Have Your Cake And Eat It Too - Why Everyone Should Track Their Food
“A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”
Key Takeaways
Just like staying on top of your finances, keeping track of your food gives the freedom to plan ahead, achieve your goals, and get the most out of life.
Tracking your food will give you more time and freedom to enjoy the foods you love without sacrificing your health or fitness goals.
Tracking your food today is quick and easy. Just follow these steps:
Download a tracking app
Determine your calorie and macronutrient targets
Enter your foods each day
Repeat
Tracking your food gives you the control to fit a few pizza slices or donuts into your targets without feeling unhealthy or guilty.
If you track correctly, it truly allows you to be mindful of your nutrition without obsessing over “healthy vs. unhealthy” or other minutiae. In other words, tracking allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
Full Story
Rejoice! It’s payday. You head down to the bank, deposit your money, and check your balance, which reads “???”
“Surely a mistake!” you mutter to yourself as you push the buttons to try again. Beep boop beep. Again it reads “???”.
The teller notices your frustration and explains, “We’ve updated our policy - we don’t track your money. Just go about your day and hope for the best! If you withdraw more than you have, we’ll let you know - but only after it’s too late. It’s just easier that way.”
You storm out of the bank enlightened, finally realizing the importance of tracking your food.
No Budget, No Problem?
Not tracking your food is akin to navigating through life without a budget. Sure, if you earn enough money and spend responsibly, living without a budget can work. But if you earn too little and spend too much, disaster is inevitable.
Likewise, if you burn a ton of calories and don’t have much of an appetite, you don’t need to track to maintain a healthy body composition. But if you’re like 95% of people, burning too many calories and eating too little is not your problem.
You may believe that maintaining a budget and tracking your food is too:
Time Consuming
Complicated
Boring
These are valid concerns, and I understand it’s intimidating to commit to a new habit. But in reality, tracking your intake will give you more time, simplicity, and satisfaction.
Just like staying on top of your finances, keeping track of your food gives you the freedom to plan ahead, achieve your goals, and get the most out of life.
Why Shouldn’t You Track Your Food?
Although your reasons for not tracking your food are reasonable, they’re not true. Allow me to go point by point and dismantle each objection to show you how tracking your food will add value to your life.
1. John, Nobody Has Time For That!
I’m going to give it to you straight - tracking your food is time consuming. But only at first. After you get the hang of it, tracking your food will give you more time.
Legendary Ex-Navy Seal Jocko Willink coined the term “discipline equals freedom,” and it applies perfectly well to our situation. Taking the steps to track food consistently requires discipline, but your initial investment will pay off in the long run.
By being mindful of your food choices and committing to the habit of tracking your food, you’ll experience more freedom to enjoy the foods you love without sacrificing your health or fitness goals.
Here’s how tracking your food gives you more time.
Allows you to plan your meals and snacks in advance, cutting down on decision making and “where should we order from tonight” discussions.
Helps you figure out the foods that you enjoy the most and also fit into your daily targets, eliminating the guesswork from grocery shopping and dieting
Improves efficiency with muscle gain and fat loss efforts. Instead of shooting in the dark, tracking gives you tangible data that you (and your coach) can use to adjust your plan.
Overall, tracking can be a helpful strategy you can use to maintain a healthy body weight, prevent disease, and, quite frankly, not die, giving you more time to spend with the people you love.
2. John, It’s Too Complicated!
Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated? (1).
I don’t know who Avril was singing about, but I do know it wasn't about tracking her food. Thanks to today’s technology, tracking is effortless and efficient.
Back in the ‘90s, we had to resort to:
Writing our foods down in a notebook
Googling the calories/macronutrients
Adding it all up by hand
Put on some Nirvana and watch Michael Jordan while we were at it
Just kidding, I was a max of 4 years old in the ‘90s. But the other parts are true! In the past, tracking food was tedious.
In comparison, tracking your food today is quick and easy. Just follow these steps:
Download an app
My favorite is Cronometer, but my clients also like MyFitnessPal. Both are free and relatively simple to use. If you have any questions about how to navigate either, feel free to shoot me a message.
Determine your calorie and macronutrient targets
This part’s a bit trickier, but it’s another aspect that’s made a lot easier by technology. Just like the apps, there are tons of calculators available online to determine your starting calories/macros.
Which one is best? It doesn’t matter! The goal here is to establish a baseline to estimate maintenance calories, i.e. the amount of calories you can consume and maintain your weight.
Here, try this one from Precision Nutrition (2).
Just enter your information, goals, and dietary preferences and BOOM - the calculator gives you calorie and macronutrient targets, as well as eyeball measurements (like “12 cupped handfuls of carbs”).
Enter your foods each day
At first, searching, selecting, and figuring out the appropriate measurements of your food will require some time. Patience is a virtue. Stick with it for a week or two, and I promise it will soon become second nature. Tracking your food gets quicker with time because:
The foods you eat the most often will start to appear at the top of your suggested foods. If you have a medium sized apple three times a day, every day, “medium sized apple” will pop up when you go to enter a food.
Your ability to estimate portion size will improve. First, you may need to use a food scale to weigh out certain tough-to-eyeball foods such as peanut butter, nuts, etc., but you will soon be able to estimate 1 tbsp of peanut butter and 30g of almonds with ease.
Muscle memory! Think of it like texting or playing Doodle Jump - at first, it feels clunky and awkward. After some time, firing off messages and jumping over monsters becomes second nature. The same is true with navigating the app! Entering data and checking your targets will become second nature.
Repeat
Repeat the process for another day, month, until you reach your goal, or for the rest of your life! Personally, I will likely track for the majority of my days left on Earth.
3. John, It’s Too Boring!
Does the thought of entering chicken and broccoli into an app, making chicken and broccoli, and eating chicken and broccoli every meal, every day for the rest of your life make you want to curl up in a ball and cry? Me too.
Tracking your food the right way actually prevents the endless chicken and broccoli loop that we often fall into. You see, whether we want to gain muscle, lose fat, or just improve health, our efforts and up looking like this:
Decide it’s finally time to make a change
Throw the frozen pizza out the window and pour the ice cream down the drain
Stock the house with chicken, broccoli, and apple cider vinegar detox teas
Eat the “healthy food” for a few weeks
Crave, cave, and engage in an all-out pizza and ice cream feast
Decide food tastes too good, that you don’t have enough “willpower” to be healthy, or that “life is too short and you just want to enjoy your food, health can take a backseat.”
After a while, start back at Step 1
Do you see how awful that cycle is? For many (myself included) tracking is our golden ticket out of this dark loop of despair!
Instead of taking the excitement out of eating, tracking gives you the control. If you want to eat a few pizza slices or donuts, you can fit it into your targets without feeling unhealthy or guilty. What’s boring about that?
Who Shouldn’t Track Their Food
I’m not a nutritionist, psychologist, or physician, and I don’t know your story. If you:
Have a history of disordered eating or a clinical eating disorder
Have incredibly high levels of life stress (i.e. working 80 hours/week, caring for a newborn, etc.)
Have tracked in the past and have the ability to make informed food choices
Don’t have any problems with your weight, health, or nutrition
Just don’t enjoy it
Then tracking your food may not be the best idea for you. Ignore the title of this article, and keep doing what works for you!
What Does The Research Say?
My argument is that tracking food will improve your health and reduce risk of disease, as a result of:
Increased awareness and understanding of what you’re eating
Improved mindfulness around eating
Improved accountability with food choices
More efficiency in achieving your goals (whether that be weight gain, loss, or maintenance)
More time to plan ahead
Pretty straightforward, and (most of the) research supports my stance.
This study out of Duke University (go Blue Devils!) found that those that tracked their food over 3 months lost more weight and kept it off for longer than those that didn’t track or tracked for a shorter period of time (1). The researchers also found that consistency was key, as those that were the most diligent in tracking lost the most weight.
Other studies, including this one from 2019, have also found that tracking improves weight loss (2, 3, 4). MyFitnessPal’s website will even tell you that about 88% of dieters that use their app to track for at least 7 days lose weight, although I was unable to find a reference to support that claim (5).
In the interest of full transparency, the research is inconclusive. This randomized controlled trial out of UCLA found that tracking food did not help the participants lose weight, and other studies have found insufficient evidence to support it as an effective weight loss strategy (6, 7).
The key takeaway is that tracking is not a magic bullet that will automatically allow us to reach our goals. When combined with consistency and discipline, tracking is a useful tool that helps us along the way. Whether we want to lose fat, gain muscle, or maintain a healthy weight, sustainable success in fitness requires work.
Wrap Up
Tracking your food, especially if you’ve never done so before, is one of the most effective ways to enhance the quality of your diet and improve your health. You will not only become more mindful of your eating habits but also gain the ability to eat intuitively and hold yourself accountable to your goals.
Best of all, tracking will teach you how to enjoy food - whether it be celebrating a special occasion, immersing yourself in a new culture, or having a date night at a new restaurant - without any stress or guilt. If you track correctly, it truly allows you to be mindful of your nutrition without obsessing over “healthy vs. unhealthy” or other minutiae.
In other words, tracking allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
