Yep, I'm over the calories they say I should have even without adding quite everything I put in my mouth AND not having the evening snack I was contemplating. And this wasn't even a day when I felt like I ate much. Damn. Guess I do need to track my eating.
Not that I think calories are the be-all and end-all, but they seem to be the best readily available indicator. It doesn't help that I'm 4'11" tall and in order to lose any weight, need to limit myself to like 1200 calories a day. Sigh. Looks like mint tea for dessert tonight...
Tracking is the way to go, but the best way to do it is to use the trackers to allow you measure yourself in a consistent way and adjust based on relative accuracy, rather than absolute.
Using an app that is a calorie counter and allowing it to tell you how much more you are allowed to eat is not an effective way to track your food and nutrition for weight loss. Calorie counts in food are notoriously inaccurate. People's estimates of servings tend to be way off. Your own personal needs and metabolism are likely different from the "average" they are telling you. And not all calories are equal (your body doesn't absorb energy from all foods the same way).
These tools CAN be effective, though, if you use them to track what you are doing and make relative adjustments based on it. In the set-up, you want to be logging 80%+ of your food consumption (food scale) and tracking with an app that has calorie/food counter. You also want to be routinely tracking your weight/fat loss - in the same way. And, of course, you loosely track exercise amount.
Over several weeks it will become clear if you are at deficit, maintenance, or surplus. Keeping all other things consistent, if you eat less, you will lose more weight than you had been. It does not matter how accurate the calorie counter is or how accurate you measure your food or how you track your weight or the exercise - so long as you measure the same way and are as likely to make errors in either direction.
The key for the exercise is that it will allow you to eat more (but not very much more), it is good for your health anyway, and, most important, it affects how your body deals with caloric deficits or surplus (losing or gaining muscle vs. fat). This last part (fat loss) is often what really matters in making your pants fit anyway.
