What I did is just get a rough estimate of calories of things I'm eating. Along with tracking weight every day. Then over a couple of weeks, calibrated calorie estimates with recorded weight changes. Developed an intuition.

After that, I never looked up another calorie, and counted based on how the food felt, and basically lost exactly 0.5 kg/week over a period of 5 months. (500 kcal deficit/day).

Even if I'm wrong for a particular meal, the over/under-estimates must be cancelling out. My food situation makes it extremely hard to actually calculate calories, so I had to develop this skill.