I have to admit I cannot track everything I eat. And I wonder if this is part of the problem with maintaining weight loss for people? The reason being I cook from scratch, a lot and going through the effort of calculating every calorie is massively time consuming and likely to drive me to eat processed foods more where it's calculated for me. That all said both natural and processed foods can have huge variation (20% is permitted in processed foods and natural variation occurs a lot). So when you count in all of that, it just makes it all really inaccurate as well as time consuming. That's before you get into the fact that LOADS of studies have found that calories (particularly in takeaways) are WILDLY wrong. For example, one study took 20 meals from popular chains. Only 10 were within the 20% permitted tolerance. Why you can’t trust the calories on the menu - Natural Resources Institute
What I do instead is prioritise fibre and protein with most of my diet being vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, pulses, nuts and seeds. Then all I do (apart from my 1 x 24 hour fast a week) is try to only eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full. The reason I think this is helpful as well is it discourages me from eating something when food isn't really what I need and I might reach for a low calorie but tasty food (e.g. a sub 100 cal snack because it fits into my calorie allowance) when what I really need is a hug but also I stay in touch with my body more and what it actually needs.
After successfully losing weight with calorie counting but then gaining it when I got bored calorie counting, I'm now pretty set that whatever habit I pick up to lose weight, I have to be prepared to do it for life. Because if I'm not, it will end up with weight gain eventually. And yep, I'm prepared to do 1 x 24 hour fast a week for life much more than I am prepared to count calories.
So fair enough those of you who are religious with calorie counting but I did want to share on the inaccuracy. Not many people seem to be aware how far out it can be. And if you think 20% is allowed, many people going for 1500 kcal per day could be 300 over without knowing. If that's someone who isn't active that could push them into gaining.
You'd think that errors didn't occur either. I saw a howler in Aldi the other day. Absolutely blatantly wrong. But despite it not being legal the chances of those products being recalled are close to zero.
Of course on average, mistakes and inaccuracies will probably even out over a while but if you regularly eat a certain food (prepared food particularly) and there is something systematic wrong (e.g. like that Aldi howler) then you might regularly be overeating without knowing.
I also feel different when I eat more vegetables, fibre and protein vs. other foods. It's a sample size of one but I did a calorie count on a breakfast recently which felt like a treat. Turned out to be <200 calories. But it's a breakfast that fills me up far more than any cereal (and it's easy to be >400 calories on cereal). But brains are funny aren't they? After realising it was low calorie, it seemed less satiating.
All of us are different though. Use what works for you.