Tips on Tracking and Why You Should

One of the most important things you can do to improve your nutrition and overall health, is also one of the easiest. Tracking. Not just what you eat, but how you eat as well. Keep an eye on what you are doing helps you evaluate what is working, what isn't, and what habits are connected.

WHY IS TRACKING IMPORTANT

Having a good goal is an important step to make progress on any venture. This is especially true when it comes to health, fitness, and nutrition. Knowing where you are is essential to deciding a realistic goal. Once you evaluate where you are and decide where you want to go, you need to make sure you are moving forward. The only effective way to do that is to track what you are doing and evaluate your results at specific intervals. If you don't know where you were and where you are, you don't know if you are making progress.

Another side effect of tracking is that you will become much more aware of what you are doing and what you are eating. Just developing that awareness makes a big impact. Most people these days are pretty busy. It becomes all too easy to just go on autopilot and not pay attention to our actions and nutrition. Being more conscious of your what you eat and what you're doing will help you make better choices throughout your busy day.

WHAT TO TRACK

For some people, keeping track can be very intimidating. There are a million different variables to track. Most, however, are not going to make a big impact on the end result. For the large majority of people, just keeping track of three things:

1. What you eat

2. What time you eat

3. What you are doing when you eat

These are going to be the easiest and most effective habits to track.

Finding habits and connections between them will progress you much more than just tracking your calories for the day. For example, you may get home from work, relax, and watch an hour of TV every night. What if you are also grabbing a beer and a bowl of popcorn with butter and salt with that hour of TV? It may not seem like much for each day, but taken over a week, every week over the course of a year? That's a HUGE impact. You need to find that connection before you can improve that habit. You could take a couple days a week, or even just one to start, and take a walk or play a game instead of grabbing a snack and watching TV.

Another really common connection that people find is that they eat more when they are distracted. If you sit down for lunch in front of the computer (something many of us are guilty of - including myself), you can eat a full meal without even thinking about it. This distracted eating lessens your body's "full" signal. If you brain doesn't realize you ate as much as you did, you'll get hungry sooner and may reach for a snack between meals that you otherwise wouldn't need.

HOW TO TRACK IT

There are many ways to track your nutrition. Find the one that works for you and go with that.

KEEP A JOURNAL

This is the most straight forward and basic way to track everything in one place. Just write it down in a notebook. No need to get super complicated.

2:15pm

Turkey sandwich on wheat with lettuce, tomato, and lite mayo.

Glass of milk.

Ate at desk while working.

The plus is that this is super simple, straight forward, all in one place, and accessible to pretty much anyone. You can also use a notepad app on your phone or computer to keep track. The drawback is that you don't have super specific numbers (like calories, serving sizes, etc) and you have to manually look back through notes to find trends and habits. For most people, especially those just starting, this simple format is plenty of info to start moving in the right direction.

USE AN APP

Another option is to use an app to track your food intake. One of the most used one, and my personal favorite is MyFitnessPal. The free version is great, has a huge database of foods to add to your log (you can even scan the barcode to add many of them), and is very easy to use. It tracks your macros (carbs, fat, protein) as well as many micronutrients (vitamins, minerals) as well as other stats (sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides). Besides MyFitnessPal there are several others, both free and premium. The drawback with many of these apps is that they don't let you track your habits with your food intake, like what time you ate and what you were doing. Also, sometime those just starting to track their nutrition find the plethora of info overwhelming.

SNAP A PIC

Yep, that is exactly what it sounds like. Another really easy way to track what you're eating and drinking throughout the day is to just take a quick pic with your phone. Almost everyone has a phone with a camera attached. A great way to keep track is just to snap a pic, note the time and what you were doing when you took it, and either write it down or log it later. The advantage here is that this is super accessible and convenient for almost everyone, and it gives you a visual impact to reinforce good habits as they are developing.

Although there are many more ways to track what you eat and how you are eating, these are generally the simplest and easiest to start with. You can of course combine them or find another method. The important thing is to find a method that works for you and one that you can stick with consistently.