Here is a neat post that argues you should not keep track of what you eat. I wrote about this earlier this year, arguing that hunger is an effective guide to proper eating. This is a subject that really deserves more attention.
It's amazing how quickly people will squash the notion that the body can self-regulate its food consumption. It is thought that in the current environment of readily-available food, a person's appetite is an inaccurate guide to proper food consumption. It follows from this that food intake should be tightly monitored and scrutinized, since the body is not up to the task.
Some of this is true because simple carbs can throw the body's hunger out of whack. But beyond this, why would a person's appetite lead them to overconsume food? The research show that starvation was not common among hunter-gatherers, so it's not as if the body is programmed to "stock up" on food.
Hunger evolved for a reason. In a healthy body, it is a signal to consume more macro and micro nutrients. It seems farfetched that an eating scheme designed by formulas and ratios can do better than a person's appetite which has built-in feedback and control mechanisms. How can an externally-designed eating scheme provide exactly the right nutrients in the right amounts and at the right time to a living, dynamic organism?
If you look at wild animals, or children for that matter, they consume food in irregular patterns. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little - it changes meal by meal and day by day. All of these "decisions" are really made at the physical level, and are not guided by a preconceived mental blueprint.
The body has its own wisdom, though this concept is almost universally ignored by modern diets. If you remove unnatural foods from your diet, the odds are your body will guide you to the proper foods in the proper amounts. In my opinion, following this path of physical intuition is simpler and more effective than all the counting and measuring of modern diets.
