Part A: What You Will Do & What You Need

There are tons of ways to manage weight, but the most accurate, effective, and educational way right now in my opinion is to track your daily energy intake. This means you’ll be tracking calories, macros, or some version of both (don’t worry we’ll go over what calories and macros are). This can seem like a herculean task to some, and don’t be mistaken if you’re doing it correctly it takes time to do and practice to become good at. Eating mostly high quality whole foods, and planning, will make the process a bit easier.

There are a few gadgets you can get to make doing this type of weight management strategy easier. For tracking your progress you need to have a body weight scale, it doesn’t need to be a fancy scale and a camera for progress photos. In order to make progress you need to track your diet, you need to have a food scale, you can use measuring cups but they are less accurate so don’t if you can get a scale. Most of us have a smartphone and this can make tracking your diet 10000000x easier because you have access to diet tracking apps like MyFitnessPal. It’s also nice to have a smart watch or some kind of pedometer to track your activity.

 

Part D: How to Track Your Calories and Macros

The only mandatory things you must keep track of are your calories and protein. If you don’t mind tracking everything you’ll learn lots and can manipulate things to know what makes you feel the best.

 

You can use the MyFitnessPal app on your smartphone, it’s free to use and has a huge library of foods. When you make your account on MyFitnessPal it will ask you some questions and provide you with recommendations based on those questions. You can use the recommended calories on the app or Ignore them, the app, while great, is not great at recommending calorie or macro needs and you’d be better off having somebody calculate you a set or using a better calculator. Do not add calories back in for physical activity the app will try to do that for you but ignore it, if your goal is weight loss or maintenance those calories are accounted for.

Set up your app: After you have your account ready you can go into the goals section of MyFitnessPal and change your calorie goal and macro split. If you are using the free version you can only change the macros in 5% increments, don’t worry about that just get them as close to the numbers you decided on as possible.

Tracking your food:

When you track foods you need to know the calories and macro breakdowns of one serving of the food, how big the serving size is, and how many servings you’re eating. 

  • With Package: Most foods will have nutrition info on the packaging with the serving size labeled on it, bread for example will say 1 slice, Popcorn may say 50g so you’ll have to weigh it out. Using MyFitnessPal you’ll usually be able to scan the barcode on the package and the nutrition info will come up for you.  Then you can adjust the serving size and add it to your nutrition diary.
  • Without Package: Some foods will not be as convenient like apples or chicken. Luckily MyFitnessPal has a very big database, so you will be able to search “apple raw with skin” or “chicken breast cooked” and find calories for these. Lots of options will populate in the list of food entries to choose from and many will have different calorie info. What you should do is first look for an entry with a check mark, as these have been verified by MyFitnessPal and are usually accurate. If there is no verified option it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion by doing a quick google search for “apple raw with skin” if you notice the search brings up 60 calories consistently and MyFitnessPal has lots of 60 calorie entries it’s safe to go with that. REMEMBER: if you use an entry continue to use that same entry every time you eat that food so your tracking is consistent.
  • Take out: For take out and fast food as long as it is a well known place like Mcdonalds you should have an easy time tracking, and it’ll will be fairly accurate, most places like that are either already in the MyFitnessPal database or are provided by the company with a quick google search. 
  • Meals made and Portioned from a less well known source: An example of this would be small local restaurants or food trucks, and meals made for you by parents, spouses, or friends, like a bowl of chili. Due to the fact that portion size isn’t standardized like at Mcdonalds it can be super hard in order to track these meals. Put yourself in these situations as little as possible. However if you do happen to be here don’t fret, take a look at your food, and make your best guess. This may not be accurate, especially starting out, but that’s okay most of your meals won’t be this way. You can search in MyFitnessPal for a description of what you’re eating and go with that. For example “Chili with beef, kidney beans, and veggies”.

At the end of the day your calories and macros should be close to your targets. They do not have to be right on, give yourself about 10% wiggle room some days you might be a bit more hungry some days you might be less hungry so don’t stress too much about being perfect.