Nutrition Facts” by Michael Flippo, licensed from Adobe Stock

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Want To Lose Weight? Stop Counting Calories

Instead, give the types of food you eat, when you eat, and how you prepare food, serious consideration

Amy Sterling Casil
10 min readFeb 23, 2023

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Viewing food as “what we consume in a 24–hour period counted as number of calories” is one of the biggest reasons three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or clinically obese.

Both my husband and I are in an older age range. I’m about to turn 61, and he is 69. He suffered a serious back injury a few years ago and has nerve damage as a result. He also has osteoarthritis (as do I). We’ve improved these health challenges by losing weight and keeping it in a healthy range.

Health is about a lot more than weight, of course.

There are a lot of good reasons to eat and live the way Bruce and I do, but achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is one that nearly everyone can understand and relate to.

I’m not sure why calorie counting or the calories-in vs. calories-out myth became so prevalent and dominant, but it’s definitely one that dominated my life until recently. Even when eating with health in mind since the late 2010s, I still counted calories “religiously.”

It was infuriating to get two to three times the recommended weekly amount of physical activity and count every…

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Amy Sterling Casil
Amy Sterling Casil

Written by Amy Sterling Casil

Over 500 million views and 5 million published words, top writer in health and social media. Author of 50 books, former exec, Nebula nominee.

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