If you Google “how to lose weight”, there’s one piece of advice you’re going to see on every single list, track your calorie intake.
For good reason. It’s a reliable way to see consistent weight loss, week after week, if you do it correctly.
If you have a smartphone in your pocket, it’s easier than ever.
Here’s how calorie tracking works, how to find your targets, and a few tips that I wish I knew sooner that make tracking so much easier.
How does calorie tracking work?
Your body runs on energy.
All food contains energy.
We can measure that energy value as calories.
All foods have different calorie values.
For example, an egg is 70 calories, and a cup of 2% milk has 120 calories.
If you can figure out how many calories your body burns each day, then consistently feed it fewer calories than it burns each day, you’ll lose weight over time.
Or you can start smoking crack, but I think this is probably better for your health.
But this brings up a bunch of questions.
How many calories do you burn each day?
How do you know how many calories are in different foods?
How do you keep track of all this?
Gotta love technology.
We have software applications for your phone that’ll estimate how many calories you burn each day.
They’re linked up to a food database.
So you can keep a running tally of which foods you eat each day.
And it will tell you the calorie values of all those foods.
So you don’t have to be googling how many calories are in an egg and using a pen and paper to track it.
It all happens in one place.
There are free apps out there that’ll do this, like lose it, cronometer and myfitnesspal, which are all great.
But my personal preference is a paid app called Macrofactor.
As you can see, I’ve been using it a lot.
I wrote a whole review of all the features here – MacroFactor Review
Not only will it spit out your initial calorie goals for you, but it will adjust your calorie goals over time based on your weight loss progress.
So if you’re not losing weight at the rate you think you should be, it’ll just adjust your calories each week until you are.
It’s got a “smart” algorithm built into it, which is basically like having a nutrition coach in your pocket.
My girlfriend and I both buy the annual plan which works out to about $6 / month.
You can use my last name, MARRA, for an extended two week free trial to try it out.
How many calories to eat
No matter what app you use… the first step to effective calorie tracking is to find out your calorie goal.
You’ll do this by going through the setup process.
Or you can use my free weight loss calculator.
All these apps will ask you how tall you are, how much you weigh, how active you are, and your age and your sex.
You punch all that data in and it’ll give you a pretty good estimate of roughly how many calories you need to eat each day based on your goals.
I recommend telling these app that you want to lose anywhere from 0.5% to 1% of your body weight each week.
So if you’re 200 pounds, you’re aiming to lose one pound to two pounds per week.
At this point, the app will tell you, okay, you need to eat XYZ calories per day in order to start losing weight at a rate you outlined.
And now all you need to do is keep a running tally each day of which foods you eat in which amounts to make sure you stay at or just below your calorie goal
How to know how many calories you’re eating
The number one mistake holding people back from seeing the weight loss results they’re after with calorie tracking is under reporting
Meaning: the food you enter into your calorie tracker is not accurate.
You’re logging, let’s say, 2000 calories a day, but you’re actually eating 2500, and so you’re not losing the weight you think you should be.
This is where using a food scale comes in handy.
Let me show you how.
This is an accurate and reliable way to consistently measure your food without eyeballing it and just wondering exactly how much food you’re eating.
The scale shows you to the gram how much food you ate so you can be sure that you’re logging accurately.
So you can weigh out the food you’re about to consume by placing it on the food scale.
Or placing a container of food on the scale, then clicking the ‘zero’ button which returns the scale value to 0.
Then when you remove food, it will show a negative value, and you’ll know how much you served.
Now find the food you ate in your calorie tracking app and tell it how much you ate.
It will tell you how many calories are in it.
That’s fundamentally how calorie tracking works.
But what if you’re eating meals at a restaurant or with your family…
Maybe you don’t have a food scale or can’t weigh it out?
That’s a fantastic question, and I’m glad you’re already thinking ahead about how you can implement this into your life.
The 250 Method
When you’re having those fun meals, family meals, or restaurant meals, you just look at the food in front of you and you ask yourself, is this food zero calories?
Odds are the answer is no, right?
So it’s at least 250 calories. And if you think it’s more than 250, it’s 500.
If it’s more than 500, then it’s 750, 1000, and so on.
So you’re just estimating in 250 calorie increments, rounding up when you’re not sure.
So if I decided that the lasagna I was eating is a thousand calories…
What I do is I just go into Macrofactor, I search up lasagna, then I crank up the serving size until it hits 1000 calories.
I log it and I move on with my day.
If you estimate every once in a while and round up on your calories, I guarantee you will still make fantastic progress.
You don’t need to be perfect in order for this to work.
My client Patrick has had some awesome success with tracking.
After an accident that left his leg injured and full of screw, he gained a bunch of weight.
Pile that on top of a sedentary, stressful job.
Now you might be thinking, Matteo, this is so time consuming.
I have to log the calories every day. That’s going to take me so long!
Make it even easier
Every single day for the last three months, I’ve been mixing one cup of milk with a scoop of whey protein in a shaker cup, and then I pour it over 125 grams of cereal.
It’s fucking delicious.
And since I know that’s what I’m going to have every single day for breakfast, I just have to log it once and then I can copy paste it from day to day.
It takes me literally eleven seconds to log my breakfast.
Learning how to track everything and input it into the app effectively is super important, but there’s one more tip I want to share with you that’ll make it easier to actually hit your target each day.
Push it back
If you are anything like 99 percent of the people out there who track their calories, it’s going to be in the evenings when you go over your calories.
That’s when you sit on the couch, you’re watching Netflix with your significant other and you’re like, you know what – I’m going to have some Cheetos.
Or popcorn or ice cream.
And then bam, all your calories gone. You went over the budget.
Here’s what you can do instead.
During the morning, and the middle of the day, you’re probably busy.
You’re at work.
That’s when you have your hands full and you’re not thinking about food, you’re not as hungry, and you have other things going on.
So push the majority of your calories back towards the evening time so you can have a little more flexibility and fun foods at nighttime when you want those treats.
If your daily calorie goal is 2000 calories per day, maybe you keep breakfast at 500, and lunch at 500.
Then you come home and you have a thousand calories to fuck around with.
You have your healthy dinner with beef, broccoli, and potatoes, and then you have extra calories that you can play with.
Ice cream, pizza, a beer, whatever you want.
Trust me on this one, it is much easier to be hungry earlier in the day and have lots of calories to spare than getting to 12 o’clock being kind of full-ish but hitting your calorie target and then knowing you can’t eat until the next morning.
If you’re interested to learn more about Macrofactor, I wrote a comprehensive article including all of my favorite features – read here
Hope this helps
-Matteo
