Calibrating the scales ⚖️

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Greetings, friends -

Lloyd here! Those of you who have seen any of our videos on nutrition/food may know that I really don't enjoy tracking the calories in the food that I eat. I find that, over time, the act of needing to weigh everything out and measure every ingredient when cooking takes a lot of the joy out of eating for me.

With that said, however, I'm currently almost one week into a 30 day stretch of tracking every calorie and macronutrient that I consume.

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Even though I don't enjoy the process, I think there is tremendous upside in doing it every now and then. This is because we as humans tend to be quite poor estimators of calories in food, and often underestimate the number of calories we're eating.[1] With that said, I've personally found that after a period of tracking everything, I'm much better at estimation and keeping my diet within a reasonable range for my activity levels for a good amount of time after.

The other reason I'm doing this is to try and figure out the optimal amount of food that my body needs, given my current activity levels and bodyweight. I started out at 2300 calories per day, found that this was far too low for me (I'm quite active, train regularly, and weighed in at 114.5kg at the beginning of the 30 day cycle). I have since moved that up to 2500, then 2800 calories now after finding that I dropped 2-3kg in 5 days.[2] Will continue to monitor this amount and see how it works for me, but I suspect I may need to eventually dial it up to 3000 calories to be at a moderate calorie deficit to steadily lose a bit of fat, while also feeling satiated and being able to crush my workouts.

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The last time I tracked my calories and macros was probably around 7-8 years ago, so I'm treating this month of tracking as a "recalibration" of sorts. I'm hoping that by the end of the 30 days, I'll be better at eyeballing my caloric intake in the absence of tracking. I don't anticipate tracking everything in perpetuity (because, once again, I don't particularly enjoy the process over a longer period of time), but the occasional 30 day window is perfectly reasonable.

Will almost certainly make a video on YouTube about this after I'm done with the 30 days, so stay tuned!

Coming up next... 🎥

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Over the last week, we've been filming and putting together a video showing Em's first week at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu!

Making this video has been a fun process that has definitely pushed us in terms of our creation process and editing style - and we can't wait to share it with you all.

Video drops on Sunday 7pm HKT (GMT+8).

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