We’ve talked about tracking your food before.
Today we want to give you tips for tracking your food on MyFitnessPal! If you’ve never used a nutrition tracker it can feel a little intimidating. That’s why we have 9 tips to help you get started!
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Measure your food
Eyeballing your food is something that you can do over time, but when you first start tracking food we highly recommend measuring what you’re eating.
Things like peanut butter, granola, nuts etc are all things that can be easy to underestimate. Start by measuring for first few weeks to ensure you’re getting a clear picture on how much you’re eating / what a true serving size is.
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Track as you go
We recommend either logging before you eat or shortly after. Trying to remember everything you ate at the end of the day is near impossible. Think about how hard it is to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday!
Doing this helps ensure there’s not a few snacks that slipped through the cracks unnoticed… like when you grabbed a few handfuls of nuts from the cupboard or had a coffee you forgot about.
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Don’t forget
Oils, salad dressings, snacks, coffee additives, drinks etc. There are a few things that add a sneaky but significant amount of calories to your day. Don’t forget to track them!
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Be honest
It can be tempting to skip out on tracking the foods we don’t want to. By being honest about what we’re really eating we can get a super clear picture on where you need the most work.
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Save meals + Recipes to the app
Have a new recipe you tried? You can paste the link in to the recipes section of the app and it will automatically populate the recipe for you! You can also add meals to make it super easy to track food items that you eat often. On top of this, MyFitnessPal remembers your frequently eaten foods so you can log them without having to find the item each time.
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Check nutrition labels
Serving sizes are important when it comes to tracking food. Make sure when you’re reading a nutrition label you see what the serving size is and how many servings there are per container before eating / logging them.
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Plan ahead
Failing to plan is planning to fail. If you have no plan for what you’re going to eat it’s going to make tracking and staying consistent a whole lot harder than it needs to be. Spending a little time over the weekend (or when is most convenient for you) is a great way to make life easier.
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Don’t use the recommended calories
Instead of using the recommended calories on the app (which tend to be very low) Speak with a coach about helping you come up with a reasonable amount of calories for you. Or, use Precision Nutrition’s calculator found HERE
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Don’t eat back your calories
As tempting as it may be to eat back the calories you burn in a workout, try to avoid this. For one, it can get you in the habit of thinking you NEED to workout in order to eat (which can lead to a poor relationship with food)
This can also be problematic in figuring out what needs to change if you hit a plateau. If you’re eating a different amount of calories every day how do you know what changes need to be made?