I wanted to elevate my comment (slightly edited) to the front after a reader complained that I didn’t report any actual calorie numbers for my consumption posts:

I don’t track calories at all, sorry, not even approximately. Calories reported on manufacturer’s labels are notoriously wrong and I neither measure my food by weight or track by calorie. Only by what you see above.

And yet I still managed to get rid of and keep off 25%+ of my body weight for over five years.

So I do what works for me. If you want actual numbers, you’ll have to track yourself. But I guarantee it’ll be off by a lot and be misleading. Also many of the things I eat I have no way to estimate the calories as they aren’t the types of places who post this (small bakeries, etc.), and any estimate I’d make independently would be off by 30% or so, at least. Perhaps more.

That said, I changed the post to make it more accurate. The only way to truly track calories relatively accurately for anyone would be to purchase or somehow gain use of a laboratory-grade calorimeter, use it on an exact duplicate of the food you intend to eat, and then eat the non-destroyed dupe. And then — even then — it is not well-known how every body responds to each food eaten, how calories are processed by the same person at different times (hormonal and diurnal changes, etc) nor how differing compositions of foods with the same calories as measured by a calorimter will be processed and perhaps stored differently. Nutrition science just is not very solid. Wish it was, but it isn’t.

That said, calories in, calories out is still the way to lose weight. Judge what to eat by how your body responds to it, with self-experiment, is my advice — not that you sought any. Calorie counting in most cases probably is not helpful and is going to be wrong by at the minimum 20%, and most likely 30%+. Which is exactly why I did not even attempt to report calories and have never tracked them and never will.

That was the end of the comment. One seeking certitude where there is none will never find it. QED.