Should you count your calories?

It’s at this stage where we have three answers to the question above. There is no right answer, but the choice you make will depend on personality, history with food, your training goal and indeed your proximity to your goal. 

Many people find following a meal plan exactly to be the best route to success; the advantage is that the numbers will all inherently be correct as I’ve built your meal plan for you specifically. This approach takes the guesswork out of the process and is likely the most linear route to success. The trade-off for this is that it’s a little more of a rigid approach. I would suggest this approach if you are quite far away from your intended goal and you want rapid progress. 

The second approach, and the one that I think works for most people is a hybrid approach, is to follow the meal plan part of the time and the rest of the time, broadly following an IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) approach. With this approach, you would partially follow the plan in the knowledge that you have a structured framework, but also the freedom to choose your own meals, aiming to come within about 10% of your guidelines. This doesn’t always represent a departure from your progress, as long as you’re eating good food and not moving too far away from the 10% suggested leeway. The downside for this is that it can be quite costly to both prepare for the meal plan and have your own food on the side. This approach is best utilised for those that want a slightly less rigid approach, need to travel or be social for personal or work reasons on a semi-regular basis.

The third approach is to read this document, familiarise yourself with healthy eating practices and then work on instinct and eat what the body calls for. This sounds a little up in the air but it works for a lot of people - I myself will go months or years without counting anything, but sometimes it can help to track for a short period and then follow an instinctive approach to food. This method obviously has the most potential for miscalibration so I would suggest that this would work best for those that are either close to where they would like to be and are focusing on steady results and a healthy lifestyle or for those that have previously followed meal plans and have a good idea of the calories and macros in various foods. This approach also works well for those that have previously encountered issues with eating disorders as it bypasses the rigid approach that isn’t healthy for everyone.