It sounds simple enough right? Just count the calories for the amount of food you eat by reading food labels. Well sometimes you don't always know what you ate. For example, some restaurants don't have their nutrition information listed or maybe you ate a homemade recipe at a friends house and they didn't measure exactly what they put into it. It's okay to guestimate a little bit; just use your best judgement on amounts or contents of certain foods. There's no need to whip out your food scale at a restaurant and measure the ounces of your salmon fillet. A ballpark figure is good enough, unless you are a bodybuilder in the final days of a cut phase trying to melt off those last few pounds of fat; then you may want to pay a little closer attention.
Counting Made Easy
Luckily we live in a day and age where technology can pretty much do everything for us which is why counting calories is so much easier these days. I've recently become hooked on the app "My Fitness Pal." It's a dietary/fitness tracking software that syncs an online publicly shared profile with your app on your phone, similar to a social network for tracking fitness. One reason I like it so much is because it has the nutritional info for a lot of foods already plugged into their database, so all you have to do is point amd click what you ate for what meal. It also allows you to pull up "reports" for different time periods so you can see what you ate over a week. It will give you total amounts in calories and grams for your food intake as well as percentages of total intake. So if I want to see how much protein I average each day and what percentage of my daily intake is protein, all I have to do is pull up that report. The program will also take into account your gener, age and activity level in order to come up with a recommended daily total for calorie intake. And if you are looking to gain/lose weight, it will show you how many calories you SHOULD be eating.
Tracking Progress:
One of the other nice features about calorie/fitness counters, is the ability to track your progress. A lot of them have the ability to check-in with daily measurements (i.e. weight, hip/waist measurements etc.) which allows you to track your progress over time and see the effectiveness of your eating strategy. Whenever, I start a new workout program I like to monitor my progress to "test" out how well it works or whether or not I like it. I recommend doing this to all of my clients as well. It allows you to go back to old workouts and adjust them accordingly to fit your goals. By tracking your food intake, you can combine that with your workouts, weigh-ins, and pictures (it all comes down to what you look like anyway, right?) so you can get a great idea of how well a program is working/not working for you.
Recommendations:
I recommend to everyone, whether you are trying to lose weight, gain weight, or just stay where you are... counting calories can help! You don't have to get all nerdy about it and directly calculate out how much you need of each macronutrient but it is a good idea to have a general number in your head of what to shoot for. Plus, with how easy smart phones and apps have made calorie counting, it hardly takes any effort at all! At least try it for a week to see what your typically dietary intake looks like, you may be surprised at how much damage your Saturday night on the town is doing to your diet. And remember, it's not as tedious as it sounds, thanks to technology!
No comments:
Post a Comment