“I eat 1.200kcal but can’t lose weight…”

Are you?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that you are consciously lying to me. But I’ve met a lot of women who said exactly that sentence to me and they were simply wrong.

If you’re a very petite woman, you’re having a very sedentary lifestyle, and are not participating in any kind of sporty activity, 1.200kcal might simply not be a deficit for you.

But if this doesn’t sound like you, here is where you might go wrong when tracking your calories for fat loss:

1. You don’t weigh everything
   If you want to manipulate your energy balance for fat loss, you need to track and weigh everything that has calories.
2. You underestimate when eating out
   The way you are putting sauce on your plate or oil on your salad is not the same way a cook does it in a restaurant. We all know that fat makes food taste yummy. So if you are eating out rather overestimate for consumed calories than the other way around.
3. You track your calories burned through exercise
   Activity trackers and smartwatches have an inaccuracy of up to ​​43% (Apple Watch). So please make sure that your calories burned are not getting tracked within your food tracking App. And even more important than the food tracking App is NOT adding your activity calories to your daily calorie goal. Otherwise, you end up eating back all the calories (and more) that you have needed to save to stay in a calorie deficit.
4. You use the wrong measuring unit
   One tablespoon of peanut butter can look different for multiple people. For one person it ends up being 300kcal for the other 500kcal per serving. Food tracking is not perfect. But making it even more inaccurate than needed is not what we want. Therefore always use gram as measuring unit and ignore: ml, cups, ounces, pieces, tbsp, tsp
5. You track raw but weigh cooked food
   Have you realized that 100g of raw chicken breast is not 100g of cooked chicken breast? Meat loses water as it gets cooked. Therefore 100g of raw chicken ends up being maybe 80g cooked. This can make a big difference and add up to hundreds of extra calories throughout the week. In the end, you’ve added more calories to your plate without you even realizing it.

The next time you are in a fat loss phase, and your calorie deficit doesn’t result in weight loss, don’t blame the deficit for your lack of results. Instead, double-check if you are doing any of these mistakes and if so correct them ASAP.

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