Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's Ask a Nutritionist podcast, brought to you by Nutritional

Weight and Wellness. My name is Brandy Burrow. I'm a licensed and registered dietitian

here at Nutritional Weight and Wellness. We are thrilled

to be celebrating 20 years on air discussing the connection between what you eat and how you feel

while sharing practical real-life solutions for healthier living through balanced nutrition.

Thank you all so much for your support over all of these years. Now let's get started with today's

question. This question came from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners. So they asked,

do you need to track calories and or protein when following a real food diet? This is a fantastic

question because it's one that I get very often

when meeting individually with clients for the first time. And the short answer is no. You do not

need to track calories when following the real food diet. In fact, here at Nutritional Weight and Wellness, we often encourage clients and class

participants to let go of calorie counting altogether.

And I think that's the beauty of the real food plan.

When you switch to eating primarily real foods and avoid processed foods as much as possible,

you are already doing yourself a big favor in terms of living a healthy and happy life.

And counting calories, I think, is often associated with the desire to lose weight.

But we have found in clinic with over 20 years of practice

that when you start eating real food in a balance that supports health and wellness first,

weight loss is usually a natural side effect of that. And I just want to clarify what we mean by

eating real food or what is meant by that real food meal plan. What we're talking about is sticking

to foods that do not come out of a bag or a box or a fast food window. So we want to stick primarily

to whole foods that you could find on a farm or growing in the

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