Getting a Handle On Your Nutrion - Start Here!
Track calories for a week.
Don’t make any changes, just practice quantifying and logging your food intake.
This is to establish your baseline. How do you know what needs to change if you don’t really know what you are starting from?
Are you often in a calorie deficit, surplus or balance? How much protein are you eating? Are your days consistent? How do your weekend days compare to your week days?
Often people say, just tell me how much I need to eat. The challenge with this is they are asking for a target to hit but they don’t have the experience or expertise to actually hit it. And targets are mostly guesses based on subjective responses that have a margin of error too. Get a better understanding of where you are right now and then start to make changes.
Changing your eating habits has a significant impact on you actually achieving your physical goals. If you want your eating habits to cause a change to your body you need to discover what parts actually need changing.
Track ALL your calories for a week, don’t just show the “good behavior” days. This doesn’t teach you anything. You might think that if you don’t log that treat it doesn’t count but the body tracks and logs everything, and responds accordingly. The body doesn’t care how you feel about this.
Another reason to objectively track your meals is that studies show we humans are remarkably inaccurate at estimating our food consumption and calorie intake. Not that we are even being deceptive on purpose, we are just not good at eye-balling it.
Once you have the data, you can make some decisions.
Realize you don’t have to track forever. Thats not the goal. You are taking a snapshot, looking for patterns in your food intake. Identify those patterns and choose an action that targets a small and manageable change and then practice it for 2-3 weeks before judging its effectiveness. You might just need to make some portions smaller instead of entirely giving up something you enjoy. Or eat more nutrient dense foods like protein and vegetables so you don’t feel quite as hungry when reducing other foods. Some small changes consistently done can add up without disrupting your life as much as you think.
2-3 weeks?! Yes, the feedback loop is actually that long. When people make a big dietary change and see immediate weight loss it is usually a combination of water and digesting food weight but this is a temporary adaptation. Fat loss comes off slower.
Recognize the trade-off for “sexy” consistency is an “unsexy” routine across more days of the week than not.
Most of our eating is a result of routine already, we need to take ownership of that routine and establish an intentional one. That might be uncomfortable to hear, that’s OK, we need to own that uncomfortable truth too.
Use an app like My Fitness Pal or MacroFactor to track. Practice it knowing that you will make some mistakes because mistakes are part of the process too and not an indication that dietary change just isn’t for you.
Now take that data and talk to a nutrition coach. If you go to a coach, you will probably be told to start tracking for several days. If you have already done so, you are already that much further ahead to taking action with the guidance of the coach. Together you can prioritize some action steps and evaluate the effectiveness or adjust them to make them more sustainable.
We have coaches who can help if you have data and want help. Even sitting down with a coach for 30-60 minutes to come up with a few prioritized steps is a worthwhile investment if it helps you set up some solid habits.