Counting calories is hard indeed, but doable. With a good calorie logging app[1], you should be able to look up how many calories any food you're eating is lik

Counting calories is hard indeed, but doable. With a good calorie logging app[1], you should be able to look up how many calories any food you're eating is likely to have. It doesn't have to be exact, just in the ballpark; it's really the fact that you're logging at all that keeps your intake in check. And after a while it becomes a lot easier, because you'll get pretty good at estimating how much calories something has. (That omelette I got at that french restaurant? Probably 700 calories, since it was really cheesy... etc.) Plus, you're just as likely to overestimate calories as underestimate, so over the course of a given week any inaccuracies probably even out. I lost 50lbs by counting calories years ago. It took me a year to drop all of them, but I've mostly kept it off for 2 years more. ("Mostly" because I stopped counting several months ago and gained about 10 lbs since my lowest level, so I'm counting calories again and am back down to +5 or so from my lowest and dropping.) [1] "Lose It!" is my favorite, but I've heard good things about MyFitnessPal, which has a crowdsourced calorie database. For any food with a barcode you can just scan it, and there's a huge database of restaurant foods, as well as estimated calorie amounts for anything you're likely to cook.