I regularly have alcohol when I'm cutting weight. It just gets counted towards my calorie budget.

I do find non-diet soda to be completely wasted calories though. Just not worth it.

2. Weigh yourself every day.

3. After 2 weeks, raise or lower your calorie budget depending on how much weight you've lost. Look at averages, not daily weight.

4. Repeat.

The 2 week adjustment takes care of most mistakes you make with calorie counting. I am usually consistent with the direction I'm over or under counting.

That said, dealing with the "knowing exactly what ingredients" part is actually easy enough, if you're cooking your own food. If not, most places have some kind of nutrition information available, and if they don't, a rough guess is definitely better than nothing.

Calorie tracking is not much fun, but it is definitely effective. Getting it perfectly right isn't as important as consistency.

If you want to be more exact, some ways to make it easier are:

1) eat prepared food that has caloric info on it, like a pre-made salad

2) cook recipes that provide caloric info

3) make very simple meals (ex. 1 cup yogurt + 1 tbsp peanut butter + 1 banana) where you can do the math yourself

But yeah, for most people they'd rather ballpark it and have less stress. Maybe that means a 4-pack instead of a 6-pack, but you're still going to look good.

Over the years I've been on/off with tracking. But I've been able to stick with it over a year now, the longest I ever have. The big difference between now and then is that I'm okay with being 80% accurate if it means easy consistency.

Previously it was very important for me to be 100% accurate. This is especially difficult to do when you eat out. By allowing myself to be imperfect in my logging, it eases the burden to track.

Here's what I do now.

1) Take a photo of everything I eat 2) Log right after eating if I feel like it, but usually I log at the end of the day

Sometimes I underestimate. Sometimes I overestimate. I think it washes out in the net. If my logging is really off it will show in my scale and progress pics.

Doing the above has given me lots of visibility into my diet and unlocked optimizations.

Consistency > Accuracy

Yes the first day and last bit suck, especially the first time. But its also ~3-5x more time efficient than most calorie reduction diets and you save time and money.

That's why the first week or two your weight yourself everyday, chart it and note everything you eat. If your weight doesn't change then you can start reducing calorie intake by reducing portions.

Plan sets of meals with known calories and macronutrients, make them all on Sunday and eat them throughout the week. Easiest is obviously eating the same thing every day, but if that's too monotonous, then choose two or three varieties and make them in big batches. Then you're not weighing grams of ingredients for a single meal at a time, you're weighing X times that for X meals at a time.

Also easy to split them up into the right serving size in a container in the fridge, and you don't even have to think about meals, just grab from fridge and pop in microwave or oven to hear.

That gets you 90% of the way without having to micromanage every meal. The odd meal out on weekends is not a big deal as long as you don't go crazy.