How to Track What You Eat
Tracking what you eat and drink is a great way to develop some self-awareness around your eating habits and take control of your diet.
There are likely tons of food choices you make every day that you aren’t even aware of. It’s easy to overshoot your calories or miss out on a key nutrient if you don’t know the nutritional content of the foods you eat.
Nutrition tracking can help you to identify your habits so you can make some progress towards changing them while making better choices about what goes on your plate.
If you’re interested in fat loss, research shows that keeping a food journal can help you lose more weight. In a 2008 study of about 1,700 participants, those who tracked their food every day lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t track.
Many people, however, are intimidated by the idea of tracking their food. Here are my top tips for getting started and making the most of your nutrition tracking.
What is Nutrition Tracking?
Nutrition tracking involves writing down or logging what you eat and drink every day. This allows you to create a record or daily diary, which you can use to identify patterns and develop more self-awareness.
How to Get Started
The first step to get started tracking is to decide which tool you’ll use:
If you prefer a pen-and-paper method, you can print off my downloadable Nutrition Tracking sheets or use a food journal. If you want to record nutritional info like calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients, you’ll need to look up that info by checking food labels or searching online.
Many of my clients use MyFitnessPal, a popular smartphone app and website with an extensive food library. MyFitnessPal allows you to create an electronic food diary while automatically calculating nutritional info like calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients.
Approaches to Nutrition Tracking
There are 2 main approaches that you can take towards nutrition tracking.
The first is to eat like you normally do and simply write it down or enter it into your tracking app as you go without a specific goal for calories or nutrients. This approach is what I like to call creating a Nutrition Snapshot—where the goal is to become more aware of your current eating habits. Each time you eat or drink something, write it down in your journal or enter it into the app. After a certain amount of time of consistently logging what you eat and drink, you can look back at your daily logs to reflect on your habits and patterns. This can help inform what changes you may need to make in the future to clean your diet up or to optimize it for fat loss or muscle building.
Another approach to nutrition tracking is to aim for a daily goal, using your food journal or app to monitor your progress toward that goal. Your daily goal might be to eat a certain number of calories or a specific amount of a nutrient (e.g. protein, carbs, and/or fat). As you eat throughout the day, you’ll select foods and beverages that fit within your daily nutrition goal and avoid over- or under-eating. This approach can help you to more effectively burn fat or build muscle by consistently fueling your body according to your fitness and nutrition plan.
Tracking What You Eat
Keep in mind that the effectiveness of your nutrition tracking depends largely on your ability to do it consistently and accurately.
Avoid waiting until the end of the day to enter everything you eat into your food log. Instead, enter foods right before or right after you eat them. If you wait until the end of the day to record what you ate, you will likely forget some things and your log won’t be as accurate.
Make sure to also include any beverages you consume in your food log. Beverages like soda, juice, and coffee with creamer have calories in them, so they’ll need to be included in your total calorie consumption for the day—especially if you’re trying to keep an eye on calories.
It will also be helpful to pay attention to the amount of each food or beverage that you consume. You can use measuring spoons, cups, or a food scale to measure how much of a food item you’re eating. Guestimate the amount if you need to.
If you forget to log what you eat before or after, do your best to log something in your food diary later on and just estimate the amount. It’s better to track something than to skip it altogether.
If you’re tracking with MyFitnessPal, you can save time and hassle by taking advantage of some of the app’s features:
Use the Meals feature to save meals that you eat regularly. This will allow you to log foods together rather than entering each food item individually every time you have the same meal.
If you cook from scratch, save what you cook as a recipe to automatically calculate nutritional info for each serving.
You can easily find nutritional information for packaged food items by scanning the barcode on the package (only available for Premium users).
If you have a Premium subscription, you can use the Meal Scan feature, which allows you to take a photo of your food to locate it in the database without having to type in the name of the food.
Check out the MyFitnessPal help forum for more help on how to use the MyFitnessPal app.
I recommend reflecting on your nutrition log at the end of every week to assess your patterns and troubleshoot problems that you encounter. My 1-on-1 coaching clients submit an electronic reflection to me each week, which allows us to stay connected and course-correct around any problems they’re experiencing.
You can reflect on your own food log by answering questions like:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how did I do in sticking to my nutrition goal this week?
What problems did I experience?
What changes do I need to make to better stick to my nutrition goal in the coming week?
If you need more guidance on tracking or cleaning up your diet, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program. This short course can be done in as little as two weeks, during which you’ll learn more about building a healthy plate and how to eat to reach your fitness goals. Click below to learn more:
Clean up your diet in 5 simple steps!
About Jayd
Hey there! 👋 I’m Jayd Harrison (aka Jaydigains), a health coach, personal trainer, and host of the Coaching Corner Podcast. I help people build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with my online coaching programs and fitness content. Check out some of my coaching videos on Youtube, join me live on Twitch, and follow on social media.
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up for more exercise tips and get notified whenever I post to the Nutrition Blog. Fill out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Update your preferences or unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
