Tracking without Counting Calories, Macros or Points
Does the thought of tracking food make you cringe? Learn how to use tracking as a positive tool to improve your health.
This week Jenn is talking about tracking without counting calories, macros, or points. Tracking can feel daunting or cause you to feel like you have to restrict things, but Jenn is here to explain the value of tracking. Tracking isn’t just for the foods you are eating, but also the movement you do throughout your day, your sleep, stress, and more. She talks about how to utilize the data that you are tracking in order to understand any food intolerances, how your body is reacting to your lifestyle, and what areas you can improve on when it comes to your health. Tune in to learn what information to track without counting or restricting.
The Salad With a Side of Fries podcast is hosted by Jenn Trepeck, discussing wellness and weight loss for real life, clearing up the myths, misinformation, bad science & marketing surrounding our nutrition knowledge and the food industry. Let’s dive into wellness and weight loss for real life, including drinking, eating out, and skipping the grocery store.
IN THIS EPISODE:
● [5:15] Why do people track their food?
● [9:00] How can you use tracking food as accountability?
● [14:00] How can you get past the resistance of tracking and make it a positive experience?
● [16:05] Jenn gives tips on how to track utilizing apps, photos, or pen and paper.
● [19:45] How to navigate the information available in myfitnesspal when you don’t want to focus on it.
● [21:47] How long should you track your food?
● [26:54] What information should we track?
● [33:02] What is the easiest, most important thing we can do for exercise?
● [33:34] What things should you track outside of exercise and food?
● [37:15] Jenn describes the benefits of tracking and how it can improve your life as a whole and clear up your mental capacity to focus on what’s important to you.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
● Tracking aspects of your health is critical to looking at data so you can notice what foods may not be working with you, or other areas that you need to improve in your life. Odds are that the things you are looking for are the things you don’t remember. Our minds are full of so many things, so use a tracking system so you have the mental capacity to focus on all the other important things in your life.
● Find what works for you for tracking - use apps like myfitnesspal, take photos of each meal, write it down, print out a food journal, whatever you can be the most consistent with. This may change during each season of your life, or even by day. How you track isn’t what's important, it's more about the data you are collecting.
Different items to track are:
● Nutrition: each time you eat, what you have, when you have it, and quantities by way of serving or handfuls.
● Water
● Supplements
● Exercise: what you are doing, how long the exercise is, and what time you’re doing it
● Stress
● Gratitude
QUOTES:
“The brain will hyper-focus on everything that's not happening. So the paper helps us see everything that is happening.” - Jenn Trepeck
“It's the data that we don't think about when we are in that moment of ‘I don't feel so great’. Or maybe it's even a week from now or a month from now and we step on the scale and it's not what we want it to be, and we go "how is that possible?” - Jenn Trepeck
“Sometimes I think the resistance to tracking is more that we’re calling it that, when we maybe just haven't figured out how to do it so it works for us. Or because we have this history of somebody being the food police.” - Jenn Trepeck
“Not putting it on paper doesn't mean you're not tracking.” - Jenn Trepeck
“How we track isn't all that important; do whatever works for you.” - Jenn Trepeck
“What I love about that is that it takes this tracking to be so much bigger than just the food. And that's really what it's about. It takes it out of the hyper focus on one thing, and becomes a tool in our arsenal, in our tool belt, to help us do all the things we want to do in a day.” - Jenn Trepeck
“As we're feeling better, there is less mental capacity going to all the things that are now on this paper. We have the mental capacity to focus on other things as we're not obsessing as much about the food choices, or the scale, or the calories, the macros, the things, all the counting, all of a sudden there's all this brain capacity that we can use for things that are actually important to us.” - Jenn Trepeck
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