The Truth about Counting Calories

Counting calories is a very difficult task, even during clinical research.

Good research will use tools such as diet records and food frequency questionnaires to identify changes in eating patterns instead of measuring calorie intake.

Measuring the amount of calories you’ve consumed in a single day is nearly impossible. If someone tells you they ate 3,125 calories in one day, they probably actually ate anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 calories.

Research trials show that there is a 30 percent margin of error when calories are counted – and the more a person eats, the bigger the margin of error becomes.

Calorie counting tools and software should be used to identify trends – not to measure the exact number of calories you eat.

To learn more about this, watch this video:

It is important to keep track of calories consumed, but obsessing over the exact number of calories you consume is a recipe for diet failure.