The Importance of (Accurately) Recording the Calories of What You Eat

Quick, tell me whether or not the meal plan for today is under 2,000 calories (aka normal man calories):

Breakfast - McDonald's Sausage, Egg and Cheese Bagel w/Hash Brown and small Orange Juice
Lunch - Taco Bell Chicken Quesadilla with small chips and small coke
Dinner - Subway 6" Bacon, Chicken Ranch w/ Plain Potato Chips and small sweet tea

Are you under 2,000 or under? How many calories did you actually eat today? According to some people, you've been "eating light". I've been tracking my food for almost two years now and I still wouldn't know what to tell you. I am actually going to give it a guess and then actually go compare.

My experienced guess is: 3,150 calories

My guesses:
Breakfast
Sausage, Egg, Cheese Bagel - 600
Hash Brown - 200
Orange Juice - 200

Lunch
Chicken Quesadilla - 700
Small Chips - 200
Small Coke - 200

Dinner
Bacon Chicken Ranch 6" - 600
Plain Chips - 250
Small Sweet Tea - 200

Here are the actuals:
Breakfast
Sausage, Egg, Cheese Bagel - 590
Hash Brown - 150
Orange Juice - 143

Lunch
Chicken Quesadilla - 510
Small Chips - 250
Small Coke - 160

Dinner
Bacon Chicken Ranch 6" - 570
Plain Chips - 240
Small Sweet Tea - 170

So to recap:

My Guess Total: 3,150 calories
Actual Total: 2,783 calories
Diff: I over-estimated by 367 calories

So not only is that meal plan over 2,000 calories. It's DAMN over by about 800 calories. If you were to do that same food for an entire week, you would gain 1.5 pounds per week (84 pounds in one year).

You might be thinking to yourself "Oh, he's so off. I can do that too and I'll overestimate too." But this is not true. Think about who I am. I'm someone who has actually studied food calories and my eyeball calculations were almost 400 calories off. You might say "Oh, but you overestimated!"

This is not good.

Say if my goal was to hit 1,800 calories per day. However, I over-estimate what I have eaten by 400 calories. That means I'm sitting at 1,400 calories a day and starving, but I THINK I've eaten 1,800 and will be dismayed when I still feel hungry. Maybe I'd just say "this is too hard, I quit." Plus, you deserve to eat those calories you've set (assuming it's reasonable). Don't cheat yourself.

In much the same way, when you underestimate calories , your weight loss progress is stunted. By underestimating 400 calories a day for an entire week, you have gained almost an entire pound of weight, even though you SWEAR that you're "doing pretty good". If you did this for an entire year, you would GAIN about 45 pounds instead of losing anything. If you made it that far. You would be very demotivated.

However, if you record accurate information, you will have the ability to see where you did well or failed and either continue to do it or adjust accordingly.

As they said back in grade school: "plan for success".

It's also important to watch liquid calorie intake. The drinks there added up to nearly 400 calories. It's not a big deal if you're counting calories overall, but I've seen studies where people will subconsciously adjust their calorie intake when they eat extra calories in the form of food, but not liquid calories. And something like a Starbucks white mocha basically has the same nutritional profile of a Big Mac in terms of fat and calories.

My problem is that I drastically overestimate what I'm actually eating when I do eat regular meals, but then I tend to get too tired to eat (which is a thing) and grab stuff like cookies to keep going and that throws everything off. Right now, my goal is to get back to eating three meals a day plus snacks. I basically eat smaller meals and get hungry fairly soon after. Like when I was in law school, my meal schedule went like this on days where I did stuff:

6AM: Whole wheat toast with peanut butter, banana, milk
9AM: Greek yogurt
12PM: Bento or small container of leftovers like fried brown rice with veggies and eggs
3PM: Grapes and almonds
6PM: Bagel or sandwich
9PM: Indian takeout (Hey, I had just been going for over 12 hours and spent most of that in class)

Off days would be more flexible, but it usually involved leftovers and/or food at the tea house while I studied. But I at so much better when I was really busy and had to actually plan everything out.

My big problem now is that we do a lot of cooking from scratch now. I''ll make brioche for toast or blueberry muffins, etc. So it's a little more of a pain to track calories like that as opposed to foods where the nutritional info is cleared labeled. I think you can find sites or apps that let you enter the recipe then enter servings to give you that information. What I'm mostly doing now is doing a daily weigh in (it's the first thing on my to do list) and record it on an app that tracks my moving average so I can see that I'm headed in the right direction. I may adapt that eventually, but it's currently moving me in the right direction, so....

Oh, and also make sure to measure servings because they can be way off of what you'd think of as a serving. Usually the serving sizes are much smaller (like 2.5 servings in a "single serving" bag of chips), but it goes the other way, too. When I measured out a serving of orange marmalade, it was twice what I was using in two pieces of bread.