Episode 31 Mythbusting: Will Tracking Your Food Give You an Eating Disorder?
Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪
In this episode, I discuss the common misconception that tracking food intake can lead to an eating disorder.
Tracking involves logging what you eat and drink every day either in a food journal or in an app like MyFitnessPal.
This strategy can help you identify your eating habits and become more self-aware. It can also help you to stick to your diet plan to ensure you're eating the right number of calories and macronutrients every day.
Some people find tracking to be a trigger for obsessive behaviors (i.e. eating disorders). As a tool, tracking can be used healthily or unhealthily, depending on your existing relationship with food and with your body.
In this episode, I give some tips for how to tackle a disordered relationship with food and alternative strategies that you can use if you find tracking to be triggering.
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(00:00):
Tracking is not necessarily going to make you have an eating disorder, which is what some people are afraid of. When we talk about tracking, they're like, isn't that going to make me have an eating disorder? No, not necessarily. The eating disorder is something that comes from a negative relationship with yourself or a negative relationship with food that likely probably already exists. Regardless if you have a poor relationship with food, whatever tool that you use to try to clean up your diet could become toxic for you or could become triggering for you.
(00:41):
Hi there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. My name's Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I've created this podcast to help you to eat better, get strong and lose weight. In today's episode, we're going to talk about a common misconception that many people have about tracking their food. Tracking is the strategy of writing down or logging what you eat every day In a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal, many people mistakenly believe that doing this will lead you to have a disordered relationship with food. We tracking itself is a symptom of having an eating disorder. So in this podcast episode, I'm going to explain how you can use food tracking in a way that is healthy. Now, tracking is a strategy that can be used by anybody regardless of whether they are trying to lose weight, build muscle, or just eat better. What determines whether it's an unhealthy or healthy practice for you, it really depends on your relationship with food and your relationship with your body. So in this episode, we're going to go over how to track in a healthy way and also how to address if you do have a disordered relationship with food and tracking is triggering for you. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:56):
Whenever I talk about tracking your food, if I mention it on social media, I almost always get somebody in the comments saying, well, isn't that kind of obsessive? And isn't that basically having an eating disorder? There's a big difference between tracking your food to keep an eye on your calorie intake versus tracking your food obsessively because you hate your body and you have this bad relationship with food and a bad relationship with your body. Tracking is just like any other thing, any tool that you can use for your wellness, depending on how you use it and the relationship that you have with yourself and with your body and with that strategy that kind of determines whether it's going to be healthy for you or not healthy for you. So tracking is just a tool and it can be used for good or for bad. So let's back up and talk about what tracking is.
(02:48):
What do I mean by tracking? The strategy of tracking is when you use either a food journal or a tracking app like MyFitnessPal and you basically log everything that you eat and drink over the course of a day, and the goal here is to keep an eye on what you're eating so that you are staying within your goals. Or you can also use tracking to just figure out what your diet looks like, like what it is that you're eating every day. You can use it just to kind of get a sense of a snapshot of what your current diet looks like. So it's just the act of writing down or logging what you eat using a journal or using a calorie tracking app like my FitnessPal. The reason why we do this, number one, I usually have my clients start tracking what they eat if they are interested in fat loss because when it comes to fat loss, fat loss is 90% what you eat.
(03:49):
It's partially your workouts, but the majority of it is going to happen by managing your calorie intake, managing your energy intake, because body fat is just stored energy. So in order to get your body to tap into its stored energy, you have to control the amount of energy that you eat, and if you eat more energy than what your body uses, then your body is going to store that extra energy as fat. But if you eat fewer calories than what your body spends, then your body taps into its fat stores. So that's in general kind of the principle that we follow. So tracking what you eat and developing an awareness of what you eat can help you to identify habits that may be sabotaging your fat loss efforts. It can also help you to identify foods that are super high calorie that maybe you weren't aware of, and then by becoming more aware of that you can reduce or control the amount of that food that you eat.
(04:44):
I also have my clients track what they eat when they're trying to build muscle because on the flip side, building muscle is a very calorie expensive activity, and if you're not eating enough calories, your gains are going to be really, really slow. So if you are struggling to build muscle and you've been struggling for a while, one of the first things that I usually recommend people do is eat more calories so we can track our calories and make sure that we're eating according to a calorie goal that way. So we can track just to see what am I eating, to develop some awareness or you can track towards a specific calorie goal, whether you're trying to lose weight or build muscle. You can also track what's called your macros. That's your amount of grams of protein, carbohydrates and fat that you eat every day. Some people do that instead of tracking their calories.
(05:33):
Instead they look at their macronutrients to make sure that they're eating plenty of protein and they're getting the right distribution of carbohydrates and fat, which are the carbohydrates and fat are the two energy macros. So you want to have the right distribution of those to power whatever type of exercise you do. If you do a lot of cardio, if you do a lot of high intensity exercise, you generally want to eat more carbohydrates like a higher percentage of carbohydrates than fat. If you're following the keto diet, you want more of your intake to come from dietary fat than carbohydrates. So those are different ways that we can track, but also you can track without looking at calories and without looking at macros in a way that we're just kind of focusing on becoming aware of what you're eating. This is a strategy that helps people who feel overwhelmed by the numbers or find the act of calculating calories or tracking macros to be really tedious.
(06:31):
A really good first step is just to help them become aware of what they're eating, so they'll write down what they're eating or they'll take pictures of what they eat and send it to me in our training app. And this is really good for helping you to just be aware of when you're eating. This helps also with if you have certain habits of you tend to mindlessly snack, writing down what you eat when you eat it and question yourself of why you're eating can be a great way to help you break that mindless snacking habit. So tracking has many, many uses. As you can see, it's it's useful in a lot of different ways and can be used regardless of whether you are looking at calories or not. Where it can become triggering and unhealthy is in the case of a lot of people who use calorie tracking to keep themselves at a super low calorie deficit and they're essentially starving themselves or the act of tracking sends them into a negative spiral where they begin to beat themselves up.
(07:42):
It's almost like their self-worth is tied to the number of calories that they eat every day. That's what I see with a lot of people who struggle with tracking and who are triggered by tracking. I have another client who many, many years ago had a different personal trainer who made him track his calories and the act of tracking was triggering his eating disorder and he told his coach, this is causing me to go into my eating disorder mindset, and his coach was like, it's fine, just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. That's something that I myself never want to do. When a client says that they have a disordered relationship with food and it's triggered by tracking, then that's when I'm not going to have them track calories and instead try to help them become aware of what they're eating through just logging, logging their food without the calories, right?
(08:45):
So you don't always have to track the calories, but I will say when it comes to healing that relationship with food and reaching your fitness goals, if you have an eating disorder that is triggered by tracking, one of the most important things that I think you should do is work on that with a dietician or with a therapist because usually eating disorders or disordered relationships with food are linked to life experiences or traumas or limiting beliefs that you have about yourself. And the eating disorder is a symptom of that. It's an expression of that. And so if you have trouble, if you have a disordered relationship with food or tracking sends you into this place where you start to have this shame spiral, you need to do some inner work either with a therapist or doing some shadow work or journal to try to get to the bottom of where that is rooted for you.
(09:50):
For a lot of people, it's rooted in traumatic childhood experiences or maybe rooted in some faulty beliefs about their self-worth, and in somewhere along the line they picked up this idea that their self-worth is tied to their weight and rather than congratulating themselves, rather than being able to celebrate when they make progress, they tend to have this obsession with when they go wrong, when they make a mistake. If you have a disordered relationship with food and tracking can trigger that for you, don't feel like you have to track, you don't necessarily have to track in order to make gains in your fat loss or in your muscle building. In those cases, what I would recommend is generally trying to follow a healthy model of eating because if you're overweight or if you're having trouble building muscle, it may be that the foods that you're choosing are not necessarily in a line with your goal.
(10:54):
So for that reason, that's why I usually recommend people memorize and start following the healthy plate model as a first step to cleaning up their diets, whether they're looking for fat loss or muscle gains. And when you're following the healthy plate model, you put half of the plate is veggies or veggies and fruit. You get a serving of veggies or two servings of veggies at every meal or a serving of veggies and a serving of fruit every meal. And then on the other half of the plate, you feel a little bit over half with a good source of protein, lean protein, things that are low in saturated fat like chicken breast or Turkey breast or lean cuts of meat. And then you also have restricted to a little bit less than a quarter of the plate is your grains and starches, and here you want to prioritize whole grains, things like whole bread or quinoa, oats, that kind of thing.
(11:42):
So generally start following this model and trying to apply this model as a good first step to establishing a relationship with food where you're focusing on reaching a goal and you're checking off following this goal every day for every meal. That is a good place to start to help you clean up your relationship with food. You want to move away from this relationship of food where you're looking at the calories and you're looking at, especially when it comes to fat loss people, when they overshoot their calories, they get into that negative shame spiral, and so they're in this sort of deprivation mindset focus where they're thinking about, I can't have this, I can't have that, I can't have this, I can't have that. If you're in that kind of a mindset in your approach towards cleaning up your diet, you're going to have a really hard time.
(12:34):
You're going to feel like shit all the time, and you're also just not going to have the best relationship with food because your approach to food is always going to be from this deprivation mindset. Instead, you want to switch your focus towards trying to reach a daily goal. I need to reach my daily goal of veggies. I need to reach my daily goal of protein. I need to reach my daily goal of greens and starches. So trying to think about building your diet rather than controlling it and contracting it, if that makes sense. And as you seek to reach this goal every day, what often happens as you change that relationship with food and you're thinking about, I need to add more, I need to add more, I need to add more. That changes kind of like your brain's approach toward food and how you think about food.
(13:25):
And many times, my clients who follow the Healthy Plate model and get into that mindset of meeting their daily quota and trying to reach their daily quota of adding more vegetables, adding more protein, as that switches their relationship with food up, eventually we get to a place where we can talk about calories and look at calories, and I haven't had a client yet who hasn't eventually gotten to the point where they're like, okay, I feel better about this. I want to start actually looking at my calories and tweaking the way that I eat so that I am moving a little bit faster towards my fat loss goals. Following the Healthy Plate model will help you to probably reduce the calories that you're taking in if you haven't been eating a lot of vegetables or lean protein before. Just following that model alone will help you get started, and it will also start to change your relationship with food, but you'll reach a point where you probably will need a little bit more if you hit a plateau, and at that point you can look at calories, but again, if the calories itself is triggering for you, you can also just think about the macros.
(14:35):
If you find tracking calories to be triggering for you tracking macros where again, you're shooting every day for trying to reach a specific goal, right? It's kind of like following the healthy plate model where you're trying to get your daily veggies in, trying to get your daily protein group in and your daily starches and veggies. In this sense, you're tracking to reach your daily goal of protein, your daily goal of carbohydrates and fats. Some people will track calories and protein together, but this is a great way to focus on, again, not thinking about, oh, I can't have this. I can't have that. You're more tracking to think about, I need to make sure I get enough of this, enough protein and that focus of make sure that I get enough can help change that relationship with food and make tracking more helpful for you and also less triggering.
(15:27):
But I do have to say, again, you may never reach a point where tracking doesn't trigger your eating disorder if you have an eating disorder, and in that case, I really would recommend working with a therapist or a dietician to work on your relationship with food a little bit more, but in the experience with me and my clients, my nutrition coaching clients and my personal training clients that focus on the healthy plate model first and then let's track just protein or the other macros and focus on getting enough of X, Y, Z, just focusing on getting enough protein, enough veggies, et cetera, that helps to kind of switch the mindset around where you're not thinking so much about deprivation and sending yourself into that negative shame spiral, and instead more about like, it's like a game at that point. You got to collect enough coins, you got to collect enough protein, got to collect enough veggies.
(16:22):
You know what I mean? So that is what I would recommend when it comes to tracking, but tracking is not necessarily going to make you have an eating disorder, which is what some people are afraid of. When we talk about tracking. They're like, isn't that going to make me have an eating disorder? No, not necessarily. The eating disorder is something that comes from a negative relationship with yourself or a negative relationship with food that likely probably already exists. Regardless, that eating disorder is going to exist regardless of whether you're tracking your calories or not. If you have a poor relationship with food, whatever tool that you use to try to clean up your diet could become toxic for you or could become triggering for you, and that can be tracking your food or just keeping a food journal or taking pictures of your food. It's about your relationship with food. So if you have a poor relationship with food, you need to work on that. That way you can reach a point where you can use whatever tool or strategy you need to use in order to reach your goals.
(17:27):
Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I hope that you enjoyed this episode and you found it useful. Now, what questions do you have after listening to this episode? If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave those in the comments below. If you are listening to the podcast, you can go to the YouTube link for this episode and leave comments in the comment section. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you drink some water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and prioritize your self-care, and I will see you soon.
