Whether your goal is to lose weight, gain muscle or you just want to get healthy, counting your calories can be a very useful tool to help you stay on track and to gain awareness of just how much you are eating.
If you have read my post about the 'The benefits of food tracking' and you have decided that it sounds right for you. The next step is learning how to actually start.
There are many ways that you can go about counting calories. The easiest way is to use an app like my fitness pal.
The most common ways I have seen are either adding foods to your app as you eat them and try to make sure you stay within your calorie budget. This way can be challenging because you may eat something early in the day that has more calories than you realised and now you are short for the rest of the day.
The other way I see often is entering everything at the end of the day. I believe that this method is the least effective because it relies on you having to remember exactly what you have eaten during the day, guessing portion sizes, and more often than not, things get missed.
I have found that the most effective method is to plan out your days in advance.
Two ways to do this are:
1. Sit down on the weekend or any other day where you have a little bit of free time and plan out what you will eat for the week then enter it into your app, making sure everything fits into your budget for each day.
From this plan, you can then make up a grocery list and hopefully then only have to make one or two trips to the supermarket for the week. This also helps you to see if there is any food that you can prepare in advance too, such as cutting up vegetables for salads and stir-fries or pre-cooking some of your protein sources such as grilling up a batch of chicken breasts and hard boiling eggs.
I know this sounds like a bit of a pain to do in your spare time, but believe me, it will be worth it when you are tired after a busy day knowing that you don't even have to think about what to cook for dinner and you already have some of the prep work done. It not only saves you a lot of time for the rest of the week but you always have quick healthy options ready to go.
2. If that sounds like too much, the other method I like is to just plan for one day at a time. At night, plan out and enter into your app what you are going to eat the next day with food that you know you have available to you and make sure it fits into your calorie budget.
This method should only take a few minutes each night and the next day all you have to do is follow your plan. It is not as involved as planning out your whole week in advance but still gets the job done.
I hope you found this helpful, if you did, give me a like, and if you have any questions about calorie counting, please leave me a comment below.
If you would like some extra accountability or help on your health and fitness journey contact me for more information, or if you are ready to get started now, fill in my application form to see if we would be a good fit.
