Burn The Fat Diet

Burn the Fat Diet Improves Calorie Competence

Why is it that any time you hear the words “calorie counting” or “food journaling”, people start running for the hills? If creating menus, counting calories and keeping a food journal are research-proven, effective tools for nutrition awareness, education, motivation and accountability (they are), then why is there so much resistance to it?

One reason is because it’s perceived as work and hard work doesn’t sell! Another reason is that skeptics say, “What about intuitive eating?” “What about people who lose fat without counting calories?”

Sure, you could choose not to count calories and eat what you “feel” your body is asking for, but if you do, that’s called "taking a wild stab at it". 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.

Perhaps even more important, they are also crucial parts of the learning process to raise nutritional awareness. There’s only ONE WAY to truly understand food and how it affects YOUR body: You have to go through all four stages of the learning process:

First Stage: 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)

Second Stage: 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!)

Third Stage: 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)

Fourth Stage: 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 believe the concept of eating intuitively has merit. If we listened to our body’s true signals, I think that our appetite, our activity and our body weight would properly mange themselves. The problem though, is that in our 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.

The only sure-fire way to reach that hallowed place of unconscious competence where eating the right foods in the right amounts becomes automatic and you truly understand YOUR body is by going through the nutrition education process.

Two simple ways to count calories and get this nutrition education you need are the meal plan method and the nutrition journal method.

Meal Planning With the Burn the Fat Diet

Using a software program or a spreadsheet, create your menu plan meal by meal, with calories, macronutrients and serving sizes calculated properly for your goals and the energy your body needs. We'll call this the burn the fat diet plan. You can create 2 or more menu plans if you want the variety. Then, follow your plan every day. All you do is weigh and measure your food portions to make sure your actual intake matches your written plan. With this method, you really only need to “count calories” once when you create your menus. This is a method I use and recommend in my Burn the Fat diet program.

The Nutrition Journal (Food Diary) Method

Another way to track your nutrition intake is to keep a nutrition journal or food diary, either on paper or with an electronic device, software or website. This is more like traditional calorie counting. Throughout the day, after each meal, you log in what you just ate, or at the end of the day, you log in all your food for the entire day. The former is the best option, since people seem to get really bad cases of “eating amnesia” if they wait too long before writing it down.

I recommend counting calories and keeping a nutrition journal at least once in your life for at least 4-12 consecutive weeks or until you achieve Stage Four. At that point, it becomes optional because habit and intuition take over.

You can come back to your meal-planning and journaling any time in the future if you slip back or if you have a very important goal you want to work on. It’s a tool that will always be there for you if you need it.

Tom Venuto, author of
Burn The Fat Diet

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling Burn the Fat Diet: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models.

Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: Burn the Fat Diet.