Tracking Your Food is for Everyone
When I start working full time with someone that has health or aesthetic goals I ask loads of questions and discuss what’s best for each individual, but there’s only one recommendation that I make every single time, no matter what; “You should track your food for 10 to 14 days”
The good, the bad and the ugly. Track all of it and begin to understand where you’re at.
This is a request that unfortunately isn’t always fulfilled - and I understand why. It’s a tedious and sometimes stressful process that is looked at as something done by meathead body builders who eat nothing but chicken and rice. I get it and, ironically, when I started tracking in 2014, I did it for the same reasons those meathead body builders did it - I wanted to get HUGE.
Spoiler alert - that never happened.
What did happen, was a process of learning that I never expected and one that I wish for every one of you. When you track your food (note; not change your food in any way, just track it) you learn SO much about yourself and the food you’re used to eating. Sometimes “bad” food isn’t that hard on your body. Sometimes “good” food has almost no calories at all!
I’ve seen, far more times than I can count, health-conscious people who track their food for the first time learning that their “healthy” habits have caused them to under-eat to a point of weight gain and weight retention.
Yes, this is a thing, but the details of this thing for another day.
The focus here is that there’s plenty to discover simply by looking at what you have on a normal day, over a small stretch of time. 10-14 days seems like the sweet spot to me for two reasons.
First, it’s a long enough time that it will likely include some “good” days and “bad” days, making it a real representation of your average eating lifestyle.
Further, it takes away from the idea of cheating the system. If I asked you to track food for a few days, there’s a good chance that you’d be thinking about what you were eating due to guilt or motivation to succeed at something. There’s no winning or losing when you track your food for the first time, just data collection.
Why is this data collection so important? It’s necessary for success.
I actually did a whole YouTube video on tracking food a while back!
That’s the truth. If you want to change something, you have two ways of approaching it. You look at the history of what’s been done and you adjust accordingly.
Or.. you guess and you pray. I’m not sure how religious you are, but if praying changed your body, I bet way more people would look like Jennifer Lopez or Chris Hemsworth.
Tracking isn’t sexy, but if sexy (or above average, or even just healthy) is how you want to look, I highly recommend you give it a shot. Take 10-14 days of consistently tracking your food through an app like MyFitnessPal and assess afterwards. You’ll learn your habits, your average intake, and soon, your next steps to an improved self.