Introduction: Why Calorie Awareness Changes Everything Calorie counting has a PR problem. It's associated with obsessive weighing of every gram of food, anxiety at restaurants, and the kind of relationship with eating that most people rightly want to avoid. Many diet approaches explicitly sell themselves on not needing to count calories. And yet: understanding your caloric intake is the single most powerful tool for fat loss, and virtually every successful long-term fat loss approach involves either explicit calorie tracking or an implicit substitute (portion control methods, structu…