Do I need to track my food?
Do you need to track your food? Nope.
But here are 3 reasons why tracking your food could help you reach your goals.
1. Tracking provides education & awareness – tracking helps you gain an understanding of how many calories you are eating in a day, while gaining an awareness of how much protein, carbs, fats and fibre you are consuming.
2. Tracking reduces variables – tracking isn’t 100% accurate but it does help to reduce the gueswork, and in turn, this can help you to make better-informed decisions about whether you need to make changes to your current lifestyle – in most cases, it comes down to not eating enough, yep you heard me right!
3. Tracking isn’t forever – no way! tracking for a period of time provides education and once you feel confident about what nutrients each food is providing your body and what a portion size looks like, you can start moving away from tracking calories and rely on your knowledge to continue to build estabolished daily habits.
💁♀️The third point is one I want to home in on a little more because a lot of people I speak to get nervous they’re going to have to do this for a long time, and it’s simply something they don’t want to do.
I get it, trust me. Tracking your food forever is not enjoyable, sustainable or something we should rely on forever.
So, what's the deal? The end game is to build the education muscle so we can understand what each food group is contributing to our bodies and where we might be out of balance. ⚖️
Tracking our food can show us:
👉What’s our protein intake looking like?
👉Are we getting in enough fats?
👉Are we consuming enough fibre for our digestive health?
👉How many vegetables are we getting in?
👉Are we getting enough calcium? Wholegrains?
👉Is our sugar intake a little too high?
👉How much sodium are we taking in?
👉Are we eating enough?
👉Are we eating too much?
We can get a much clearer idea of all of these by tracking our food rather than simply guesstimating.
And once we begin to develop new habits around tweaks that may be required, this becomes second nature and simple.
🙋♀️But here’s the thing, you can’t skip step 1 and jump straight to step 3 because weight loss generally happens when you have less energy in than energy out, and in order to measure this you need to know how many calories you consume in a day and how much you expend...
Without this process and education there are too many variables left unknown and the process will be a lot more frustrating for you.
Does this help?
