If you are counting calories as a means to achieve a certain weight, you're doing it wrong. Let me tell you why.

I'm not a junkie eater, but in the last few weeks I've been making an effort to eat quite well and overall, it's going very well and it has been quite easy for the most part. The reason? Well, the reason is very simple, there is a lot of food that is healthy and delicious at the same time. If you stick to it for a while, you end up loving it and you can't have enough.

Take fruit for instance, you're supposed to have 5 portions of fruit a day.  With all the delicious seasonal fruits around, I would find it hard to avoid eating more than that, but I don't try. I do have more than five a day and I don't give it a second thought.

Last week I've seen a comment saying something along the lines of: "one should also be aware not to eat too much fruit because fruits also contain calories, five fruits a day already have the same amount of calories than a portion of chocolate". Now, that is true but it's silly.

To start with, you need energy on your diet, you need the calories, they are not something to avoid entirely. On second thought, the calories concept mask a lot of things, one thing is calories coming from saturated fat, a completely different thing is calories coming from fruit sugars. They are processed differently on the body.

Last but definitely not least, there isn't much on a chocolate that is good for your body. Cocoa itself is good, and depending on the quality of the chocolate you may also have good fats and a few other things, but is not massively rich in nutrients. A cheap chocolate is much worse, famous brands of chocolate are not even legally allowed to be called chocolate because of the low proportion of cocoa (Try to find the word "chocolate" in the packages, you'll be amazed on how often it's missing).

A cheap chocolate, may contain as little as 15% of cocoa and the rest is bad fats, bad sugars (yes, there are good fats and good sugars and you need them) and chemical stabilizers and stuff like that. Which means that at most 15% of your candy has any degree of goodness.

A single fruit with 100g to 150g may contain as much as 140Kcal at times, but are different sugars, good fats, vitamins, fiber and other nutrients. About everything in a fruit is beneficial and nutritious. So when you eat 500kcal of chocolate, you still need to eat something else for nutrients, when you eat 500kcal of fruit, you are pretty much served with many of your needs, which means that calories on your chocolate are superfluous and calories on your fruit are essential.

Since you are what you eat (quite literally) your body will have to manage any superfluous food you eat somehow, when you feed your body with something that is nearly 100% good, there isn't much your body will have to guess and it will be much more balanced.

Finally, nutrition is not about looking fashionable, it's about feeling good and being healthy. Weight and calories balance are metrics and may help you to achieve your goal - which should be feeling good and healthy ;) - but if you are feeling bad to make the metrics look right, then you're doing it the other way around.