Jonathan Steedman (00:01.625)

Hey food groupies, today I'm going to be talking about counting calories in an app. So if that's of interest to you, keep having a listen because I'm going to give you some of my top tips and some of the major things that people miss, as well as my favorite way to get people to use those apps. And if you're not interested in tracking your calories, then by all means continue to listen. But also, you can skip this one. Tracking is not for everyone. Absolutely not. There's certain people who

maybe shouldn't track right now. There's certain people who should literally never track. But for other people, it can be a super valuable exercise. It can help you learn a lot about your food, what's in it, what's not in it. It can help you very quickly realize that you're missing certain nutrients or you're coming in significantly under certain nutrients. And so I just wanted to do a quick little podcast about, like I said, a few probably big mistakes people make, a few things to look out for, and then a few.

tips, not necessarily in that order. In fact, probably the reverse order. Because what I wanted to start with is the number one adjustment I make with a client who wants to track or maybe is already tracking is tracking as you go, i.e. eating your breakfast and then entering it in, eating your lunch and then entering it in, or even preparing your breakfast then entering it in.

Tracking as you go throughout the day, I don't think is a very good idea for someone unless they've tracked for a while or have tracked for a few weeks at least and have a good handle on what their food and their daily structure should look like. If you track as you go, you run a very significant risk of getting to 4 p.m. and quote unquote running out of calories or realizing that you have...

200 calories left in your day, but 40 grams of protein to hit, like just these things that don't kind of work. you, yeah, and so that's the first big thing. Now, to answer that question, a bit of a side quest. I would always rather, if you have quote unquote run out of calories before your dinner, as an example, don't skip dinner, just have a dinner, go over your calories that day, totally fine. If you are under protein, I would probably just.

Jonathan Steedman (02:21.613)

call it a day if you've hit your calories, but I would then reflect on where in my day was low in protein, how can I make sure that I hit that number again? anyway, but you can avoid all that if you instead use it as a little bit of a simple meal planning tool. So literally the night before or the morning of, you just think about what am I gonna eat tomorrow or throughout the day?

Hopefully you have a bit of an idea of what you're eating if your day is so chaotic and so unplanned. I mean, we're all gonna have those days, but if they're unplanned and chaotic, that's probably just another conversation and another important thing to focus on. But let's say that you do have an idea of what you're eating. The night before, go through your day and start putting in the foods you're planning to eat. This isn't to keep you into a rigid meal plan. It's just so you can get a sense of where your planned day is going to land in terms of

total calories, macros and those sorts of things. So what I like to get people to do is to, know, let's assume you have a the most normal meal pattern of like three main meals in a snack, right? So go through those days and those meals, sorry, and just add the protein component of that meal. What protein source are you planning to have at breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner? Once you've done that, go back through those meals and make them make sense. So for example, you might've put eggs,

for breakfast. Now hopefully you're not just having eggs for breakfast. So maybe you want to add some toast to that or you're going to have a bowl of muesli on the side and you just go through and you foods into those meals, add some rice to lunch, add a wrap to dinner until it makes sense. By then you should get a good sense of, right, how many of my, how much of my calorie budget do I have left? How close am I to my protein target? Am I

killing it, in which case, great. If not, you can then go back through and adjust those protein serves or potentially add some extra protein sources on top. S-O-U-R-S-C-E-S, not like protein condiments. I'm sure they exist, but they sound disgusting. But anyhow, so you can go back through and you can kind of troubleshoot the day before it gets away from you. That can be a really, really helpful shift. And you don't need to do that forever, but doing that for a week or two can just help you adjust to.

Jonathan Steedman (04:46.208)

these are the portions I should be looking for. These are the foods that help me hit these numbers rather than doing that kind of at the other end and going, crap, I've completely missed today. Which again, it's one day, it doesn't matter, but we can in the scheme, consistently, we can make sure that doesn't happen if we plan, use it as a meal planning tool. Now, again, I'm not saying you need to fill out your entire calorie budget ahead of that, what I would get you to do

Well, what I would hope is actually you do have a few calories left over. So let's say that you've gone through, you've added your proteins to every meal, then you've gone back through and you've made them made sense with additional carbs and fats and sauces and flavorings and things like that. And then hopefully you still do have a few to a lot of calories left over. And those are the ones that you can just kind of wing on the day. What do feel like? Is there something lying around? Do you have a really feel like a banana for afternoon tea or something like that? And so yeah, it's not about

fully filling out your calorie budget the night before. Look, if you're in a pretty harsh deficit, that might be what happens and that's fine. But if it's just sort of general deficit or even maintenance things, you should hopefully have some calories over to spend as you wish more flexibly on the day. So definitely do that. That can be a huge shift. Just some tracking things that can help as well or not help, make sure.

The big thing about tracking is unless you are gonna track literally everything, please don't track. And this is one of the few times that I'm very black or white, all or nothing. And it can feel a bit of a burden, but tracking is a burden. The reality is though, if you track 80 % of your intake, that is useless. Because I have no idea, and you have no idea what that other 20 % is. Is that other 20 % 200 calories or 1500 calories, right? You need to track 100%.

of everything that goes in your mouth. That includes food, duh, but also includes drinks. It includes snacks. It includes the little bits and pieces. And so one huge mistake I see with people tracking is this like, I'm eating 1500 calories and I'm not losing weight. In reality, they're tracking 1500 calories and they're eating 2200 calories because they're just neglecting, oh, I put mayo on that sandwich. Oh, I had half a pack of my kids popcorn.

Jonathan Steedman (07:07.755)

Like all of these little things which in isolation are minor but like five little things in a day quickly add up and if you track them you'll notice that. And so if you've literally never tracked before I actually like people to just track as they go which I know is opposite of what I just said but track as they go for the first week or so to just get a sense of that because you get a better handle on like I eat all these things that I didn't realize I ate and that's totally fine okay that's not that's not to criticize you it's now you know.

Now we can adjust it. So look out for liquid calories, coffees, teas, soft drinks, juices often get missed, condiments, so sauces and dressings and gravies and oils, cooking oils, all of those sorts of things. Again, I know it sounds really particular, but unfortunately for something like tracking to actually be helpful and valuable, we need that level of detail. So that's the big thing. The other thing I would say is don't track veggies, non starchy vegetables.

tracking potato and stuff like that and pumpkin, would definitely, but if you really want to, you can track like a cup of salad or something, but to be perfectly honest, I just think that level of extra tracking is not really necessary. Hopefully your veggie intake is relatively consistent and tracking things like baby spinach and cherry tomatoes and carrots and things, it's just painful. So I know I just said track everything and now I'm saying don't track veggies, but whatever, come at me.

I just see it as a bit of another burden. And I promise you, if your goal is weight loss or weight gain or weight maintenance or performance, it's not gonna be that you ate too many or too few carrots. It's going to be a bigger food item, a more nutrient-dense, more calorie-dense food item that you're missing. So I would be focusing in on that. Now in terms of apps, because I get asked that all the time, look, they're all kind of, they've all got their pros and cons. The two main ones I would recommend that free,

They do have paid versions of course as well as always. My fitness pal is fine, right? Yeah, it can be inaccurate, but you know what? They can all be inaccurate. So just be careful, look at the entry. I once tracked lamb chops for a year and found out the entry had zero grams of fat. So if I checked closely, I don't need to know exactly how many grams of fat are in a lamb chop, but it's pretty obvious that they've got some fat. So that should have been...

Jonathan Steedman (09:33.8)

red flags. I always just double check those entries, particularly if you're using them consistently. like the interface for my fitness pal is pretty good. Obviously, the database is huge. I think it's perfectly fine to use if you like it. For a much higher level of detail. I really love chronometer, CRONO meter. Now, unfortunately, the flip side of that is because the database is insanely detailed. That's that's the best thing about it. The database is very reliable and very detailed means it's a much smaller much

more tightly controlled database. So you're gonna run into more instances where you have to manually add your nutrition information for food because it's not gonna exist in that database. So just keep that in mind. If you wanna move into like an AI coaching kind of app, the two I would recommend, I've used personally Carbon, it was good. And I haven't used MacroFactor, but the guys who made it I trust implicitly. So I would be picking either of those, they kind of give you.

They adjust your calories and stuff like that based on your inputs. And so if that's something you're looking for, I would go for those two apps. So yeah, that's how I would track if you're going to track. Please don't think that it's an essential part of the process. But I've also seen a little bit too much conversation around like tracking is bad and tracking is dangerous. And that's just not true for a lot of people. For some people it is, and for others it's not. Know thyself, pick the right tool for the right job. And above all, if you're going to track, particularly for the first time, plan ahead.

Plan your day ahead, don't track as you go. Alright, I'll see you next time.