Macro Tracking Tips

Food tracking and calories

Macro tracking can be an excellent tool to help you reach your goals, build intuitive awareness of the energy found in food and support you in making healthy food choices! 

This blog will assume you already know your macro ratios (in grams or percentages) and your overall calorie target. Still, you need extra help to make this tedious process less tedious. 

1. Get the right equipment. This includes a small food scale to weigh and measure your food. While you're at it, grab yourself some measuring cups if you don't already have those. 
2. Keep your food scale in plain sight on the counter. The visual reminder will keep you honest and on top of it. 
3. Download a tracking app - MyFitnessPal is great as it integrates with many other fitness apps and tech. Cronometer is another tracking app available, and I like it because of how it graphically displays your progress over the day. 
4. Both myFitness Pal and Cronometer have barcode scanners to pull up the nutrition data quickly and easily - use it! 
5. Favourite the food/ingredients you eat on a near-daily basis. For example, I have plain Greek yogurt and protein granola almost every day, so it made sense to 'favourite' those items in the app, so they always appear near the top of your search list.
6. Use the 'recipe' feature in the app to create and store your most frequently had meals to save time punching in individual ingredients. We highly recommend doing this for your big-ass salad, which we encourage you to eat every day.
7. As you track over time, the app logs your most recent entries, which can then be referred to again instead of searching. Scroll through your history. 
8. Aim to track as much as possible (including liquids), but don't sweat it if you miss entries here or there. The take-home point is that the more you track, the easier and faster it becomes. Practice makes perfect but don't worry about trying to be perfect! 
9. When eating out, punching in an estimate is better than no data. Search for something similar and enjoy your dinner night out! 

The biggest thing to remember is that tracking is a tool and not the toolbox. It's great for the reasons above but should not be something you do moving forward forever.

If you haven't tracked before and are curious, try it out for 2-3 weeks and notice how it changes your eating habits. You can learn how to calculate your macros here. Track as much as you can, but again, don't let it be another stressor that detracts you from what's most important - eating to energize and feel good! 

Be strong and be well, 

Coach Sheldon 

p.s food tracking is not for everyone! We encourage you to focus on whole foods and get enough protein, carbs and fats. If you are curious if you are getting enough, food tracking can give you that information. If you have previous ED or disordered eating, we do not recommend tracking your food.