Tracking Your Nutrition | Easier Than You Think

I’m sure you have heard the saying “nutrition is 80% of the results.” Why do you hear this so often? Well because it’s true. Another saying you may have heard is “you can’t out train a bad diet.” Both of these are commonly heard and true. The better the nutrition the better your results will be. I highly doubt you are busting your butt with Insanity or P90X and only looking for minimal results. I’d go as for to say that with seeing only minimal results you’ll be more apt to quit altogether. The mindset where you think you can eat whatever you want because you are putting in the time for exercise even extreme exercise and not see results will most likely cause you to lose your motivation. And we don’t want to lose our motivation.

WHERE DO WE START?

The best place to begin is to have a plan with a goal in mind. Whether it is the lose body fat, gain muscle mass or both you need a plan. Next we need to plan on what supplements we will want to include in our nutrition. We want to maximize our results, so make a plan and stick to it.

So we now have a plan and a goal, now what? How do we continue to stick to our daily nutrition goals? Well there is only one way to make sure and that is by tracking your nutrition. In my opinion this is the best way to stay true to your goals, if you waiver from your daily percentages you’ll know exactly where you messed up. It takes the guess-work out of the equation. I hear from people all the time about not seeing results while they are “eating clean”, but almost every time we take a closer look we discover that what they considered as eating clean wasn’t really even close. Too many carbs, not enough protein too many calories and so on.

Learn More about getting started right by clicking here.

HOW DO WE TRACK NUTRITION?

It’s actually not that hard to do these days, especially with all the new technology in smart phones. Now you can track your nutrition straight from your cell. I recommend starting with a nutrition tracking system that has a phone app to go along with it. The one I use and recommend is My Fitness Pal. I use it everyday to track my percentages of protein, carbs and fat. Now, one thing I don’t do is track my exercise with the program, I simply set a calorie and macronutrient goals and leave it at that. Just makes it a little more simple.

There will be a little bit of research required when getting started to find the right foods that work for you and your goals. Reading nutrition labels and doing online searches can help with this process, but I’m sure you have an idea of what’s good or bad, so start with that. My Fitness Pal will have the food in the database so you’ll know right away the nutrition value.

WHERE DO I BEGIN?

A good starting place when trying to cut the fat is a ratio of 50-30-20. 50% Protein, 30% Carbs and 20% fat. This will translate into 1000 calories from protein, 600 calories from carbs, and 400 calories from fat in a 2,000 calorie goal (250g protein, 150g carbs, and 45g fat).

You’ll want to be as close as possible on these daily percentages. A good tip that works for me is I’ll enter tomorrow’s food today so I can adjust the day as I need to in order to hit my goals. You’ll also want to eat often, 5-6 times per day. I eat 3 meals and 3 snacks to keep my metabolism running efficiently.

This should get you started on you way to tracking your nutrition and hopefully will give you some motivation towards your workouts, I know it works for me.

MY FITNESS PAL TIPS

So I mentioned My Fitness Pal being a great tool to track nutrition and it’s free by the way. Now I wanted to go into it a little deeper so you can get the most out of it.

The first thing I noticed is that the Macronutrient setting seem all out of whack so if you just jump in and start trying to meet their goals set be the system itself you maybe missing out on some gains.

The first thing we need to do is (after you know your calorie and macronutrient goals) is to customize the settings. When you are logged in click on the “goals” tab, next click the green “change goals” button. Now we want to click on the “custom” settings then click the green “continue” button. On the next screen is where you can alter and update how many calories you want to reach as well as the maconutrient goals for the day. Once you set it where you want it click the green “change goals” button at the bottom.

One thing I like about the phone app compared to the computer version is that the phone app includes a pie chart showing your goals and how close you are to you goals. I do most of my tracking from my phone so I frequently look at this chart (Pictured Below).

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