Many of my clients don’t believe me when I tell them they don’t need to count calories. Mainstream health and wellness messaging has long put a huge emphasis on “calories in, calories out”—the idea that you need to eat exactly the number of calories you burn in a day in order to maintain your weight. Add to that the explosion of apps that help measure your food intake, and wearable devices that claim to calculate your exercise output, and it’s no wonder people are so obsessed with tracking these numbers.
Calories do matter. Getting the amount of food you need each day is important for physical and mental health and, conversely, eating drastically more or less than this on a regular basis can hurt your well-being. But knowing exactly how many calories you eat (or burn) each day can add a ton of stress and just isn’t necessary. It’s also impossible: For one thing, the FDA allows for a 20% margin of error for calories and other nutrients on nutrition labels. And your smartwatch isn’t very good at measuring how many calories you burn; a 2022 review looked at existing data on popular fitness trackers and found that all of them miscounted energy expenditure by at least 30% on average.
But still, diet culture insists that these inaccurate tools and calculations are more reliable than your own body’s hunger and fullness cues. It trains you to see yourself as a machine instead of a human being, and that can be a tough mindset to snap out of—particularly if you’ve been counting calories (or grams of carbs or fat) for years (maybe even decades). After a while, your brain becomes a database of nutrition information, and it’s hard to stop automatically tallying things up every time you look at a plate of food or pop something in your mouth.
But I’m here to assure you that shutting down that internal calculator is possible, even if it takes a little while. Here are some practical things to try if you want to stop counting calories for good.
1. Try food journaling as a transitional tool.
If you’re in the habit of logging your nutrition info in an app or a paper journal, try redirecting that instinct to something less rigid. “Rather than tracking every calorie or macronutrient, write down your hunger level before you eat, what you ate, and your fullness and satisfaction levels when you’re done,” Rachelle LaCroix Mallik, RD, owner of the Food Therapist in Chicago, tells SELF. Noting a bit about how you’re feeling (mentally) at mealtime can be helpful as well, Mallik says. (Are you stressed? Tired? Content?) On a practical level, recording these things gives you something tangible to do around mealtime when you’re tempted to count calories or carbs. But unlike adding up nutrition info, it can also help you get more in touch with your hunger and fullness cues and offer insight into how your mood and emotions impact your food choices. Over time, this will help you understand your body and your eating patterns better, which can give you more confidence in making decisions that feel good physically and mentally—without depending on calorie information.
2. Decide what you want at a restaurant before you look at the calories.
Unfortunately for anyone trying to obsess less about calories, many restaurants (specifically, those with 20 or more locations) now print them on their menus. One way around this is to stick to local places without public calorie information for a while, as you get used to not counting. When you do eat at a chain restaurant—which is totally fine! It might be the best or only option, or you might just love a certain place—Mallik suggests checking in with your body and deciding what kind of meal you want before you look at the menu. “Ask yourself, ‘What would taste good, feel good, and be satisfying?’ All three of these considerations are important in making a food choice that aligns with your needs and preferences,” she says.
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For example, before opening the menu at the Cheesecake Factory, decide if you want a burger, a salad, a pasta dish, or a meat-and-potatoes-type entrée. Once you’ve narrowed it down to one of these categories, head straight to that section of the menu and pick something that sounds good, trying to pay as little attention to calories as possible. By narrowing things down before you see the numbers, you’re giving yourself permission to decide what you really want. Sure, you probably know that certain things tend to have more calories than others, but taking the extra step to avoid looking at that info at first can help you get more in tune with what food choice will actually satisfy you at a given time.
3. Cover the calorie information on food packaging.
There’s no way to avoid nutrition labels completely, but when you’re trying to stop counting calories, keeping them out of sight may keep them out of mind too. “Cover nutrition facts labels with opaque tape or use a sharpie to black out the information so you can’t see it,” Drusilla Rosales, RD, a family nutrition dietitian in League City, Texas, tells SELF. Of course, you may already know the number of calories in certain packaged foods, but not having this information (or the suggested serving size) in your face every time you cook or snack can help you stop fixating on it. Over time, you’ll probably notice that you don’t think to check the label every time you grab something from the fridge or pantry. Once this becomes the norm, you can probably stop with the tape.
4. If someone else starts talking about calories, change the conversation.
You might be ready to delete MyFitnessPal, but that doesn’t mean everyone around you is on the same page. Listening to people talk about nutrition, diets, or food tracking can be triggering—especially when you’re in the early stages of letting these things go—so your best bet is redirection. “Change the conversation when someone brings up macro counting or the number of calories in a certain food,” Amy Brownstein, RDN, a dietitian in Park City, Utah, tells SELF.
You can ask them about what they’re reading or watching on TV, bring up a hobby you have in common, or say something more direct like, “I’m trying to think less about calories, would you mind if we talk about something else?” When you’re able to keep this kind of talk out of everyday conversations, you’ll naturally start to think less and less about it, Brownstein says.
5. When your brain starts counting calories, distract yourself.
Even if you avoid looking at calories and do your best to make food choices based on your hunger levels and preferences, there will be times when your brain starts adding things up without your permission. The best move in this case? Divert your attention to something else ASAP.
Rosales recommends using mindful eating exercises to tap into the sensory qualities of whatever you’re eating. For example, you can ask yourself questions like: How does it look, smell, and taste? What’s the temperature and texture of the food? Is it satisfying at this moment? If not, what would you change to increase your satisfaction level? This practice helps you fully experience the food instead of seeing it as a number.
If that doesn’t work for you, or if you get tired of it, you can also try thinking about literally anything else. Go over your workday to-do list, dream about your upcoming vacation, think about an important conversation you need to have, or brainstorm weekend plans—whatever will interrupt the automatic calculation.
Keep in mind that even if you put all of the above advice into practice, you’re probably still going to have thoughts about calories (detoxing from diet culture takes time). Instead of beating yourself up about it, though, try to accept that it’s inevitable for a little while—if your tracking habit spanned years, you can’t expect it to disappear in a matter of days or weeks. Just keep pushing away the thoughts when you can, work on paying attention to your body’s cues, and trust that all that nutrition noise in your head will get much quieter over time.
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