The Benefits of Meal Tracking (and how to do without driving yourself nuts)

Fact: the benefits of meal tracking far outweigh the pain of keeping up with it. But as a nutrition coach, I understand that consistently tracking everything you eat and drink everday can feel tedious. Hear me out.

Can you reach your goals without tracking your meals? Yes.

Do food logs help you reach your goals faster and more directly? Also yes.

The Benefits of Meal Tracking

Tracking what you eat and drink is one of the most effective ways to achieve your health and fitness goals. This is true whether your goal is to lose weight, or gain weight, or build muscle, or improve performance.

Build an Awareness About What You Eat (and Why)

It is incredibly easy in this fast-paced, productivity-driven, multi-tasking-oriented world that we live in to go through the motions of eating without ever really tasting your food or paying attention to what’s going in your body. One of the biggest benefits of meal tracking is building an awareness of what you eat and why you eat it. This is the reason I ask all of my clients to track for 2 weeks (bare minimum). And the reason I check in with myself regularly.

If you don’t know what you’re eating, how can you effectively make a change to your diet or eating habits?

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Mindfulness is a trendy term that has been gaining a lot of traction in the last few years. I’m not typically one to hop on the band wagon but mindfulness (aka awareness) is something I can stand behind.

What does awareness even mean?

It means making conscious decisions about, or at least being conscious of, what you eat.
It means asking yourself why with the intention of having an answer.

Awareness is the difference between:

• Eating an entire large bag of popcorn when you’re at the movies just because you’re there and it’s in front of you, and choosing to grab a handful and slowly enjoy it.
• Finishing the leftovers on your kids’ or significant other’s plate simply because it’s there.
• Grabbing a handful of candy from the break room as you pass by even though you don’t even really like chocolate.

This kind of awareness has enormous influence on what you choose to eat, how much you enjoy the food in front of you and ultimately, your health.

Get on a Regular Schedule and Stabilize Your Energy Levels

Have you ever hit that point in the day when you feel ravenous? Like you could eat the entire Ruby Tuesday’s buffet line and then order cheesecake? And you realize you haven’t eaten since breakfast (and maybe breakfast was just a coffee?).

Industry secret: the reason that “eating every 3-4 hours” is a staple guideline in the nutrition world is not because it revs your metabolism. It’s because it keeps your blood sugar stable. Which means you don’t reach this ^^^ point in the day and then eat everything in sight.

Maintaining a meal journal will help you stick to a regular, consistent eating schedule. No more walls to hit when you have nothing left in the tank. Bye bye, feeding frenzies because your brain tells you to grab the closest and fastest food possible. No more feeling bloated and guilty after said frenzy.

Tracking your meals – what you eat and WHEN you eat it – is a great way to connect how you feel energy-wise with what and how you eat. You’ll start to understand that:

• When you skip meals you’re more likely to overeat later in the day.
• If you’re craving fast carbs and simple sugars it’s often because you’re lacking regular nutrient intake.
• When your meals are nutrient dense and frequent, you don’t have those cravings and you don’t feel like taking a nap at 3 pm.

Get More Out of, and From, Every Workout

What you eat before and after your workout affects what you can put into that workout, and what you can get out of that workout. Let me fitsplain…

Proper nutrition – both the what and the when – can:

• influence intra-workout performance
• optimize post-workout recovery
• decrease risk of injury
• improve focus
• increase reaction time
• boost strength gains and endurance/stamina

In general, you want to make sure that you eat some protein and carbs within 1-2 hours before you workout, and protein and simple carbs (ideally) after you workout.

Here’s where the benefits of meal tracking come in: tracking ensures that you get that right fuel at the right time. If you feel like you lose momentum halfway through your workouts, your first checkpoint should be what you eat in the hours leading up to it. There will be certain foods that your body can’t handle before a workout, and certain foods that make you feel like you can go forever. What those foods are depends on…you.

Bonus points: the hour after your workout is the perfect time to “indulge” in some quick carbs (read: simple sugars), and to pack in some protein. Post-tough-workout your body is depleted of it’s glycogen stores, and your muscles are primed to soak up both energy and muscle-building protein. A quick protein shake with fruit and whey protein is your best friend here!

Eliminate Nutrient Deficiencies and Fix Imbalances

Meal tracking isn’t just about reaching you calorie goal and hitting your macros. You can also gain a lot of relevant information about micronutrients – vitamins, minerals, fiber, sodium, sugar, etc.

Meal trackers like MyFitnessPal not only breakdown your protein, fat and carbohydrate numbers, you can customize the tracker to give you feedback about micronutrients and other important nutrients as well.

The screen shot below gives you just a glimpse into the kind of metrics I’m talking about. These numbers might not seem too important, but if you are either way over or way under, they can make a big impact on how you feel and how your body functions!

Find (and Break) Patterns and Triggers

One of the main benefits of meal tracking, and one of the reasons I use it regularly with my clients, is that you can start to put together an understanding of where the patterns – healthy or unhealthy – are impacting progress.

For example, I have a client who got really frustrated on weekends because she had trouble not snacking in the evenings. She didn’t have the same kind of trouble Monday through Friday. So we tracked for a few weeks and here’s what we found:

My client has a Monday-Friday job so she meal preps on Sundays to make sure she doesn’t have to stress over what she’s going to eat when she’s busy all day. She’d shop in the morning, prep in the afternoon and portion. Consistently eating healthy meals was really easy for her because of that.

But that meal prep schedule meant that she was out of readily-available healthy eats by Friday and she wasn’t shopping until Sunday. There was nothing left to grab except the junk that was leftover from before we started working together – the junk she didn’t want to eat.

The second piece of the puzzle was that her Monday-Friday schedule is structured, and her weekends aren’t. During the work week she’s up early and out the door. She’s busy all day, she works out right after work, she gets home with enough time to have dinner, get stuff around the house done and then head into her nightly routine and bed. Weekends, not so much. There’s more down time, and more of a sense of “time off”.

We realized from her food journal that she wasn’t really snacking all day. She was just snacking in the evenings when her boyfriend broke out the snacks for movie night. Her guilt and frustration made her feel like she was way more off track than she was.

But all of this information allowed us to make some changes and plan ahead for these moments. Now, she:

• plans a second mini-food-prep session on Wednesdays (usually just a quick trip to the store for some restocking) so that she’s not out of healthy options by the weekend.
• browses recipes early in the week to find a fun but healthy snack that she can have ready to go if she does find she wants something to snack on during movie night.

Meal tracking win!

Create a Foundation for Effective and Streamlined Change

You don’t start a road trip without knowing where you’re setting out from, which direction you’re headed and roughly where you want to end up. Why? Because you want to know where you are at any given time on the journey. If you wind up lost, you want to have as much information as possible to get you back on track and moving forward.

Same logic applies to your fitness journey.

Meal tracking allows you to understand where you are starting out from. Where you are at any given time. What direction you need to head next. All so that you can end up where you want to be.

Reality check: How would you answer the following questions (questions I pose to my clients when we get started):

Do you drink enough water?
Do eat enough protein?
How many servings of vegetables do you eat in a day?

Here’s the feedback I usually get:

“Yes, I drink a ton of water!”
“I think so”.
“Oh, I eat a lot of vegetables”.

And then we track and we find out…not so much.

Research shows that most people are actually quite terrible at guess-timating their intake of specific foods and drink. We’re jaded by the “shoulds” and the good-vs-bad food influence. We don’t pay enough attention to actually know, for sure, that we are eating and drinking what we should be eating and drinking.

When you really know the answers to the above questions, you can then know where to: add more, decrease intake a bit, change it up, add some new flavors or colors, get creative.

Meal tracking gives you the data and awareness that creates the foundation on which you can create change.

The benefits of that far outweigh the few minutes it takes to track what you’re doing.

How to Track Without Driving Yourself Nuts

Now that I’ve convinced you of the benefits of meal tracking and that indeed, it could change the course of your fitness journey…here’s how to do it without adding additional stress to your day.

Choose just 3 days to track

You don’t need to track every single day. Select two days during the week, and one weekend day. That should give you a well-rounded look at your eating habits over the full week.

Personally, I track on Mondays without fail. You have more motivation and energy at the beginning of the week so it’s highly likely that you’ll track from breakfast all the way through your midnight snack.

The days you choose are up to you, but choose at least three.

Use a meal tracking app

I’m old school. I prefer my physical planner over online calendars. Give me a pen and paper to take notes any day. I write out my grocery lists on a notepad rather than in the notes on my phone.

But when it comes to meal tracking…I don’t want to do the same work twice and I’m definitely not using Google to look up individual foods and their nutrients. I use MyFitnessPal to track my meals. This is what I recommend to my nutrition clients, too. It’s easy to use, has a vast database and breaks everything down in easy-to-read charts and summaries. There’s a free version that works to get started, but the Premium accounts come with all of the bells and whistles (more customization, daily goals, meal scanning – huge bonus!, and access to planning).

Save your favorites foods and meals

If you have the same breakfast every week day morning, save it and copy paste each day rather than re-inputting over and over again. Same goes for your favorite recipes and dishes. Do the work once, use over and over again.