IIFYM vs. Calorie Counting

I calorie counted for years. I'm a professional calorie counter, honestly. I've done so off and on for about a third of my life, so trust me when I say I'm well practiced. The thing I loved about calorie counting was that macros didn't matter. This meant that if I wanted to, I could eat a package of chocolate fudge pop tarts for every meal and in theory lose weight.

A package of pop tarts is only 400 calories. If I ate pop tarts for every meal I'd still have an extra 200-400 calories at the end of the day! I could have an entire cup of chocolate ice cream to end my day of pop tarts. I wasn't always so bad about my food choices, but I certainly wasn't looking to hit nutrition guidelines. I just was watching calories. This was good and bad. On the one hand, I'd lose weight eventually. On the other hand, my skin broke out and I felt like shit all the time. On top of that, eating wasn't about being healthy and getting thinner, it was about sneaking in as much crap food as I could, and losing weight simply due to deficit.

IIFYM is great, because there's that emphasis on health.

The only down side is that it requires so much tracking of so many things (fat, carbs, protein and fiber, vs. just calories), that some times I felt a bit obsessive.

Still, I'll take the hints of obsession over eating crap simply because it fits into my calories for the day. It's hard to eat crap all day know how much protein you'll have to eat at dinner to make up for pop tarts for breakfast and lunch. Besides, I'm really enjoying my progression back to eating real food. Paleo was difficult to have a life with, keto was better but still a challenge. This is very attainable, and after being so restrictive the last 6 months, I'm having no issues staying within reason on my carbs (which some IIFYM-ers have a hard time with).