Should I Track My Food?

If you have already begun your health and fitness journey or worked with a coach, you have likely tracked your food before. Tracking is great because it allows us to dive into missed nutrients, it helps us learn what foods are more calorie or nutrient dense than others, and helps us to be mindful about our food choices.

Unfortunately, some forms of tracking take a lot of time and energy. In worse cases, it can spark a poor relationship with food and cause some people to become obsessive about every bite that goes in their mouth. This is why tracking should be used carefully as a tool, and not something to rely upon long term (or at all!) if you are impacted negatively by it.

That being said, most of us have a distorted gauge of the food we eat. Modern life has an abundance of food readily available to us, and processed foods are manufactured to make you want more and more. While mindful or intuitive eating may be the end goal, most people benefit from using some form of tracking as a learning tool so that we can be informed consumers. Tracking doesn't always involve a scale or calorie counting! There are many different forms of food tracking and it is important to use one that will help you on your unique journey.

Here are a few different ways to track your food:

Mindfulness Tracking

If you are someone who is just starting on their health journey and have never tracked food before, it might be useful to start by just writing down what you eat and not worry about the calories/macronutrients. This will help you to become more mindful about the food you are eating, which has great benefits by itself! From here, we can identify if we need to do any more in depth tracking in certain areas.

Fuel then Feel

If you are experiencing regular symptoms like digestive discomfort, bloating, fatigue, anxiety, etc. a Fuel then Feel journal can be very useful! Track what you eat, when you eat it, and when you experience any symptoms. This can help us to connect what we eat with how we feel, and identify any foods or eating habits that might be causing or contributing to these symptoms.

Nutrient Tracking

If you have identified any nutrients of concern, you can simply narrow down your tracking to that specific nutrient! A common one is protein- many people under-eat protein for their needs. Tracking every single metric can be overwhelming and confusing, so focusing on one thing at a time can be helpful for long term success!

Calorie & Macro Tracking

For those who have developed a positive and healthy relationship with food, yet still have specific weight loss or weight gain goals, calorie tracking can be used to help you methodically reach those goals! Calorie and macronutrient tracking is an excellent tool to learn how many calories are in the foods that you eat, the difference between the macronutrients, and insight into how many calories you are consuming and how you can change that to work towards your goals. This is definitely not for everyone- I strongly advocate for keeping things simple and not letting the specifics of calories and macros control your life unless you have very specific goals that require it!

Long Term Tracking

If you enjoy tracking and it helps to keep you in a positive headspace with food, there’s really no reason to stop! But if you are becoming obsessive, or you’re just sick of tracking, it may be time to wean off. This can look like just tracking protein for a few weeks followed by no tracking at all, or even tracking here and here when you’re curious about where you are at. As I have said before, I strongly advocate for the end goal being no tracking at all- tracking is a tool to be used to build a base of skills and knowledge related to nutrition.

Mindful / Intuitive Eating

This should be the end goal for most people! If you have learned about calories and macronutrients, understand how different foods impact how you feel, and know roughly how much you need to eat throughout the day to support your energy needs, then you are ready for mindful / intuitive eating. If you don’t have any specific goals of weight loss or gain, mindful eating should be enough to maintain where you are as long as you have had the practice of understanding your food! Its important to build these skills BEFORE relying on your intuition... Processed foods containing high amounts of calories, artificial flavors, artificial or highly concentrated sweeteners, etc. which negatively impact our intuition. If we simply jump to intuitive eating, our intuition might be a little out of whack and not at all in tune with our bodies actual needs.

Tracking forever is not the only way to eat healthily; contrarily, tracking isn’t always a bad “diet culture” thing! Tracking is a useful tool to help us tune in to our eating habits, and learn about our food. Once that awareness, understanding, and mindfulness has been learned, it is absolutely possible (and encouraged!) to wean off of tracking and still maintain your health.

Source used:

A. Aragon. The End of Tracking: How to Graduate Away from the Micromanagement of Your Diet. Alan Aragon’s Research Review. April 2021.

https://alanaragon.com/download/4026/