Planning and Tracking Your Food

Now that you understand the Ratios of your food, how much you are eating, and looked at the Quality and Quantity of your Food, we can delve deeper into Planning and Tracking. Once you understand food on a nutritional level, entwining good food choices into your life becomes easier, but not first without planning and tracking. Setting out on your week organised and with good intention sets you up to be proactive, not reactive. Tracking is a great way to see whether you are staying on track, identifying habits that come up that may be stalling your progress, and also gain awareness to your eating routines and rituals.

Success = Planning + Tracking + Reflection

PLANNING

To set your week up for success, start with a plan. Now that you have a deeper understanding of food, you can start making an effective plan for your week.

  • Prepare for the Week

    • Set up a meal planner

    • Have an 80/20 approach, 80% quality foods, and 20% treats/meals out. Leave some wiggle room for treats, or a meal out on the weekends.

  • Food Shop in bulk (1-2 times a week)

    • Only buy what is on your list, make sure you buy enough

    • Organise recipes before hand

    • Snacks

  • Meal Prep

    • Make your meals in advance

  • Account for Snacks

  • Base it around your schedule

TRACKING

Tracking is the single most important tool for awareness, accountability and consistency. Logging what you eat can help you to be aware of whether you are staying on track, and also see how what you are eating affects your body.

  • Use a convenient tracker - MFP or Manual Food Diary

  • Self fulfilling prophecy of day

  • Use MFP as a benchmark

    • Check your planner calories and macros by inputting into MFP to see if your plan is balanced

  • Grow and get familiar with MFP Database

    • Keep consistent and frequently used foods pop up at the top of your search

    • Save recipes so you can divide a recipe into servings

    • Save meals and common foods you eat together

  • Set a phone reminder to track at end of day

  • Explore better options for cravings - healthy treats and snacks

  • Budget your day

    • Distribute calories so you don’t get too hungry

    • Save some calories if you are having a bigger meal later

    • Don’t under-eat

  • Track emotions, mood, food cravings

Make sure you aren’t being overly strict with your calories and food, but also maintaining discipline.

REFLECT

Every week look back on your plan and reflect on how you went. If you stuck with your plan, kept consistent, felt good and are seeing results, stick with it!

If you are noticing that you are being inconsistent, undereating, overeating or being undisciplined. Go back to your plan and check that your calories and macros are based on your goals, you have fitted your nutrition around your schedule, you are nourishing yourself with high quality food 80%+ and low quality food 20%-.

There are many factors to nutrition including hormones, emotional eating and habits that we will cover in other lessons but you must have data to begin with otherwise you won’t have any idea what is working and what isn’t. Keep consistent and the results will show!



Kirsty HolmesEducation