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Tracking your food

13 July 2023 Nutrition


We need to talk about tracking food intake.

This topic is becoming much more commonplace and spoken about. However the issues with the current conversations and attitudes towards tracking food tends to be very ‘all or nothing’.

Let’s begin by highlighting that in general, we find that the people who get the best results are often the clients who have had a significant period of time tracking their food in some capacity and the people who want the fastest results almost always rely on some form of tracking their food intake.

Before we unpack that statement, we should stress that there are many different ways in which someone can track their food intake; for example someone can keep a written food diary using pen and paper, or maybe write it in a note on their phone, alternatively someone could keep a photo food diary (i.e. they would take a picture of each meal and snack they have each day). However nowadays the most common method of tracking one's food is using an app on your phone, such as MyFitnessPal or Nutracheck.

The main benefit of these sort of apps is that if you can accurately and honestly log everything you eat and drink, it can give you a fairly detailed breakdown of amounts of calories you're eating, as well as quantities of the different macronutrients - protein, fats, carbs, as well as fibre and micronutrients, i.e. vitamins and minerals.

Of course tracking your food on something like MyFitnessPal isn't perfect, as there may be some foods which aren't 100% accurate, you may from time to time have to guess certain portion sizes and the major downside is that it can be an extremely labour intensive process initially. This initial period can often be a barrier for some people, however if someone commits and pushes past that initial period, tracking everything they eat and drink for an extended period of time can provide a huge amount of data on your eating habits.

Also, tracking food on an app can be an extremely educational process, as you get to learn about the calorie and macronutrient makeup of the food you eat... some food you thought were "good" might not be the most suitable for your goals and some that you thought were "bad" may actually fit into your eating regime a lot better than you thought. You get to learn about food and meal combinations as well as learning to calibrate your portion sizes.

As well as learning about the nutritional makeup of the food you eat, possibly the biggest benefit of tracking what we eat is that it increases awareness around our eating habits and the food we eat. For some people, getting it down in black and white can be a rather eye-opening experience, with some people find that they are eating far more than they thought, others nowhere near enough of 'the good stuff', or perhaps that some typically thought of "healthy" foods are in fact extremely calorific when added up.

It is important to note that a common pitfall we see is when people only track the good days and not tracking when things don't go to plan... this doesn't really give us a clear picture of what is going on.

In order for you, or your coach, to know what needs changing, we need to track the great days, as well as the not-so-great days, in order to get an accurate picture and learn what to change. So be brutally honest, track the good days and the bad and get an accurate picture of what you’re consuming on a regular basis, learn and get better over time.

Another pitfall we see regarding tracking food is that people think they should track forever and that progress cannot be made without tracking. We however feel strongly that tracking is a great short term tool but probably not the best long term strategy. So to avoid feelings of failure and to develop a good relationship with tracking food, we must set parameters around what, when and how long we will be tracking for.

For example, ‘I’m going to start tracking my food’ is great… but there it’s probably not sustainable to track indefinitely, so it will indefinitely fizzle out.

In that case, ‘I’m going to track my food religiously for the next 30 days, then I’m going to go down to tracking the first week per month for the next 6 months’, then I’m going to see if I can move to a more intuitive plan’, is a much better statement of intent and there are clear parameters and timelines around it.

Remember, tracking food is a tool we use to increase awareness and educate ourselves so we can ultimately make changes to what we’re doing. The tracking itself isn’t the solution, it’s a tool we use to help us make positive adjustments and improve our compliance. So the sooner we can identify what we’re doing well, versus what we need to change and then move to a more intuitive approach, the better.