If You’re Tracking Calories, Write Down Your Dinner First.
Keeping track of what you eat is a lot like budgeting: you have a certain amount of calories or nutrients that you can “spend” during the day. Planning is key, which can be a little unnerving: What if I wasted too many calories in breakfast? Will I be hungry at dinner?
So, here’s a tiny little trick that works no matter what your goals (including if you want to eat more and fear dinner should be a monstrous portion): Track your dinner first.
Instead of counting each day in your tracking app from morning to night, consider a 24-hour period that runs from noon to noon. I first heard about this from redditor u / woodsea . Let’s say you start tracking on Monday:
- Ignore breakfast and lunch. Register your dinner on today’s (Monday) entry.
- Wake up the next day, have breakfast and write down yesterday’s (Monday) entry.
- At lunchtime, start tracking today’s (Tuesday) entry. You will complete the rest of this entry tomorrow, Wednesday.
Now lunch is becoming the easiest meal to budget: you know how many calories or macros you have. If you screw up and end up eating less than planned, you won’t be eating for long — you’ll be back on track the next day after a few hours.