Calories are a good enough metric. There are exceptions: It's hard to calculate how much energy your body will spend to digest food burning energy in the proces

Calories are a good enough metric. There are exceptions: It's hard to calculate how much energy your body will spend to digest food burning energy in the process. Eg. nuts are high calories but also increase the amount of energy you're burning. If you worry about macros (eg. hitting your proteins) you can get even better results by building muscle (which increases your metabolism and make you burn more fat) and avoiding a bunch of health issues likely linked to eating modern processed crap. That said, the phrase: > without making your calorie intake less than your expenditure you will not loose weight is correct and not a meme. It's just that your expenditure is hard to track and can be influenced by a lot of factors. What I found that works wonders is to: - 1. keep your diet and fitness regimen as constant as possible, no matter what it is - 2. swap food with lower calories and higher protein intake, while trying to avoid processed food - 3. increase exercise without adding food - 4. measure your weight every morning at the same time - 5. do that until you stop gaining weight and your weight is constant for a few weeks - 6. reduce calories by doing step 2 or 3 again until you start losing a bit of weight - 7. keep doing it until you hit your target weight I did this to lose weight years ago and it worked well. The main advantage is you don't have to worry about counting calories. Last year instead I just went carnivore (admittedly, I did it to sort out other health issues, the weight loss was a welcome side benefit) and I found myself feeling full (thanks to the higher fat intake) and eating a sensible amount of meat, which helped me lose 10kgs over ~10 weeks. I'm sure not eating carbs (ketosis) also played a role.