With so many tracking apps out there now to help Busy Gals get a better idea of the nutrients they consume in a typical day, I think it’s time we have a chat about the right way to track your food for weight loss…
Let me ask you this, have you ever avoided logging the fun foods you love because you think they’re “bad”? If I had a nickel for every time I heard “I didn’t track it because I didn’t want to see how bad it was”, let’s just say I’d be RICH. But girl, that is so NOT the point of tracking!
Let me first say that I understand that tracking food using an app like MyFitnessPal is not for everyone. But in my experience, I’ve found most ladies are using it wrong.
When tracking your food the right way, we believe it can be a helpful tool for a lot of busy women we work with!
Whether your goal is to lose weight, improve your awareness of your eating patterns and habits, work on your digestive issues, or even improve your connection between eating and emotions, logging the food you eat can help you reach those goals!
But tracking your food is NOT about judgement.
We utilize tracking as a way of putting food on a level playing field. We utilize tracking to intentionally fit in all our favorites and make sure we’re getting ENOUGH of the nutrients we need to feel our best.
If you do any of the following, it’s time you rethink the way you track your food to help you reach your goals:
- tracking only when you feel you are eating perfectly
- tracking to eat as low calorie as possible or following calorie recommendations that are too low
- tracking just to track, not to learn or create awareness
- tracking until you feel burned out by it and then going back to how you ate without tracking
- tracking to get permission to eat more food, including adding in exercise calories “burned”
Tracking your food is simply a tool to create awareness around your habits and patterns.
When you create awareness, it helps you see where you can make some changes to help you reach your goals and LEARN about habits you could create long-term!
So let’s look at an example:
❌Let’s say you LOVE chocolate, but you feel guilty eating it. You never log it so you never see how it can fit in, so you continue to view it as a “bad” food and overeat it when you let yourself have it. You also have a glass or two of wine without tracking it because, screw it, you’re already being “bad”.
✅Now let’s say you log the chocolate in your app and see that one serving is 120 calories. You enjoy the heck out of that chocolate and make it a priority to fit it into your calorie and macronutrient goals on a regular basis. You also log a glass of wine and see that it’s 120 calories. Now you know that you could have a half serving of chocolate and a glass of wine for less than 200 calories and that fits in pretty easily a majority of the time.
So now you’re reaching your health and fitness goals AND eating the chocolate and drinking the wine!
Tracking your food for weight loss is not supposed to bring you shame or guilt because we believe food and nutrition should be FUN! Logging is about actively having your favorite foods and feeling PROUD to include them….. instead of avoiding logging foods because you think you shouldn’t have them.
Busy Gal Nutrition wants you to track the foods you enjoy, even if you previously thought you shouldn’t include them at all. Because we want you to better understand your body and nutrition to fuel yourself for LIFE 😘
