Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with food and exercise tracking. You know, the apps and websites that let you list what you’ve been eating, and how much you’ve been working out, and tell you if you’re balancing out one with the other. (See http://www.myfitnesspal.com.)
Now, I hate tedium, repetitiveness, added tasks, added work. I don’t believe in measuring and obsessing over food and calories. So, what am I doing, constantly tethered to MyFitnessPal on my iPhone?
Get the feedback you need: and then move on!
Food tracking is good feedback. I saw:
- Refined carbs add hundreds of calories: it’s so hard to balance intake and outtake once I eat them!
- I really can eat as many veggies and healthy proteins as I want and still balance my activity level
- Wow: being active (working out) really made a huge difference in how much I could — and needed — to eat to balance my output
- My sodium intake was way over the USRDA: something to work on
Seeing these results, in black and white, is really motivating. There’s no denying it!
But, do food tracking in spurts. Once you get some insights, you can move on:
- Food tracking isn’t perfectly accurate: it’s just a guideline.
- Let’s face it. Whipping out the phone every time you eat is a drag — and for me, it takes away from the spontaneity and joy of food
- Once you’ve used it to figure out how you want to change your eating or exercise, it has limited payoff.
For me, it just takes too much time to track things on an ongoing basis.
Better to track your food for a week or two every once in a while, as a way to calibrate yourself.