Do You Need to Track Calories?

Is calorie tracking worth it?

Tracking food has had a huge surge in popularity recently. It has quickly become the default strategy for Coaches and Fitness Fanatics to get results. But is it needed? Here's your answer. 

Tracking is always going to be more accurate than not-tracking. However, tracking can often be too invasive of a strategy to work in many peoples lives. It doesn't align with how they want to live their lives. And, if done wrong, it can gloss over very important discussions regarding quality of food. 

In order to get a personalised strategy, we have to ask a couple of important questions:

1. What does the person value and what do they want to get out of nutrition? Do they want to lead a healthier life? Or do they want to perform at the highest level? These are very different situations that often necessitate very different solutions. 
2. Where is the person on their "nutrition journey" and what is their past experience? Different points in the journey often need different strategies. 

But here's the gist. 

If you're a busy person with a life outside of fitness, and you want to improve your nutrition to feel better and drop a couple kg's - there are often many less invasive strategies that will get you what you want. These include: 
- Portion sizing (large servings of Plants and Protein)
- Limiting highly processed foods (Chips, Chocolate etc) 
- Practising eating to 80% full 

Often, those will be enough. 

However there are some situations where you may want to track. 
- If you're wanting to drastically change your physique. 
- If you've been training for a while and need another level of accuracy to further improve. 
- If you want to learn about the calorie density of the food you eat (which will be useful even if you stop. tracking later on). 
- If you're trying to perform at the highest level in sports/competition. 

That was just a brief overview on the topic. If you want to dive in further, simply leave a comment below! Alternatively, book in with the team- we’d love to give you a hand constructing your own nutrition strategy. 

Isaac.