The role of tracking nutrition in fitness and health-related goals is undeniable. When you start tracking your food, you increase self-awareness, learn more about food intake and behavior, gain benefits from self-monitoring, and ultimately get closer to achieving their health and fitness goals. All of these benefits are critical for weight management. But people trying to gain hypertrophy (get bigger) and alter their body composition can also benefit from monitoring their food intake as well. Further, clients just looking to improve general health and physical activity will benefit from keeping a closer eye on their eating habits.
Food is the leading influencer of poor health in America. In fact, an unhealthy diet contributes to nearly 7000,000 deaths each year in the United States. These deaths are linked to diseases (to name a few) such as; heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. To make matters worse, the numbers are increasing in every generation, especially as we see childhood obesity on the rise.
Most people agree that diet is an essential component of health, but it is also incredibly easy to fall into poor food habits that result in weight gain and disease. Think about it, we eat multiple times a day, every day; therefore, you have more opportunities to run astray with good nutrition intentions. Even worse, we’re exposed to food-related decisions constantly. We process incoming information constantly from media and marketing to our own social influences. So proper nutrition is no easy task. Tracking your food in an app or food diary is the best way to get an honest look at your current state. There’s no hiding. Your own records will show you exactly where you’re at. From there, you can take the necessary steps toward improving it.
What Does Tracking Your Food Actually Do?
There are few proven benefits to using a nutrition app or food diary as a food tracking system. Ist if these benefits translate to weight loss. But don’t forget that when you have a nutritious diet, you’ll have better energy levels for physical activity, sleep better, experience greater focus. All of this is not to mention the other health benefits from good nutrition like lowered cholesterol and blood pressure, to name a few. Tracking your food helps in three distinct ways.
Teaches You About Nutrition
If you’re new to healthy eating, then you might not even how to read a nutrition facts label or guess the right portion size. This is okay, not many people know these things until they starting paying attention to what they eat. As you begin your food logging journey, you’ll learn about the importance of measuring foods, how to count calories, and how different each food group makes you feel differently. In short, just the process of accurate food logging will teach you more about nutrition. Of course, this is the case with someone new to healthy eating. But even people who think they eat right can benefit from double-checking their eating habits from time to time.
Increases Self-Awareness
Just as much as you’ll learn more about food, nutrition tracking will teach you about your relationship with food. This is especially the case if you’re journaling other experiences like emotional states or stress levels. It might also teach you when you’re prone to snacking mindlessly or find yourself hungry. And, as this state of self-awareness grows with food, so will it grow with other aspects of your health and fitness like water intake, activity levels, and more.
Self-Monitoring Increases Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant mental state we have when what we’re doing doesn’t align with what we want to be doing or what we believe we’re doing. Cognitive dissonance is so unpleasant, in fact, that we start changing our behaviors to reduce it. So, when we start food tracking (accurately), it’s a form of self-monitoring. And, when we see that our food choices aren’t in line with what we want to be doing, we start changing our behaviors. Of course, this really only starts working when we know the difference between good and bad nutrition. For example, if you think Buffalo chicken wings are healthy because it’s “chicken”, you might be thrilled to log it into your nutrition app. However, once you learn how the food is prepared, you’ll realize otherwise.
The bottom line is that cognitive dissonance and self-monitoring work. In fact, they work in other forms of behavior change, too like if you’re trying to increase your daily step count or water intake.
What Goals Are Good For Nutrition Tracking?
Most of the research centers around weight loss in efforts to better control obesity. However, as pointed out earlier, nutrition is critical for everything we do. Therefore, you should consider logging your foods even if you aren’t necessarily trying to achieve fat loss.
- Hypertrophy or increasing lean body mass: If you’re trying to increase muscle mass without increasing body fat, nutrition is just as important as strength training. You need to have adequate amounts of protein to support muscle growth. But, you also need carbohydrate food sources so that your body uses the proten for muscle growth rather than energy.
- General health: Most people, especially as they age, start focusing on their blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and cholesterol All of these metrics are impacted by what you eat (and what you do). Therefore, if you just want to live a healthier life, tracking what you eat is important.
- Functional fitness: If you’re healthy but you want to improve your fitness levels, you need to be able to perform your best. This means having adequate energy levels and the proper nutrients to support your body. Therefore, making sure you’re consuming essential nutrients is important for anyone looking to improve overall fitness levels.
Best Ways To Log Nutrition
By now, you realize you can’t go wrong with food tracking. There are some basics you should follow to get the most from food logging. Follow these tips in order, for the best results.
- Commit to logging your foods accurately and honestly for a specified time (start with 90 days). Being honest with what you eat won’t be easy at first, but it’s important.
- Research the best way for you to track your foods. Some people are good with a pen and paper. Others love the convenience of a nutrition app like MyFitnessPal (so do we).
- Log everything that goes into your mouth. This includes calorie counts for beverages, coffee creamer, one or two chips, even chewing gum. Be diligent with no stone left unturned.
- Start measuring your foods to get accurate calorie counts. Visual estimates have a time and place, but once you get the hang of your system, you need to start measuring each portion size so that you know the calorie counts are exact.
- Begin journaling other experiences. Take note of if you’re tired, stressed, or bored. See if you can find your own eating patterns that you can break later.
- Pay attention to percentages of macronutrients. Counting your macros means looking at what percentage of your calories are coming from protein, carbohydrates, and fats. As you get better with your health and nutrition, it really helps you fine tune what needs to happen for the best results.
- Loop in an expert. Accelerate your results and get the trusted info you can’t find on the internet. Hire a personal trainer, nutrition coach, or health coach to help you out.
- Share your goals and successes. Sharing with others will further cement this new healthy habit of yours. Make it public and take your commitment to a new level.
Summarizing Nutrition Tracking
If logging your nutrition with pen and paper works for you, kudos! For many, it gets lost in the shuffle. Today’s digital age gives us an abundance of resources at our fingertips. We can utilize technology to reach goals faster.
The top five components for effective weight loss using technology are: self-monitoring, counsellor feedback and communication, social support, use of a structured programm, and use of an individually tailored program. Whether your goals are to lose weight, gain muscle, or improve mobility, these tools remain the same.
There are a million and one diet trends out there and everyone has their own opinion: Intermittent Fasting, Keto, Paleo, High Protein Diet, etc. If you want to keep it simple Michael Pollan, American author, journalist, and activist, says, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.”
It’s important that your diet choice is unique to your needs. Make choices you can sustain through even your weakest moments.
Tracking nutrition empowers you to eat consciously, breaking bad habits and introducing new ones that serve you. If you are what you eat, then eat good food. Bon Appetit!
There are many fitness apps out there that can help you do this! For example, MyFitnessPal is a great tool. Naamly aggregates the data from this app so you can see the nutrition progress of clients at a single glance.