Change Your Meal: the Complete Food Tracking Guide
For lunch on Tuesday last week, I had a vegetable roast mixed with ground beef curry and a side dish of rice (all stuffed with sriracha, of course). I could remember this meal a week ago because I track my meal every day. Not only does this help me achieve my goals, but I now have records to look through when things change from “under control” to “oh shit.”
What’s the point?
Keeping track of every bite of food seems a bit too obsessive because no one has time for it. But if you’re like me, who wants to avoid over-dieting and be miserable, but loves food as hell, knowing exactly what is disappearing from your stomach on a regular basis can help you control your weight. You can also learn a lot about your eating habits and improve them.
Still skeptical? Science seems like a fan . A review of studies published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association looked at 22 published studies of the relationship between weight loss and reports of self-controlled weight, food, and / or exercise. Reviewers consistently found a positive association betweensuccessful weight loss and careful food intake tracking in studies that evaluated nutritional reports. While food tracking itself is no more magical than, say, using shaking weights, these studies show that this practice simply forces you to reevaluate your eating habits and dietary choices, and perhaps be aware of the circumstances and moods that surround your eating behavior. …
Second, realize that your memory really smells bad , especially of something as mundane as the remnants of last night. You might remember inhaling fried rice and half-eaten raw egg roll, but you probably couldn’t tell exactly how many calories you ate . No big deal , most of us grossly underestimate the amount we consume , which definitely hurts your weight loss efforts if that’s your goal.
How food tracking benefits you
So, research seems to be revealing a positive relationship between diligent self-control and improved weight loss outcomes. But how does it help?
Helps to lose weight (and gain weight)
We mentioned earlier that diet is a much more important factor in weight loss than exercise alone for weight loss, so controlling your food intake is key.
Most people don’t realize how much they eat every day because intuition is a terrible yardstick for determining “enough.” Most of the time, when people are unable to lose weight or gain weight, even if they eat tons of kale salads filled with hope, they simply do not meet the calorie needs for their goal. Keeping track of food in a diary or on an app like MyFitnessPal gives you all that precise data in the spotlight . (I myself use an application called Cron-o-meter .) It allows you to view your records, like an accounting audit funding a company, to see where things might go wrong or what could be improved.
If I found that a week or two had passed without any change in my body composition or weight, I would first dig through my nutritional journals. I may have been eating too many Chipotle burritos, resulting in an unwanted baby burrito over time. At the very least, I can make it clear that this is a simple dietary decision and not a reason for me to unnecessarily exercise more or more. cut calories.
You will find out what is in your food
After you track your food for long enough, you have a better understanding of the composition of the foods you eat and what you get from them (for example, for nutrition or pure pleasure?). You realize that a glazed donut, for example, is composed mostly of a 3: 4 ratio of fat to carbs and contributes very little to your satiety and health (although it certainly tastes good!). As you get better and better, you can even measure portions such as one cup of rice or six ounces of steak with reasonable accuracy .
This is a valuable skill in helping you make healthy judgments about healthier food choices (in most cases). Over time, you will eat accordingly and refer to it as nonsense in marketing jargon , such as “lean,” “high in protein.” “Low in fat” or “low in sugar”.
Helps identify potential food intolerances
At certain times of the year, I suffer from severe eczema rashes. I thought it was just a crappy card that was given to me and that I could live with it. Over time, I noticed that the severity varied depending on what I ate a few days before. Through detective work and a little waiting, I have established that certain processed dairy products (such as cottage cheese), sometimes peanut butter and tomato-based products are causing or exacerbating the outbreak. After eliminating them, my eczema is under control.
Nutritional records and tracking of my body signals provided me with important data that helped me choose the right intervention. Sometimes the advice to “listen to your body” is difficult to justify with intuition alone, since you often do not know what to look for and may deliberately reject its messages. Irritability, rashes, headaches, or even bloating can potentially be signs of food intolerances . To be sure, it is best to consult a dietitian or doctor. When you have reliable data, such as nutritional records, you can work with it to figure out what your body is tolerating and what is not.
How to know if tracking is right for you
If you are looking to lose weight or have specific physique goals, it will be much easier for you to achieve them if you take more control over your own eating and consumption habits. Period.
What do you need to track
Once you have a food tracking app that you like, all you have to do is add the foods you eat and the amount of food you ate. It doesn’t have to be hard, you just need to do it. As an added reward, include short notes on your mood and energy levels to start a paper trail of your eating habits. In other words, do you eat when you are bored or really hungry?
If you’re in the pen and paper business, it looks like, but you’ll need to Google a little to track down the nutritional value. USDA values for fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats are often reliable numbers. Most company and restaurant websites also offer nutritional data for their products, but keep in mind that nutritional data is not 100% accurate (and that’s okay).
You can also (and should) weigh food on a digital scale (preferably in grams) and be shocked at how (or how small) the serving sizes are on the label . (I mean, have you ever weighed a batch of peanut butter? Egads .) While food tracking accuracy is very important, it is not necessary to track every lettuce. This article describes “free products” that you don’t need to eat.
Calorie counting vs. Counting macronutrients
Calorie counting is one option, but this method of counting is appropriate for poorer foods . For example, compare one Pop-Tart and 1/2 cup oatmeal made with 1/2 cup 1% milk. They both consume around 200 calories, but they are completely different in terms of providing satiety, nutrients, and even mileage per serving.
Some people argue that calories don’t matter as long as you eat healthy foods, but both quality and calories are important for weight loss. Healthy foods also have calories. In fact, some of the purported “ healthiest” foods (eg, agave nectar, nuts, coconut oil, quinoa) are also high in calories. Throwing in handfuls of these foods on the pretext of healthy eating will make you scream on the scales.
An alternative is to track macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fats). This gives you a lot more nutritional options (also called a flexible diet ). This is my preferred method as it supports my goals for body composition and training intensity. It is also interesting to think about the concept of Tetris to hit my food targets.
How to start tracking your food
And here’s the fun part: Tracking food is a bit of a hassle at first. But remember that food tracking is another skill (like knowing what to do at the gym or learning how to cook) that needs to be developed and made into a habit. Here’s how to get started:
- Choose your food tracker: use an old-fashioned pen and paper or a mobile app like MyFitnessPal or Cron-o-meter (the latter costs money).Eating research shows that your preferred food diary method is important in order to stick to this practice. Personally, I find apps to be more convenient because I can easily copy the same foods and get nutrition data on the fly (though make sure the data is validated because some of the inputs will contain completely incorrect information).
- When starting out, ignore quantity: During the first weeks, work on thinking about what you ate without thinking about how much. Just focus on the foods themselves so that you log all the foods that touch your mouth (yes, even those few peanut M & Ms) to teach you how to track your consumption regularly, and also help you be more mindful of your eating behavior.
- Invest in a digital kitchen scale: Once you feel more comfortable keeping track of your food, invest in a food scale that can accurately measure your portion size. Try to weigh all items with the same measurement (the easiest is grams). This is important because real food products often vary in size and nutritional data are not always accurate .
- Involve your spouse or family : If your family doesn’t understand what you are doing, you are likely to be disappointed. This study by Burke et al found that supportive spouses helped participants integrate self-control into their daily lives and positively impact weight loss efforts.
- Write down the foods you’ve already eaten after your meal: Eventually, however, you’ll want to move on to predicting and recording the foods you will eat (also called pre-planning) once you have a better understanding of your preferences and habits.
- Weigh your groceries and write them down ahead of time: Once you feel comfortable with all of the above and plan to do so in the long run, it’s time to streamline the process so that you spend as little energy as possible on it. Plan all of your meals a week or a few days in advance, and just devote five or so minutes to logging in at the end of the day.
You don’t have to constantly track or weigh things; just enough, until you begin to understand your consumption, how to meet your needs on a daily basis, and you learn to be more careful about the composition of food.
While these are all good things for serious weight loss efforts, you should still enjoy yourself whenever possible. This means not being the person who pulls out a digital scale during lunch with friends and starts weighing your lasagna. Now this is an obsession.