When it comes to losing weight, gaining weight or even maintaining weight one of the most manageable area’s is calorie tracking. If you haven’t ever tried to track your calories before, or if you have tried but found it complicated or time consuming, over the next 4 days we are going to look at how you can make it as easy and as enjoyable as possible.
If you haven’t done so already download the app ‘MyFitnessPal’, its free and is super easy to track your calories once you get the swing of It. Have a play around and if you have any problems using the app just let me know and I will do my best to get it sorted!
- Keep is simple: Yes, okay it may sound boring, but the ‘simpler’ your meals are, they easier they are to track. Now this doesn’t have to be a long-term thing, I just want you to learn how to track your calories and to realise how easy it can be. If you are creating all these crazy meals with 20 different ingredients then yes, it is going to be time consuming and it will be harder to track and manage compared to a 3-4 ingredient meal. If you are someone who loves to be adventurous with your food and cooks different recipes every day, then just schedule 5-10 minutes into your day to apply these meals into MyFitnessPal to ensure it all fits within your calories, and let’s be honest 5-10 minutes of planning to help you achieve your goal is totally worth it.
- Repetitive isn’t a bad thing: Now this kind of relates to yesterday’s post, but the more often you consume the same foods, the more you will learn and remember how many calories is in said food. If you’re constantly changing your food sources every single day then yes it will be time consuming to stay on top of it all and track your calories. Let’s be honest, do you really need to change your food source every single day?
- Weekend management: One of the biggest barriers I see with my clients, is social or just general lazy weekends. Prime example being you’ve had a long week, but you’ve tracked your calories all week and its gone well, now that it’s got to Saturday you think you’ll get a quick take away and maybe have a couple of drinks… and because it’s the weekend you don’t have to track it right?
This could potentially be your biggest barrier when It comes to achieving your goal. Now that we have been tracking our calories all week though, we can now look at managing this extra calorie consumption over the weekend. Let’s say you have a meal out this weekend that you’ve known about for a while, and your daily calorie limit is 1500, this means your total calorie limit for the week is 10,500. We can often estimate that a meal out is anywhere between 1000-2000 calories, so what we will look at doing throughout the week is dropping our calories by 200 a day (down to 1300 a day) to allow for that extra room of 1000 calories at the weekend. Now without tracking calories and managing your food consistently there is no real way to manage the extra calories at the weekend, therefor slowly down your progress towards your goal.
- Always have your goal in mind: Our last point is going to sound a bit cheesy, but at the end of the day we all have a goal. Tracking your calories pretty much guarantees that you will reach your goal (as long as you are hitting your correct number of calories). So when you’re having an off day and can’t be bothered to track today… think about your goal.
Reece Halsey
Impact personal trainer
