Tracking Your Food - How Accurate Do You Need To Be?

If you're serious about dropping some pounds (and keeping them off!), it's important to take note of what you eat. You may even consider tracking what you're eating either by counting calories or macronutrients, or keeping a food log of some sort. As you do this, you inevitably start to wonder: how accurate do you need to be to see results?

The reality is, when you want to lose weight, tracking your food helps to ensure that you're not unknowingly sneaking in extra calories, which could happen, even if you think you're following the serving size on the nutrition label to a T.

Cupboard-raiders should especially pay attention. "Being accurate is important because if you're a habitual snacker, you could easily be overeating on a daily basis and have no real awareness around it," JC Deen, a fitness coach who helps clients lose weight.

Let's say you wanted to eat a plain bagel (about 250 calories) with some peanut butter (standard serving is 190 calories). If you eyeball the serving size, it's easy to overdo it without measuring it on a kitchen scale. Since peanut butter is so calorically dense, going over a little bit every time means extra calories that add up over the long run and could stall your progress.


Related: What Are Macros? And Should You Count Them For Weight Loss

Thus, a certain level of consistent accuracy is important.

Do I Need To Count Macros To Lose Weight?

One of the more popular methods people use to lose weight these days is counting macronutrients, a method that tracks the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat you eat every day. Rather than counting calories, counting macros is said to be a healthier, more effective way of tracking the food you're eating and how that contributes to your weight loss because it looks more at nutrients.

Although there's certainly nothing wrong with counting macros — it can offer useful insight into your overall diet — it may not be the best, most sustainable way to get your health on track. Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT, certified plant-based dietitian and health and fitness expert, explained why you might want to take a step away from your macro calculator and instead develop a more holistic relationship with your food.

What To Do If You've Hit A Weight Loss Plateau.

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Binge Eating - How This One Thing Helped

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with emotional eating. It started when I was an angsty teenager who was bullied incessantly at school, but it continued well into my adult years. I've experienced many mornings when I wake up feeling immensely guilty for all the binge-eating I did the night before. This is an extremely common battle among many women across the country, and you'll find a variety of different advice online that is supposed to help you stop binging.

We're encouraged to journal how we feel, identify our triggers, and answer cravings when they arise rather than ignore them altogether. In many cases, you'll hear that moderation is the name of the game. My battle against binge-eating had nothing to do with any of that advice, though. The only thing that stopped me from emotional eating was logging every single thing I ate into my phone and putting myself on a strict diet.