Why we track our food

One of the first things we will begin to talk about with our nutrition when sitting down is tracking our macronutrients and calories so that we can create sustainable weight loss.

For many people who’ve never tracked before, this is often met with a frown and the notion that this ‘tracking’ is considered unhealthy. By tracking, what I mean is weighing and measuring your food based on a certain macronutrient profile of carbohydrates, fats and proteins throughout your day.

Before we get to the relationship with food aspect of it all and discuss the social aspect behind tracking, let’s first discuss scientifically why we track what’s going into our mouths.

For most people who are seeking nutrition help, it’s likely because you are looking to create some sort of fat loss in the future, and or become more toned and muscular. From a scientific perspective, to lose body fat, we need to be burning more calories than we are eating in order for our body to burn adipose tissue (fat) and put that carbon dioxide back into the environment. If we are eating as much as we are burning, or eating more than we are burning (through exercise, breathing, walking around, playing with your kids or pets, etc.,) the number on the scale isn’t going to move and you won’t be burning body fat—plain and simple.

This is true no matter what diet you choose to follow. Be it a high carbohydrate and low fat diet, a paleo diet or even a ketogenic diet. If your calories burned are higher than those ingested, weight loss will almost inevitably occur.

Within my intake form for new clients to fill out so that we can learn more about you, I include a request for as much food information as you have had over the last three to seven days. What that does is shows me how much you’ve been eating so we can figure out where you are at and help design a road-map for where we are going to go.

From there we can set out with a prescription that is based on your current dietary history so to eliminate the guess work so we can help achieve your goals.

Now the reason we track is because our eyes can be incredibly subjective when it comes to our favourite foods on our plates. Take for example a tablespoon of peanut butter—I love this example. I used to enjoy having a peanut butter sandwich in which I had a tablespoon on each piece of bread—or what I thought was a tablespoon. Each time I did it, I just stuck to the spoon in the jar and put it on my bread and enjoyed.

That was until one day when I decided to weigh it. I found out that there was 120 grams of peanut butter on my sandwich. One serving or one tablespoon is 15 grams. That’s six extra servings I was accounting for that I didn’t even know. Each serving is 90 calories, so every time I had that sandwich—which was probably everyday sometimes even twice that day—I was eating 540 extra calories never mind anything else that was inaccurate in my day.

Take just that peanut butter and put it over seven days, that’s 3,780 calories. Over say a three-month dieting period, it’s 45,360 calories. In one pound of fat there is approximately 3,500 calories so when it all works out I would be eating at a caloric surplus and gaining approximately 12 pounds over a three-month period (without accounting for metabolic adaptation). Talk about self-sabotage.

This is why I have clients initially start with weighing their food so they can get a better understanding of what certain portions look like. Will we always weigh and measure? That depends on your goals, but we don’t have to. To be as accurate as possible during a fat loss phase, ideally this is what we want to strive for, but if you’re just looking to pursue a healthy lifestyle and aren’t trying to get on stage for a physique competition, eying your portions is perfectly reasonable.

When it comes to the social aspect of weighing your food, I understand that it’s not always going to be possible to weigh your food. Events come up where you just can’t enter it or you go out for dinner and the meals aren’t on MyFitnessPal. That’s perfectly okay, we do our best here.

Will weighing and measuring your food create a poor relationship with food? In some cases, yes it can if you allow yourself to obsess over the little things like how much kale is on the scale even though it might amount to a total of 25 calories. That’s what coaching is for though—allowing you to work through those experiences so that ten years from now you don’t need a scale or a coach and you can live a healthy life eating the things you absolutely love and enjoy in quantities that are sustainable.

For many like myself though, the scale may be a necessity in order to keep an eating disorder at bay. I know there are people out there who don’t really feel hungry and get that same hormonal response from leptin and ghrelin which help us regulate our hunger because of Eating disorders in our past dietary history (as talked about by Dr. Layne Norton on the Ange Hauck’s TransformYour Life Podcast). Now, the food scale helps me make sure that I’m eating enough food while also ensuring that I stop when I should feel full.

Even for myself, I know this isn’t the long-term solution I need to be working on, but for now it’s been a serious help. As Dr. Norton put in that podcast, if people were able to regulate their hunger response on their own, would we possibly be in the obesity crisis that we are in North America today?

It’s an interesting thought.

TRACKING IS SIMILAR TO THE WAY WE RUN OUR BANK ACCOUNT. WE CREATE A BUDGET SO THAT WE KNOW MORE MONEY IS COMING INTO THE ACCOUNT THAN IS LEAVING IT AND THUS, WE ARE MAINTAINING OUR MONEY OR GROWING OUR WEALTH. IT’S THE EXACT SAME WITH OUR INTAKE WHEN MONITORING OUR DIET. LIKE OUR BANK ACCOUNT, IT WOULDN’T BE HEALTHY TO OBSESS OVER EVERY LITTLE PURCHASE OF TWO DOLLARS BUT WE SHOULD HAVE A GENERAL IDEA OF WHAT’S GOING IN AND OUT OF THE ACCOUNT SO THAT WE ARE BETTER ABLE TO MEET OUR FINANCIAL, AND THUS NUTRITIONAL, GOALS IN THE FUTURE. ​

When it comes to tracking, know that it’s a tool at your disposal to help you achieve your goals, but it’s not the end point. There are other discussions such as meal timing, food quality and hydration that we need to consider outside of the parameters of food quantity.

It’s a whole FOOD picture approach.