Tips To Become Calorie Competent From Calorie Clueless

Calorie counting & food journaling are research-proven, effective tools for nutrition awareness.

You could choose not to count calories and eat what you “feel” your body is asking for, but if you do, that’s called guessing. If you guess correctly and eat the right amount, you lose weight. I would call that luck! Would you rather roll the nutritional dice or bet on a sure thing?

Nutrition journaling and menu planning replace guesswork with precision.

Here are stages of the learning process

Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence - you are eating the wrong foods in the wrong amounts and you’re not even aware of it. (You don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing)

Stage 2: Conscious incompetence - you are eating the wrong foods in the wrong amounts, but for some reason, you now become aware of it. This is often because of a “hitting bottom” experience or an “I’m not gonna live like this anymore” epiphany. (You don’t know what you’re doing and now you know that you don’t know what you’re doing!)

Stage 3: Conscious competence - you educate yourself and begin to eat the right foods, but it takes a lot of thought and effort to eat the right things in the right amounts. (You know what you’re doing, but you have to think about it and work very hard to make it happen because you’re using willpower and still learning)
Stage 4: Unconscious competence - you’ve made the conscious effort to eat the right foods in the right amounts and you’ve counted calories and kept a nutrition journal for long enough and with enough repetition that these behaviors become habits and a part of your lifestyle. (You know what you’re doing and you do it easily and automatically without having to think about it).

I think the concept of intuitive eating has merit. If we listened to our body’s true signals, I believe that our appetite, our activity and our body weight would properly regulate themselves. The problem is, in technologically-advanced culture with an obesogenic environment, a sedentary lifestyle, social pressure and food cues tempting us at every turn, our intuitive bodily wisdom constantly gets short-circuited.
In our modern society, being able to eat by instinct and successfully guesstimate your nutrition or trust your feelings of hunger and satiety are not things that come naturally or easily.

In the next post, I will discuss on two simple ways to count calories and get this nutrition education you need are the meal plan method and the nutrition journal method.