Tired Of Tracking Your Food? Try This Instead
Written by Kim McLaughin
Tired of tracking your food?
Tracking your macros, or calorie counting, is a widely used method for nutrition accountability and guidelines. Apps and trackers might make life a bit easier, but tracking burnout is real.
If tracking your food causes you a major headache, or if you’ve been doing it for a long time and you find it’s causing you more anxiety than less anxiety: you might need a tracking break.
Use these guidelines when you need a break from tracking
Here are the guidelines you need to know to eat healthy (in order of importance):
Total Calories are what matter for weight loss
- The number one rule in weight loss has been the same for a long long time. Your calories in have to be less than your calories out to lose weight. Period. End of story. The more you move, the more calories you can consume and not have them turn to fat. Workouts are part of this calorie out count but even more important than your workouts is your movement throughout the rest of your day. Do you take walks? Do you stand instead of sit at work? What is your step count each day? Keep in mind, a typical person only burns about 1200-1400 calories a day before movement …if you add an hour workout to that but then you sit on your butt for the rest of the day, you are only burning an extra 200-300 calories. The movement you do outside of the workout (the other 23 hours of the day) actually makes up the majority of the calories that you are able to add outside of those initial 1200-1400. If you’re not moving outside of the workout (ie- walks, getting outside, super active job, etc) then keep your calorie goals on the lower side 1500-1700 per day. If that sounds low and you know you can’t adhere to that consistently then MOVE. Find little ways to stay more active throughout the day.
How do you know how many calories you are consuming if you’re not tracking?
- If you’ve been tracking for any length of time, you should know roughly what things are worth. It doesn’t have to be perfect. At the end of the day, 50-100 calories positive or negative is not going to make a huge difference but if you can’t deal with this uncertainty. Track just the thing you don’t know in a tracking app. If the food you’re about to eat does not come with a label and it’s outside of the whole food/good for you realm, type in your best guess in an app and see what the calorie count is roughly. For example — a Carne Asada burrito. I would type in Carne Asada burrito into the Macros First app and take a look at the HUGE variety of options. The trick is to choose one on the higher end as far as calories to see how much you “could” be using up of your daily balance.
Protein intake matters
- Protein is one of the hardest macronutrients to break down so just know that you are burning calories when you consume protein. More importantly, though, it also contains 9 essential amino acids that cannot be made by your body and they are essential to maintaining and building muscle. The more muscle you have, the better for a HUGE number of reasons — overall health, longevity, calories burned daily, aging, etc.
- As long as your total calories are accounted for, eating a lot of protein is rule #2 — but also see rule #3 and #4.
Fruits and Vegetables should make up at least half of every snack or meal.
- The micronutrients found in fruits and vegetables are not easily replicated. Even if you supplemented your diet with a green drink or other pills and liquids, it is not the same as consuming those vitamins and minerals from the plants themselves. Your body needs those micronutrients to function optimally.
- In addition, fruits and vegetables contain fiber. Fiber is key to gut health and necessary for good poops! You should know your fiber count already if you’ve been tracking but you should aim for 14g of fiber for every 1000 calories consumed.
Please remember that anything that comes in a package is considered processed — avoid as much processed foods as you can
- But if you are going to consume things that come in packages, please remember – just because something says “high protein” on the package does not mean it’s good for you. Take a look at the ingredients, the added sugars, and the fat content to determine if something is “healthy” or not. You may not be tracking macros but you should still look at nutrition labels! Make judgements based on that information. If something contains 12g of fat and you wouldn’t have consumed that if you were tracking because it would “use up too much of your fat macros” – use that same logic here. Just because you’re not tracking doesn’t mean the numbers no longer matter.
Follow these guidelines to give yourself a mental break from tracking your food
If you follow these guidelines, and eat until you’re at a 7 out of 10 on a fullness scale, you shouldn’t skip a beat with your nutrition. Taking a break from tracking doesn’t mean you can have a free for all but it does mean that you can take the pressure off of yourself for a bit and rely on healthy habits instead. Macro apps will always be there and you can do an occasional day or week check-in in the future but NOT counting can sometimes make food fun again.