The Pros and Cons of Food Tracking

I decided to start tracking my food about 5 months ago. I started because I had incorporated a good training regimen back into my life since we finished a very intense summer of home renovations, and I felt like dialling in my nutrition was the next best logical step to improving my performance in life and sport.

When I started, my goal was simply to get a true picture of what I was consuming. Fact over feeling if you will. I had zero judgment in the first month of tracking. I simply wanted to see the breakdown of what I regularly ate.

I use Carbon Diet Coach, which is a paid app, but I could just as easily have used MyFitnessPal, or a free equivalent app. The reason I went with Carbon is I liked the idea of having a weekly check-in with a built-in coach that would make adjustments to my macronutrient profile based on what I input as my goals.

The free apps don’t have the built-in coach to adjust things for you as you go. I have no affiliation with Carbon, but I do recommend using their app, it’s very user-friendly and I like the simplicity of it.

The goal that I input into Carbon in the beginning was “Maintenance”, meaning I was not looking to lose or gain weight. Like I said, I was just getting a baseline for what was going on with my intuitive diet.

In the first month of tracking, the initial challenge was guesstimating portions of the foods I was eating. I was not yet habitually remembering to weigh my food on a food scale, so I had to rely on rough estimates.

So, surely my data was skewed in that first month, but I got the gist. I learned that I was easily over-consuming in the fat category, and under-consuming in the protein category. And I knew that my initial tendency was to gravitate toward carbohydrates over protein if I became hungry. Basically, my macronutrient balance could be improved.

Other things I learned in the first month were that eggs have almost as much fat as protein in their make up and that a serving of pasta was much less than I thought it was.

Over the next 2 months, I would try to meet my protein requirement, but would constantly fall short. It made me realize that that is one macronutrient that you have to be intentionally focused on consuming in order to get enough of. I had a newfound respect for the effort involved in optimizing one’s nutrition. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Finally, in month 3, I was able to meet my protein requirements for a few weeks in a row. I had to supplement with protein powder, but varied up my other sources between tofu, eggs, beans, edamame, yogurt, fish, chicken, beef and pork. It was definitely a point of focus for me.

My goal shifted to wanting to not only track my food, but learn as I went, so that if I stopped tracking, I would have a really good understanding of what I should be eating to feel and train my best mentally and physically.

I am happy to report that tracking is no longer a chore, it is second-nature and helps me stay on track with what my body needs. The food scale is on the counter at all times and it has become so much easier to plan my meals ahead of time.

One last perk to using Carbon is that they show you a weekly average of what you’ve consumed. This allows you so much freedom in adjusting day to day what you’re eating. For example, if I know I’m going out for pizza with friends on Friday, I can account for that ahead of time in the app, and maybe that means reducing the carbs and fats I have on another day of the week. So I never feel like I’m missing out on things, it’s not restrictive but I can see how to adjust based on those instances.

It is definitely more difficult to record food eaten out at restaurants, so using guesstimates is what I resorted to. Not a perfect system, but it can encourage you to eat out less than cooking at home.

I’m someone who has a lot of things I want to do. And energy is the finite resource that stands in the way sometimes. Dialling in my nutrition has given me the confidence to know I can maximize my energy to do those things. Of course provided I’m sleeping well.

To recap, the pros definitely outweigh the cons with regards to tracking your food. I would suggest to anyone thinking about starting, to commit to doing it for 100 days. You’ll need the first 4-8 weeks to get a basic understanding of what you’re currently doing; and another 4-8 weeks to actually try to meet your own individual macronutrient breakdown; and then another month or two to essentially learn how different breakdowns affect your body and what you really need to feel your best.

If you approach it with an open and curious mind, then food tracking can be the best thing you ever did to improve your lifestyle. It admittedly takes some patience and up front effort, but once you understand what your body needs, you have that knowledge for life.

I don’t plan on tracking forever, but I know it’s a tool I can use when the inclination is there or if I’m trying to narrow in on a particular goal efficiently. I think it’s good to take unstructured breaks from tracking, as well as training.