That's really interesting, since many people report having Up & Down days, as their appetite varies rather widely.

The fact is that there is absolutely no way to count exactly how many calories you are burning. That silly treadmill readout or magazine article on burning X amount of calories by doing Y or whatever is just that. Silly. And a complete shot in the dark. Eat to satiety. If it's 1900 calories one day, it may be 1000 the next. Or 2500. If you are healthy, losing weight and feeling good, why would you care? You can't drive yourself crazy about an arbitrary number calculated with bad science that means almost nothing in the first place. Ditching stress will help your weight loss far more than worrying about 100 calories. No joke.

No reason the two should be mutually exclusive. Well, unless that would be the "new" Atkins part that I am unaware of?

So many 30 year 'health' myths to overturn. Calories in/calories out. You just need to exercise more to lose weight. And you must weight yourself and count calories to lose weight and stay at a weight because you can't trust your own body to set a healthy weight.

Not true. An overabundance of carbohydrates overstimulated our pancreas, making us live from grain high to grain high, and blocked our use of the fat on our bodies for fuel. When we reduced dramatically the carbohydrates in our diet (sugar and grains) we found that natural balance we were missing.

It took me a year to repair my metabolic system. My blood glucose in the first year of a ketogenic diet would spike to 130 and my cholesterol numbers weren't great. The second year I reaped the benefits with glowing metabolic numbers, endless energy, and for the first time in my life a balance of calories in to maintenance weight. I don't have to count anymore. It's redundant.

For some people this is good advice. For others? Not so much.

I am perfectly capable of maintaining my bodyweight (in the upper 200's) eating literally nothing but meat. That's not hypothetical, I've done it. I can't really distinguish any level of satiety short of stuffed to the gills.

If you can eat to satiety and lose weight, that's awesome. Not everyone can. If you can't, you need to do something else. It doesn't have to be calorie counting, but that's one way.

That said, trying to balance calories in versus calories out by any means other than actual weight loss is probably a waste of time. We don't and probably can't know enough about the equations to do it. But ballparking it CAN work.

I agree that it's good to know the whole story about what we're putting into our bodies, calories included. It's all useful information. And part of the semi-obsession required for weight maintenance over time.

Or how many we're taking in. In the early pages of his "Why We Get Fat," Taubes talks about the futility of measuring calories precisely. Others have also commented on the fact. It's my understanding that even with carefully controlled processed and packaged food, nutrition counts are allowed a 10% margin of error. Real natural foods vary all over the place.

That said, I do "ballpark" my calories occasionally. But my days of attempting to count every calorie (Count Every Calorie was title of a tiny book I started with 100 years ago) have been over for a long time.