me. Despite being 60 lbs overweight I had a ton of experience going into that so advantage me
The only thing I really count is protein. I make sure I hit at least 220 g per day
I don’t do that either, haha. Never counted a calorie or a macro in my life. Don’t care to.
Gram Life!
At least I can say that the religious calorie-counting I did for a couple years gave me a lot of knowledge and an ability to estimate the amount of calories in a meal really fast, so that I know when to refuse that cesar salad covered in oil and sprinkled with nuts that my friends would call “low-calorie”.
The massive problem with listening to what my body is telling me, is that the signals that my other organs are sending me about how much they would really need me to eat, it goes through a filter first. My brain.
And I remember one month, when I was working like a madman on a project with a deadline in one month, not sure if I could finish it in time. I was running around from place to place, and from the first minute I woke up til the minute I went to bed, I was occupied. And constantly in panic mode, constantly anxious, basically for one month straight.
I felt no hunger at all. I ate ~2200 calories per day, because that felt like it was enough. (Even though I was on my feet almost all day long, running errands. But I was still not hungry. Just constantly panicked.)
I began looking skinnier, cheeks became more sunken, so I knew I had started to lose weight. Month and a week later, I noticed that I had lost around 8 pounds. I actually got bloodwork done and some other tests, because I was sure I had cancer or something. Because one of the first signs is “unexplained weight loss”. I thought it was unexplained, because my body was telling me i’m not hungry so I assumed that I was eating plenty. But constant heightened anxiety, especially to this degree, masks a lot of things. It masked the severe hunger you would get from the ~1000 calorie deficit I was putting myself through. And not just the hunger, it masked the fatigue, too. It felt like I was “in the zone” for a month straight.
And in times when I feel depressed, my body tells me I need to eat a lot of shit food constantly. Listening to that would lead to disaster.
So I suppose that people who don’t have extreme ups and downs in their life all the time, could rely on intuitive eating reasonably well, but… definitely not me, unfortunately…
I actually like calorie counting, for a time, because most of us have no idea how much we’re eating. Weighing an actual serving of something is eye opening. You also realize real quick that you don’t want to justify a lot of the convenience foods anymore when you have a caloric budget.
I feel the same. I will calc out all my foods and eat the same things daily for a few (or more) weeks and then repeat. Using this method you can prep a weeks meals and only really have to weigh things out once or twice a week.
I have never been into that much extreme diet, but again I have replaced my dinner with healthy salads and that have proved quite desired results.