5 Reasons to Track Your Calories for Fat Loss – AFL 2.3
In this video, I go over 5 different reasons to track your calories for fat loss.
I wanted to follow up the previous AFL video and expand more on the benefits of tracking your calories, particularly when it comes to fat loss.
Now, before getting started I want to mention the freebie that comes with this video, which is Counting Calories 101. This guide is designed to give you all the necessary tools to master counting your calories and nutrition accountability.
Tracking Calories
In the previous post, I correlated tracking your calories regularly to having an accountant keep track of your finances.
Obviously, an accountant allows you to stick to your financial budget, creates a record of your expenditure and income and helps you better utilize your financial resources.
5 Reasons to Track
While a nice analogy, I want to expand on 5 more concrete reasons you should be tracking your calories for fat loss.
No. 1 Awareness
First off, when you track your calories, you inherently create a digital, or for the more archaic, written, log of your nutritional intake.
Your nutrition log will tell you what and how much you’ve eaten throughout the day as well as break down the macro and micronutrient content of your caloric intake.
Unless you forget to track something or abstain from tracking something; for example, alcoholic beverages. This log will accurately depict your nutrition habits and preferences.
Your log will allow you to become aware of where your deficiencies if any exist, and also start you off in the right direction by culminating you’re eating habits into quantitative calories and macronutrients.
Now, once you’ve increased the awareness of your eating habits and your current intake you can develop a plan of attack for your goals.
For the goal of fat loss, this means you’ll want to be in a caloric deficit.
No. 2 Accountability & Consistency
Moving on, to number two, once you’ve been eating in a caloric deficit for a period of time and tracking your calories regularly. You are able to use this tool to hold yourself accountable to your fat loss program.
Moreover, by holding yourself accountable and staying consistent with your program you’ll be able to ensure your fat loss success.
On the flip side if you enjoy have an unstructured diet then you’ll really need to reflect on how your lack of structure has helped you in respect to your goals.
Has the theme of your lack of accountability hindered your triumph?
If so, then it might be a good time to use tracking your calories as a tool to jump-start your success.
No. 3 Accuracy and Precision
Next, will be in regards to improving your dietary accuracy and precision.
By eating in a caloric deficit, you should mathematically be losing fat.
However, since this depends on a person-by-person basis your deficit accuracy is also dependent on you.
Additionally, depending on how aggressive you are with your deficit will determine how fast you lose fat.
Conversely, if you’re not accurate with your fat loss program you might not be in a real caloric deficit or your deficit may be so great you end up losing a significant amount of muscle as well as fat.
With respect to precision, you want to be within about ±10% of your goal fat loss intake. By being precise with your intake will help ensure you consistently make progress towards your goals.
Not only that, but this gives you some wiggle room with your calories and macro, to have some room for more pleasurable foods.
Ultimately, this culminates to your fat loss success through the accuracy of your caloric deficit and precision of your intake.
No. 4 If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM)
Fourthly, I want to introduce If It Fits You Macros or IIFYM for short. If you’re familiar with IIFYM, then you know that your consumption of food is limited primarily to their caloric and macronutrient components.
This means you aren’t forbidden from having cake, alcoholic beverages, or any specific food or drink that you fancy.
Rather in its truest sense, everything is fair game, so long as you stay within your caloric and macronutrient goals.
That being said, if you eat nothing but sweets, steak, pasta, and beer you’ll come to discover, meeting your set goals to be increasingly difficult.
Primarily because a surplus of unhealthy foods does not typically amass into a successful IIFYM diet. Rather if you eat a lot of unclean foods you’ll find it difficult to hit your macros.
To be successful with IIFYM, you’ll have to eat well for the majority of your meals and use some of your calories to eat or drink what you so, please.
An easy IIFYM program to follow is the 80/20 protocol. Where 80% of your diet is “clean”, meaning with nutritious and healthy food, that you enjoy. And the remaining 20% of whatever you so, please.
In a 2000 calories diet, this means 1600 calories of nutritious food and 400 calories of drinks, cake, desserts, Peanut Butter or whatever you can think of that adds up to 400 calories.
No. 5 Control
And to wrap it all up, the last reason will be control. By tracking your calories, you gain the ability to control your intake, the variables of your nutrition program and the ability to course correct when needed.
If you have a night out and let a little too loose, you have the ability to reel yourself in and compensate with a stricter and slightly lower caloric diet till you’ve evened out.
This is contrary to a popular method of “burning off the alcohol” or “burning off a meal”.
By having control over your diet, you gain the ability to control your progress.
Gone are the days of hoping for progress.
By tracking your calories, you gain control over your fat loss program and can coerce your body to reach the physique you desire in a streamlined and controlled manner.
Conclusion
Quickly recapping, by tracking your calories you increase your control over your diet, creating one that works for your goals and better yet, one that you enjoy throughout the entire process.
Ultimately, through tracking your calories you gain the ability to control your fat loss program giving you the ability to lose fat with ease.
I want to mention again that the freebie that comes with this post is the Counting Calories 101 guide; this free guide was designed to help you expeditedly reach your fitness goal through mastering your nutrition and counting calories. Click on the box below to get your free copy!
Furthermore, if you want to be regularly updated on when we release new content then please like our FB Page or subscribe to the EVA YouTube Channel.
Finally, I want to thank you for taking the time to go through this AFL post.
I hope you that you’ve gained something appreciable by watching this video or reading this post and I wish you the best of luck with your fat loss goals.
That’s all for today – Cheers!
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