Most people could tell you in detail their budget, their retirement plan, detailed analytics on their social posts or website views, or a number of other things that are "normal" to track. But when tracking what you're putting in your body daily becomes the topic of conversation, things get weird!!
It's not all about wanting to look a certain way and it's not only for competitive athletes!
Learn about food and it’s composition.
Learn your maintenance calories (or how many calories you need to maintain your weight at any point.)
Have the ability to adjust intake to lose weight or gain weight.
Helps to keep an appropriate (for you) balance of your macronutrients and learn what balance you feel best with.
With time, helps you to recognize real hunger/full cues which can enable you to eventually relearn how to eat intuitively
1. Learn about food and it’s composition.
Most of us have no idea what foods are made up of. To start with, most don’t even know what calories or macronutrients are. By no fault of our own, it’s just not something we’re ever taught. We may breeze through calories and metabolism in biology or health class, but even when we are given this information, we aren’t shown how to apply it.
For instance, have you heard someone say they’re going to “cut out sugar” from their diet? Or say that a cookie is bad so they ate pineapple instead? And let’s not forget my favorite, “I only eat healthy fats like avocado, so it doesn't matter how much I eat of it.”
All carbohydrates are broken down into glucose in the body (the most simple form of sugar) which fuels our brain and all bodily functions, we NEED it and we need a fair amount of it. You cannot cut out sugar! However, you can limit “added sugars” if that is a concern for you. (This is a BIG subject and will be talked about in detail in another article.)
With all things, the dose determines the poison, so learning what the makeup of foods are can really help you move away from the “good” food / “bad” food mentality and understand what it is you’re eating and in what amounts so you can make informed decisions rather than decisions based on guilt or what you “should” do or what’s “healthy”.
It is all numbers. Sure, there are foods that make you feel good and foods that don’t make you feel good, but at the end of the day..
200g of Pineapple looks like 100 calories, 26g carbs, .2g fat, 1g protein
And
2 Oreos look like 107 calories, 17g carbs, 5g fat, >1g protein
Numbers.
2. Learn your maintenance calories (or how many calories you need to maintain your weight at any point.)
Our body composition determines our RMR or resting metabolic rate. This is the amount of calories (or energy) we burn at rest or to merely stay alive. This amount is the absolute bottom floor amount of calories you should be consuming. This amount changes as our body composition changes.
Any calories you take in beyond your RMR is used to fuel the activities we do. Figuring out how many calories is optimal for us is not as easy as trusting the amount of calories your apple watch told you that you burned in a day. Calorie burn from fitness trackers and machines can be wildly inaccurate (read more on this here). Anything outside of a controlled metabolic lab can be wildly inaccurate. So how do we know?
There are calculations that can be done (this is how online calorie calculators give you the numbers they do), but no body is the same. These calculations are a good place to start but usually will need to be adjusted either up or down based on your response and goals.
3. Have the ability to adjust intake to lose weight or gain weight.
Once you’ve figured out the amount of calories needed for you to maintain your current weight, you can then get into adjusting this when you have different goals. Like to lose weight, to gain weight, etc.
Tracking your food is the only way to know what you’re already doing and you have to know what you’re already doing in order to make adjustments to it!
Sometimes it may not even be the total calorie intake that needs to be adjusted. Sometimes it’s the distribution of those calories between the macronutrients (protein, fat, carbs). Again, without proper tracking of all these things, you’d never know 1) what you’re currently doing and 2) how to change it to elicit the response you’re after!
4. Helps to keep an appropriate (for you) balance of your macronutrients and learn what balance you feel best with.
Again, every body is different. Right? So some people feel better when they eat higher carbs/lower fat/moderate protein. Some feel better with higher fat/lower carbs/moderate protein. Some do best with high protein/moderate carbs and fat, etc. There is not one way that works best for every single person!
Ann endurance athlete is going to need a different distribution than a bodybuilder and a sedentary person will need a completely different distribution than either of the others!
Tracking calories only is a great place to start, but it’s only 1 piece of the puzzle and you’re really doing yourself a disservice by not utilizing all of the tools you have available to you.
5. With time, helps you to recognize real hunger/full cues which can enable you to eventually relearn how to eat intuitively
Most of us lost the ability to eat intuitively a long time ago. When we were kids and were forced to clean our plates or get no dessert. Or when food was used as a reward. That connected food with emotion and out the window went our ability to disconnect emotion from food and eat to fuel ourselves rather than to stimulate our pleasure responses and get that wonderful dopamine rush!
There are exceptions to this of course, but it seems to be few and far between, unfortunately.
When you change the narrative and begin to eat with purpose and in certain amounts, you can begin to recognize your eating patterns and see when you’re eating out of boredom, out of emotion, out of habit (think when I sit on the couch, I need to have a snack too), and the times when you are truly hungry.
You know, you’ve got a budget of calories/macros for the day. You can eat them whenever, but knowing you’ve got a limited supply may cause you to step back and evaluate the amount you’re thinking about spending in any given moment. Am I really hungry right now or am I bored? Am I really right now or am I emotional and craving that wonderful dopamine rush? Am I really hungry or do I just have a habit of snacking while I’m driving? (Ahem… road snacks anyone?!)
When you can start to identify these triggers, you can start to correct them! Maybe that is making sure you can have those road snacks and still have room for dinner later (without overspending!). Or maybe you decide the road snacks aren’t worth it, and you find something else to keep you entertained while driving.
Either way, you’re identifying habits that don’t have anything to do with actual hunger and you can once again begin to identify when your body really is asking for food!
This has benefits that stretch far beyond performance and/or body composition goals. This is identifying habits that don’t serve you. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t enjoy eating! You very much should!! But you shouldn’t be held hostage by emotions or habits that are not positive or beneficial. And when you can disassociate eating from the negative habits and patterns, then you truly can enjoy eating and enjoy all foods!
This can come in handy if down the road, after spending a period of time tracking and you reach a good point to maintain, maybe you can take a break from tracking and you won’t have all of these false hunger cues sabotaging you!!
