I’m writing this from France, home of the world’s best pastries, bread and cheese. And I’m eating like it.

I’ve recently learnt the art of baking sourdough back in the UK, so bread has properly got its hooks into me. Is it the healthiest food on the planet? Not really. Do I love it regardless? Absolutely. With butter, with olive oil, with peanut butter, even jam. And whilst I’m here, pastries and croissants and pain au chocolat are getting the same treatment. Most days out here I’ll have a French stick and a croissant, easily.

Now, a caveat, I’m also running pretty hard at the moment. But it got me thinking about something I used to obsess over, calories.

The maths is real, but it’s not the whole story

Let’s get this out the way first, calories absolutely matter. Tracking them works, regardless of what Instagram tells you. If you’re chasing a specific goal, weight loss, weight gain, performance, calories in versus calories out is a real, useful tool. I’m not here to tell you otherwise.

But here’s where it gets more complicated. If calories were genuinely all that mattered, you could just cut them back a little more each week, forever, and eventually look like Superman. That’s not how the body works.

It’s a bit like progressive overload in the gym. In theory, if you added 2kg to your lifts every single week, you’d be adding over 100kg to your numbers in a year. Obviously that’s nonsense, the body doesn’t work in a straight line like that. Calories are exactly the same. If it feels starved, your body doesn’t just sit there burning fat like people tell you it will. It gets smarter than that. It starts to conserve energy. Things like libido will drop off. Energy levels dip. Your hormones start swinging all over the place, and more often than not you end up nutrient deficient too, because you’re simply not eating enough of the stuff your body actually needs.

And it’s not just a weight loss problem. I see it just as much with people trying to gain weight or chase performance, ploughing calories in without ever thinking about where they’re coming from. The goal, whichever direction you’re going, should always start with nutrient dense food first. Calories matter, but I’d argue nutrients and hormones matter more.

Eating for what you’re actually doing

This is the bit that took me the longest to learn, you shouldn’t be eating the same thing every day regardless of what your day looks like. Your body uses different amounts of energy depending on what you’re asking of it, so your food should move with that, not stay fixed while your output changes underneath it.

Case in point, for the first time in years I’m currently eating Coco Pops. Genuinely. They’re high sugar, high carb, and you’re hungry again an hour later, in most circumstances a pretty terrible breakfast choice. But after a 15 to 20 mile run, they’re brilliant for topping the carbs back up fast. They’d never be my normal choice, but right now, with the distances I’m covering, they work for me. It’s about picking food to match what you’re actually asking your body to do that day, not what you ate yesterday out of habit.

Outside of that, I’m still eating plenty of veg, sourdough, good quality meat, a lot of wild meat actually, venison and duck, alongside good beef and chicken. The Coco Pops are a tool for a specific moment, not the foundation.

I’ve also learnt to pay attention to how individual foods actually make me feel, not just what the label or the macros say. I rarely eat high carbs at lunch anymore, because I’ve noticed it makes me tired through the afternoon. Before and after training though, I’ll eat plenty of carbs, that’s a different job the food’s doing. I don’t buy that half the world is suddenly wheat intolerant, but I do know if I eat too much wheat in a day, it tends to leave me with indigestion and heartburn. I’ve also found that high fat, low carb leaves me feeling flat, less muscular, and I perform worse across the board. That’s just what I’ve learnt about my body specifically. Yours might be completely different, and that’s kind of the whole point.

Track it properly, then learn from it

Here’s the thing most people get wrong before they even start, most of us eat considerably more than we think we do. That’s not a guess, it’s just what happens when you actually track properly for the first time. So my advice is, track your calories properly for a few months. Not obsessively, but honestly. That gives you a real benchmark of what you’re actually consuming, not what you assume you’re consuming. Once you’ve got that benchmark, everything gets easier, because now you’re adjusting from a place of actual information instead of guesswork.

But alongside the numbers, track how you feel. What foods sit well, what foods don’t. What keeps your energy steady through the afternoon and what wrecks it. That’s the piece that never shows up on a calorie app, and it’s arguably the more useful data of the two.

My own 80/20

Day to day, I eat pretty clean. At home it’s largely the same foods, scaled up or down depending on how much energy I’ve used that day, big run, eat more, day at the desk, eat less. Evening meals are whole and home cooked by me, about 99% of the time.

That’s my 80. It’s what lets me relax on the 20. When I’m away, like I am now, I can enjoy the pastries and the bread without feeling any type of way about it, because I know what the baseline looks like when I get home. That balance is the whole thing, really. Not restriction, not obsession, just knowing your own numbers well enough that you can afford to step outside them sometimes.

So yes, calories matter. Track them, learn from them, use them as your benchmark. Just don’t mistake the number for the whole picture. Eat for what you’re actually doing, not for a fixed target that never moves. Your body will always tell you more than the app does, if you’re willing to listen to it.