Dr. Layne Norton

But, yes, calories, the most important thing.

But what I try to do is, one, figure out, OK, approximately what are they spending per day?

And the best way, in my opinion, to do that is if they have been tracking, okay, what are you eating now?

In general, what's your body weight doing, right?

Because if they're logging relatively accurately and their body weight's not changing, I mean, you can put whatever you want into a calorie calculator, but that is their maintenance calories.

That is their energy expenditure, right?

And so I like to start there.

And then if people haven't been doing that, one nice –

trick I like to do.

As you know, when you monitor behavior, behavior changes.

And we know this right even down to like photons, right?

So I'll say, okay, if you don't know it, would you just do me a favor?

Just track for the next three days.

I don't want you to change anything.

Don't change a single thing you're doing.

In fact, if you're eating junk food or if you're eating what you think is too much, that's great.

Then we have a bigger shovel, like your energy expenditure is higher than we thought.

We have a big shovel to dig you out with, right?

So please don't change anything.

But what invariably happens is it's a very instructive experience for them because they'll start tracking and realize, oh, man, I was eating a lot more than I thought because I was having a bowl of ice cream that I was thinking was a serving and it was three.