Yash Birla explains that both calorie- and macro-counting are methods for controlling how much food and energy you consume during the day, frequently with the goal of assisting with weight loss, increase, or maintenance. Both require tracking your food intake, typically with an app, in order to keep track of how many calories or macronutrients you consume each day. 

You can view the calorie or macro breakdown of anything you consume by simply logging it into an app or software each time you eat or drink something. Despite the modest differences between the two tracking techniques, both involve a lot of labour and effort. Most of the time, in addition to entering everything you eat into your monitoring tools, you need to weigh or measure all of your meals before eating in order to precisely track your intake. This article explains in detail the difference between counting calories vs macros.

What’s the difference between counting calories vs macros?

Your height, age, weight, degree of physical activity, and desired weight are all taken into account when calculating the number of calories you should consume each day.

Using this method, your food is judged solely by the energy it contains because calories are just a measurement of energy. The notion is that you may eat whatever you want within your daily calorie budget since each macronutrient—protein, carbohydrates, and fats—includes a different number of calories. Protein and carbs have 4 calories per gramme, whereas fat contains 9 calories/per gram.

On the other hand, macro counting places more of an emphasis on the macronutrient profiles of the meals you eat throughout the day (again, carbohydrates, fats, and protein). You keep track of how many grammes of each macronutrient you consume rather than calculating calories. By prioritising the macronutrients that make you feel your best and thrive in your diet, macro tracking still counts calories indirectly because they make up the calories in the food and liquids you consume. For instance, a ketogenic diet necessitates macro tracking since it maximises fat intake while limiting carbohydrate intake, necessitating active analysis of the macro profile of each meal.

So which is more effective?

Macro tracking, which places more attention on what you’re eating rather than the particular focus calorie counting places on how much energy you’re ingesting, can be more helpful in helping you achieve weight-related and health-related goals. Unlike calorie counting, which ignores nutrients, macro monitoring partially accounts for your nutrient consumption.

You can have a more direct impact on your health and weight results by adjusting your intake of various macronutrients. For instance, studies have shown that eating a lot of protein might help you gain lean muscle mass and feel fuller all day long (and therefore less likely to overeat). Knowing this, you might decide to increase the amount of protein in your macros to assist you to reach your objectives. This is, perhaps, the more precise and efficient approach to take.

Having said that, if you fall victim to IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros), both calorie- and macro-counting can be deceiving. Basically, if you adopt the mentality that you can eat whatever you want as long as it falls into your daily calorie or macro target, regardless of how high saturated fats, sweets, artificial chemicals, etc., it could have a negative impact on your health, says Mr Yash Birla while explaining the difference between counting calories vs macros.

The Difference Between Counting Calories vs Macros 1

Because it’s not quite this straightforward, despite all we hear about weight loss requiring a calorie deficit and calories in vs. calories out being the key to reaching all of your goals… The truth is that not all foods are created equally. A variety of plant foods, including vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, and proteins, as opposed to one greasy, manufactured burger each day because it meets your calories or macros, has a profoundly different effect on your health.

Why? Because wellness is more than just being thin! Therefore, if you’re not consuming enough nutrient-dense foods, focusing too much on the quantitative side of things can result in nutrient shortages, bad health results, and concerns. It is therefore not sufficient to solely concentrate on your macronutrient intake and disregard the healthfulness of everything you are putting into your body, even though macro-counting may be the least of two evils.

The bottom line?

There is presently no evidence to prove that counting calories or macros will help you reach your weight-related objectives more successfully than the other. Even comparing low-fat and low-carb diets yielded no appreciable differences in outcomes, indicating that keeping track of macros may not be very beneficial. Similar to this, calorie counting was only as successful as it was enduring.

Thus, if managing your health and weight is your priority, finding an enjoyable, sustainable eating pattern that feels more like a lifetime decision than a diet is the best course of action. Where’s the joy in analysing and keeping track of every bite of food you take in? Instead, keep in mind that each of us is unique and has a varied reaction to various foods and diets, suggests Yash Birla.

Put your attention back on eating full, healthful foods the majority of the time while still making room for occasional treats. Mr Yash Birla advises you to discover what works for you and stick with it—consistency is always important!