15 years of calorie counting: what I've actually learned

I've been tracking my calories since 2010. That's 15 years of logging "medium apple" and hoping for the best.

In that time I've used eleven different apps, built three spreadsheets, set and missed about a thousand daily protein targets, and spent six weeks on a clean bulk eating 3,500 calories of rice that gained me nothing but regret. I have opinions, is what I'm saying.

This is the post I wish someone had handed me in 2010, or 2013, or honestly, any year before last one. It's not advice exactly — it's a list of things I've bumped into repeatedly, got wrong repeatedly, and eventually stopped getting wrong. Your mileage may vary.

1. The problem isn't knowing. It's doing.

This is the big one, and it took me about ten years to accept.

I spent most of my twenties thinking that the reason I wasn't hitting my targets was that I didn't know enough. More reading. More research. Another podcast. Another book. Another spreadsheet to cross-reference my macros against my training split against my sleep against the phase of the bloody moon.

None of it helped. Because the gap wasn't knowledge. The gap was, and is, between knowing what I should eat and actually eating it on a Tuesday at 6pm when I'm knackered and the kids want pasta.

Every tracker I'd ever used assumed the problem was data capture. If you just logged diligently enough, you'd hit your numbers. Which is like saying if you measure your bank balance often enough, you'll become rich.

2. The messy middle of the day is where it all goes wrong

For years I'd plan a perfect day on Sunday evening. Meals laid out, macros calculated, targets bang on.

Monday morning: goes beautifully. Smoothie. Greek yoghurt. On track.

Monday lunch: bit of a rush, grab a sandwich, it's got about double the carbs you'd planned. Fine. Ignore it.

Monday 3pm: you realise you're 60g of protein behind. Panic. Eat a protein bar. Now you're on target for protein but 400 calories over budget.

Monday 6pm: you have no idea what to have for dinner. The plan assumed you'd stuck to the plan. You hadn't. The plan is a liar now.

Here's what I finally worked out: the plan doesn't need to survive contact with the day. The system needs to. You need a way to look at where you are at 3pm, and know what to eat at 6pm. Not a fresh plan every Sunday — a rolling adjustment.

If you only take one thing from this post

Take this one. Stop trying to plan your day in advance. Start trying to adjust your day as it unfolds. Everything else follows.

3. "Clean eating" was a six-year detour

For about six years I wouldn't eat anything that hadn't been either grown or shot.

No pasta. No rice. No bread. Definitely no biscuits. I thought I was being disciplined. I was, in fact, being a tremendous bore — and more importantly, I was massively under-shooting my calorie target because I'd eliminated most of the easy calories and made myself sick of chicken breast.

The thing nobody tells you about clean eating is that the food doesn't care what you call it. A calorie of "clean" brown rice lands in your body in almost exactly the same place as a calorie of "dirty" white bread. Your macros are made of numbers, not morality.

When I stopped making food choices based on whether they were "allowed" and started making them based on whether they hit my remaining targets, two things happened: (1) I actually hit my targets, consistently, and (2) I enjoyed eating again.

Turns out the body doesn't mind biscuits. The body minds too many biscuits, which is a different problem.

4. The spreadsheet phase helped nobody

In about 2014 I had a spreadsheet with 37 tabs. It cross-referenced my weekly macros against a rotating 12-meal menu. There were dropdowns. There were IF formulas. There was, god help me, a dashboard with conditional formatting.

It was beautiful. It was also completely useless.

Because the half-life of any meal plan is about 48 hours. The minute real life happens — a client lunch, a birthday, a kid getting sick, a friend suggesting pub — the spreadsheet becomes fiction. And you stop opening it. And then you stop tracking. And then you stop trying.

Anything that requires Sunday-evening-Chris to accurately predict Thursday-lunchtime-Chris's behaviour is going to fail. Plan less. Adjust more.

5. Protein is the thing, and I still get it wrong sometimes

If I could go back and tell 2010-me one thing, it'd be this: hit your protein target every day, and most of the rest sorts itself.

I was undereating protein by roughly a third for most of my twenties. Not deliberately — I just wasn't paying enough attention. I thought I was getting enough because I ate "lots of chicken" a few nights a week. Turns out "lots of chicken a few nights a week" is not 180g a day, it's about 90g a day, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between putting on muscle and not.

Once I started prioritising protein at every meal — not just dinner — most things improved. Body composition, recovery, hunger, energy. It's the most boring advice in the world and the most useful.

I still miss it sometimes. Three out of seven days, probably, on average. Better than one out of seven, which was where I started.

6. Tracking is easier than deciding

Here's a truth I resisted for years: the tap-tap-tap of logging food isn't actually the hard bit. Modern apps have made that quite fast. You can log a whole day in three or four minutes if you've saved your regulars.

The hard bit is deciding. Standing in the kitchen at 6pm, 40g of protein short of target and 200 calories over, wondering what combination of things in the fridge is going to close that gap without turning into a three-course project.

For 15 years, every app I used was on the wrong side of that problem. They wanted to know what I ate. I needed to know what to eat.

Every tracker I'd used for 15 years asked the same question. Nobody asked the more useful one.

This was the insight that eventually got me building. I wrote more about it here, if you fancy.

7. Consistency beats intensity, always

I've had weeks where I hit every target, weighed every portion, tracked every gram — and then I'd drop off for two weeks because the intensity was unsustainable.

Across a year, those perfect weeks counted for nothing. What counted was the slightly-scruffy 70%-accurate tracking I managed to keep going for months at a time.

If you're choosing between "perfect for three weeks then quit" and "pretty good for six months", always pick pretty-good-for-six-months. The progress is in the stacking, not the sprinting.

8. Most of the "science" you read isn't helping you

I've read more nutrition research than is healthy for a man who isn't being paid for it. And I'll tell you a thing that's annoyed me: the vast majority of it has no practical effect on what a normal person should do for dinner tonight.

Is the optimal protein intake 1.6g/kg or 2.2g/kg? It doesn't matter. You're miles off either of them. Aim for "a lot" and eat it. Is it better to have carbs before training or after? It doesn't matter. Eat them, train, feel fine. Is fructose uniquely bad? Not really, and anyway you'd have to eat about eight apples in a row for it to matter.

The 20% of information that matters — hit your calories, hit your protein, eat enough plants to not get scurvy, repeat — is not contested. The 80% that's contested doesn't affect 99% of people. Learn the 20% and move on.

9. The apps aren't all the same, but they are all the same shape

I've tried eleven of them now. I won't name them. They vary in polish, in speed, in database size, in the cheerfulness of their notifications. What they don't vary in is their fundamental model: you eat something, you log it, they show you a number, the end.

None of them close the loop. None of them say “based on what you've eaten, here's what to eat next.” Which is the whole reason you're tracking in the first place.

That's what eventually made me stop waiting for someone else to build the thing I wanted and have a go myself. Which brings us to where I am now.

10. The thing I'd tell 2010-Chris

Alright, honest wrap-up. If I could sit 2010-Chris down with a coffee, I'd say something like this:

"You don't need more knowledge. You have plenty. You don't need more discipline, either — you're already willing to put in the work. What you need is a tool that does the decision bit for you. Until one exists, keep it simple: hit protein first, track roughly, don't worry about being perfect, don't eliminate food groups, and don't build a bloody spreadsheet.

Also, stop the six-week rice bulk. It's a terrible idea and you'll only gain back-fat."

Where it lands, 15 years on

I'm still tracking. Still missing targets occasionally. Still making it up as I go. But I'm missing by less, and I'm spending a lot less time on it, and I'm enjoying food again instead of treating it as an ongoing moral test.

That's about as good as I've got. And honestly? That's plenty. The goal was never perfect — it was “consistently pretty good, with less faff.” Took a while to realise that was a legitimate goal, but there you are.

If any of this lands with you — if you've been through some version of the same 15 years — I've built a thing you might like. And if not, thanks for reading anyway. I'll be back in a fortnight or so with another one.

— Chris