The Importance of Tracking Calories
Let’s talk about nutrition tracking because what gets measured gets managed.
Prefer to watch than read? Then please check out the video below:
Study on Caloire Tracking
Whether you’re looking to gain, maintain or lose weight, tracking helps ensure your diet is set up to facilitate these outcomes. Without tracking, most people grossly underestimate their calories. In fact, in this study, subjects underreported their intake by an average of 47%, and to make matters worse, overestimated their physical activity by 51%. Some obese subjects repeatedly failed to lose weight, even though they reported restricting their caloric intake to less than 1200 kcal per day. But they weren’t cursed with a slow metabolism – it was checked in the study – they just underreported their intake. They reported eating around 1,028 kcal per day, but their actual intake, measured objectively, was 2,081 kcal! This is why it’s important for us to get our nutrition tracking right!
Do You Need to Track Forever?
No, you don’t need to track forever, sometimes just two weeks of meticulous tracking can be enough to help you understand the amount of food you’re actually eating and spot those secret calories coming in, such as the copious amount of butter we use on our toast, that serving size of cereal which is more like 4 serving sizes, that tea spoon of peanut butter that’s actutally towering, or not accounting for the fact we had three milky coffees this morning – guilty! 🙋♂️
To ensure we don’t fall victim to these tracking errors, it’s important that we are vigilant with our tracking and meticulously track everything, at least in the early stages. I recommend that almost all my clients use MyFitnessPal. Yes, there are other apps out there, but at the time of writing this article, MyFitnessPal remains the best choice.
Nutrition Tracking Pro Tips:
When using the search function, select the items with a green tick, as these entries have been officially reviewed or added by the app.
Use weighing scales for at least the first few weeks.
Track the raw weight, so before cooking, and use a raw entry from the database – this way you're always comparing like for like.
Use the barcode scanner where possible. It’s much quicker and easier.
Don’t forget to track oils, butter and sauces – you’ll be surprised by how calorific this stuff is.
Track anything with calories, including veg.
Remember, you can drag tracked meals from previous days. This way, you don’t need to manually re-enter every item of something you eat regularly.
You can use the meal scanner, but you will need to double-check this, as the accuracy isn’t always great.
When eating out, you want to overestimate your calorie intake by 20-30% to account for any additional oils and sauces they may have used.
Now, I’m not suggesting you become someone who is obsessed with tracking, but rather that we should at least commit two weeks to accurate tracking. The understanding of your diet you’ll get from this is invaluable moving forward. Eventually, you’ll be able to eyeball and guesstimate the calories in a meal with relatively good accuracy, and eventually completely step away from tracking while maintaining full control of your body composition.
Trust me, it’s worth it!