Tracking Your Macros [Accurately]

I’m going to preface this article with a few things.

Firstly, macro tracking is not the be all end all holy grail of weight management. But it is a really powerful tool when used correctly. When being mindful about the data you enter, you are able to develop quite a thorough understanding of the nutritional value of the various foods that you eat. This practiced over a period of time will enable you to make informed food choices for the rest of your life, long after you stop using the app.

Which leads me in to point two, macro tracking shouldn’t be something you do forever. Again, track mindfully and you will be able to educate and empower yourself with nutrition knowledge so that you can guide yourself in eating in accordance with your body composition goals and prevent yourself from falling in to gimmicky diets and well marketed, ill intentioned “health” foods.

On the way to phasing out your use of a tracking app, you can and are certainly encouraged to exercise more freedom. EG. Non tracking days, eye balling food rather than weighing, alternating week on / week off tracking, etc. However, in the early days of macro tracking, diligence and precision is important for both accuracy, getting results and your own learning. This article will focus on the diligence required early on and is not to be interpreted as behaviours encouraged long term / forever.

This article is far from revolutionary. However, if you are relatively new to tracking your macros or have never really been shown how to use a macro tracking app such as MyFitnessPal [which is the app I will refer to from here on in], the following article will likely provide you with some helpful practices that you can apply right away to improve the accuracy of your tracked data and ultimately your success with any nutrition intervention going forward.

So, all that being said, here are some of my top tips for tracking your macronutrient intake to maximise your prevision and ultimately your results.

Track everything.

Alcohol, non-alcoholic drinks, condiments, milk in your coffee, sugar in your coffee, the bite of your partner’s meal, etc. The five calories here and the ten calories there add up across the day. Failing to track seemingly little things that alone bear little impact can really mess with the accuracy of your data over time.

Track before you eat.

Ever eaten a meal, thoroughly enjoyed it, thought you had a handle on your daily calories only to track it and realise you’ve blown them way out of the park? Yeah, you can prevent that pretty easily. Before you sit down for a meal, track it. That way, you know what serving size is appropriate before it’s already in you.

On a longer term scale, track ahead of time.

Meal prep on Sunday with lunches prepared until Friday? Enter your lunches ahead of time. Do you eat the same breakfast every weekday? Track this at the start of the week too. Not only will this save you a heap of time through the week, but you go in to each day already knowing how many calories you’ve got to play with for your dinner and snacks. You can do this on a daily scale too. Perhaps you eat the same breakfast every day, lunch is prepared and you know what you’re having for dinner. Track your meals at the start of the day, then you know what you’ve got to work with for your snacks and how much protein you’ve got to get in across the day to avoid a double scoop of protein powder right on bed time.

Enter and adhere to your own calorie and macronutrient targets.

If you are working with a coach and they have prescribed calories and / or macronutrient targets for you, enter these in to the app and aim to hit these each day. Oftentimes, people get confused and lead astray by the targets provided by the app which may conflict with those that have been prescribed for them specifically. When your coach adjusts your targets, adjust them in the app also. Note: if you are using the free version of MyFitnessPal you are only able to set macronutrient targets as a percentage of your calorie target. Therefore, you may not be able to set your macronutrient goals to the exact value prescribed by your coach. EG. My calorie target is 2600 and my protein target is 120g. The app only permits me to set my protein target as 15% / 98g or 20% / 130g. In this instance, adjust your goal to the closest possible value and use it as a guide only. It will be up to you to remember and aim for your actual target in this instance.

Be aware of exercise calories imported from your activity tracker.

When your coach or the app calculate your calorie targets, they consider your activity level [exercise, training, incidental activity, activity at work, etc]. As such, your physical activity is already factored in to your prescribed targets. MyFitnessPal integrates with FitBit and other activity trackers so that occasionally the calories that you are expected to have burned through your daily exercise is imported in to MyFitnessPal and added to your daily calorie intake. Be aware of this and do not eat the additional calories that have been added. This is a really easy mistake to make. Notice when your exercise has been imported in to MyFitnessPal and delete. EG. In the example below, my calorie target was 2500, which already considers my physical activity level. I have consumed 2580 calories. However, because my daily steps have been imported from my FitBit, it appears that I still have 710 calories remaining to consume. To delete the Fitbit calorie adjustment, just swipe right which will yield the image on the left which accurately indicates that I have exceeded by daily calorie target by 80 calories.

Weigh your food.

Weighing your food can be a bit of a drainer, I get it. However, we are grossly inaccurate at eye balling food and awful at measuring an accurate tea / tablespoon, rather than overfilling them. [Can you actually answer the question of low full should a legitimate tablespoon be? Cos neither]. When aiming for accurate food measurements, weighing your food with food scales is about as good as you can get. Going back to my first comments, be mindful when you are weighing a notice how much 100g of a given food actually is. This will build your ability to eye ball food overtime to equip you for when later on, you cease tracking. In the absence of food scales, measuring cups or spoons are still better than nothing.

Do I weigh my food raw or cooked?

It doesn’t really matter. Just pick one, stick with it and track accordingly. EG. If you track pasta cooked once, always track it as cooked weight and choose a MyFitnessPal entry that denotes “cooked weight". The change in food volume / weight can be profound and may have a huge impact on how the food would be tracked. Here is an example of brown rice cooked V uncooked. When it is cooked, brown rice absorbs water meaning that your 100g is now comprised of more water and less rice, making the calorie yield of 100g of cooked rice much less than 100g of uncooked rice.

Use the barcode scanner.

This is a huge time saver. When consuming packaged foods that carry a barcode, scanning the barcode will give you the existing listing of that food in MyFitnessPal. Just be sure to cross check the MyFitnessPal listing against the packet you have in front of you to ensure it is correct.

Create your own food from the nutrition label.

If you scan something and the listing doesn’t exist, create your own listing for that food. This will be much more accurate than using a similar listing of a different brand.

Serving size and servings per packet.

Always note the serving size and number of servings per packet for pre-packaged foods. Assuming that one packet = one serve is an easy mistake to make. A great example of this are Lenny and Larry’s cookies. They are marketed as 16g of protein per cookie - how great! However, according to the nutrition panel, there are two servings per cookie, which means in a “serving” there is only 8g of protein and in a whole cookie there are not only 16g of protein, but also 54g of carbohydrates and 12g of fat. I’d love to know the number of people that have had the whole cookie and tracked it as one serving.

Create recipes.

If you enjoy cooking and making meals from scratch, tracking comprehensive meals that require an extensive list of ingredients each and every time you consume them can be a bit of a headache. MyFitnessPal enables you to create recipes. This enables you to enter the quantities of ingredients used for the whole recipe and divide the recipe in to the number of servings it makes, so in future when you make this meal, all you need to do is adhere to consistent quantities of each ingredient and eat a controlled portion size. This last note is important. Creating recipes takes a little time up front but will save you boat loads of time down the track and improve your tracking accuracy as long as you maintain consistent quantities and servings. In the absence of this consistency, your data may be heavily inaccurate. Most recipes I personally cook are quite simple, but having these few that contain a larger list of ingredients already in the app save me a bunch of time when I make them.

Create meals.

Similarly, MyFitnessPal enables you to create meals. I use this feature to pair foods I commonly consume together to save me time later. EG. If you commonly have eggs on toast with avocado and a coffee for breakfast, create this as a meal called “Weekday eggs and avo breakfast” or whatever, so you can add it in one click each day.

Eating out.

You don’t have to stop eating out when you are trying to lose weight. Eating out less may be beneficial, but you certainly don’t need to stop eating out altogether just because you don’t have your food scales and don’t know how to track what is on the plate in front of you. There are a few possible circumstances when it comes to eating out so here are a few possible ways of navigating those circumstances. Regardless of circumstance, always track a ball park of what you will likely eat ahead of time so you know what calories and macronutrients you have to work with for the remainder of the day. If you have no idea what the meal will consist of [EG. when the menu is unavailable online or you are eating at Nonna’s house and God knows what goes in to her cooking], allocate yourself ~700-1200 calories for the meal and eat accordingly for the remainder of the day. If the restaurant is part of a larger chain, they may have their nutrition information available online or already in MyFitnessPal, in which case track ahead of time as per normal. Where the nutrition information is not available, track the individual ingredients, not the meal as a whole. EG. If you have a veggie burger. Don’t search MFP for veggie burger. Instead, track the brioche bun, the veggie patty, the tomato relish, the salads, etc. Always assume more fats and carbs than you think. Whatever you come up with after your tracking, add 20%. I always add a tablespoon of oil to my listing, assuming that it is doused in much more oil than I’d like to believe. Once you’ve actually seen the meal, you can refine what you’ve tracked earlier in the day to reflect the actual ingredients and portion size.

Alcohol.

Okay, to explain this without too much confusion. There are in actual fact four macronutrients, that is, nutrients that yield calories. They are protein, carbohydrates, fat and alcohol. If you track your macronutrients without keeping an eye on your calories while you are consuming your alcoholic drinks, you are likely to hit your macronutrient targets while surpassing your calorie goal. This is because alcohol yield seven calories per gram — not per gram of alcoholic beverage consumed but the alcohol in that beverage. If you are planning to drink on any given day, focus your attention on your protein and calorie targets, rather than your carbohydrate and fat targets.

Plan ahead for events that involve food.

It is possible to bank your calories. That is, consume fewer calories say Monday - Friday in anticipation of an event on Saturday that you suspect will have you eating and drinking quite a lot more than usual. For example, if your usual daily calorie target is 2000, you may elect to consume 1800 calories Monday to Friday, thereby banking you an additional 1000 calories for Saturday. This is certainly not mandatory and you are certainly permitted to have days of higher energy intakes in the interest of enjoying your life. However, if your goals are more time sensitive and / or very important to you, this is a tool that you can employ.

Eat foods you enjoy.

The beauty of macro tracking is that it can teach us that no food is inherently good or bad, but rather we can afford to eat more of some foods than others, while still eating in accordance with our goals. We need to consume enough nutritious low volume foods to maintain adequate micro-nutrition for good health and to prevent us from being eternally hungry. But assuming you’ve already hit your protein and fibre targets, you’ve had your five serves of veggies and two serves fruit and you are adequately satiated, you don’t get bonus points for eating more “healthy food”. Eat your veggies, hit your protein and fibre, ensure you are eating a great enough volume of food to be satisfied, and with the left over calories, eat the foods you enjoy. Ignoring your personal preferences and refusing yourself foods you enjoy is unsustainable and will ultimately impact your results. Again, there are no bonus health points for excessive restriction and discipline. Incorporating foods that make your heart sing is one of the greatest benefits of taking a more flexible approach to your nutrition. Your social and psychological health can be nourished by enjoyable food and food environments and these too are important. But I’ll save the crux of that conversation for another day.