If you’ve read these blogs for any length of time you will know that one of the things that I recommend is to track our food for a number of days.
Sure, it’s not the only method of making changes to our eating.
But experience has taught me that it’s probably the most effective.
It gives us something more precise to work on than just a vague description of what someone’s eating.
It can help highlight the relatively easy adjustments and tactical swaps we can make (instead of just “stopping” or “cutting out” XYZ).
It can give us a degree of accountability around our choices.
When I’ve spoken to someone about tracking, and they’ve agreed to do it………
And then next time I see them they haven’t (or only for a bit)………
There are three potential reasons they might give;
1. “I forgot”
2. ” It’s a bit of a faff”
3. “It wasn’t going to be good”
For the first one – what can you do to remember?
Reminders, visual cues, etc.
For the second – yeah I get it.
It is a bit of a faff.
But it’s the highest return on investment faff you can do.
A few minutes of mild inconvenience here and there that will return many times the benefit of the same amount of time doing anything else.
And as for the third?
“It wasn’t going to be good”
As the blog title suggests – that’s the best time to do it.
Tracking our food when we’re eating lots of fresh, nutritious things in a calorie deficit is great, sure.
But the real value comes in tracking when that’s not happening.
Gaining insight into some different decisions that we can make that we would enjoy just as much, but would have less impact on our waistlines.
Knowing that we’re going to track might help us make some better choices (it also might not but we can still do it anyway).
We can just choose to have the integrity to track even when it’s “not good”.
And that will give us the knowledge we need to enable us to average out.
Knowing that time created a 2,000 calorie surplus……..
Enables us to know what we need to do to average that out (maybe knock off 400 calories a day for the next 5 days)?
——- Want an approach built on creating an average that allows us to socialise and have fun rather than living like a monk? You’ll find that at www.myrise.co.uk/apply ——-
If we were looking to reduce our financial expenditure we wouldn’t just keep note of when we weren’t spending much money and ignore the times we were spending loads, would we?
That would be the least beneficial way around to do it.
It “not being good” is not a reason to not track…….
It’s the best reason to track.
Much love,
Jon ‘& Field’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
