When looking to lose weight, a first step may be to use a calorie counter to track your food intake – but calorie counters don’t show the whole nutritional value of a food – a key piece for health and long term weight loss.
What is a Calorie Deficit?
You’ve most likely heard the term “calorie deficit”, especially if you are looking to lose weight. But there’s much more to weight loss success.
While a calorie deficit (meaning one is consuming fewer calories than one is burning) is a key part of weight loss, it only tells part of the story when you’re looking at long-term overall weight loss, as opposed to a short-term drop in pounds.
The Truth About Calorie Counters
It’s easy to find calorie counters online, but they’re not all created equally. If they don’t factor in nutrition, then using them to count calories won’t give you a full picture of your diet. It reduces everything you eat and drink to numbers, but it doesn’t consider the nutritional values of those numbers. For example, 100 calories of cookies and 100 calories of salmon may have identical caloric values, but they carry very different nutritional profiles.
Related Reading: See All the Foods You Don’t Need to Count with WW
How to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories
WW’s PersonalPoints system considers all of this and more, making it a smarter tool than a basic calorie counter. The PersonalPoints system is backed by the latest nutritional science and is designed to gently guide you toward a healthier pattern of eating, focusing on more foods that are higher in fibre, protein and unsaturated fats, and lower in added sugars and saturated fats. The PersonalPoints values of food items go up when there are saturated fats and added sugars present, while also factoring in calories, and the values go down when foods contain protein, fibre and unsaturated fats (the healthier type of fats).
Related Reading: PersonalPoints Tracking vs. Calorie Counting
With PersonalPoints, instead of just counting calories, you’re getting a complete picture of the nutrition you’re taking in, and gaining an understanding of how the food you eat affects your body. Tracking is seamless and you’re able to roll over unused points into your Weekly bank, so there’s room for extra indulgence here and there as well. It’s a system that offers guidance and support, much more than a calorie counter would, and sets you up for long-term success on your weight-loss goals.