Calorie Tracking Tips

Who else is planning on using My Fitness Pal again this year?! 🙋🏻‍♂️

Here’s a few tips to help you out:

* Don’t add your exercise. It’s usually wildly inaccurate and generally says you’ve burned way more than you have (don’t shoot the messenger!) With some calorie tracking watches if you stick your arm out the window whilst driving it thinks you’re burning calories for fun!

* Don’t trust the bar code scanner! Always double check the nutrition label. Once I scanned a fat free yogurt and it came up as chocolate mousse. Ok maybe it was a chocolatemousse! but still double check label matches.

* Finish the week. If your goal is weight loss and you’ve tracked so well for 5 days, keep going to the end of the week. It’s easy to ruin all of your hard work over the weekend, even if you’re allowing yourself a few more cals. It’s great to be able to see your 7 day calorie average to get a true picture of your intake over a full week.

* Don’t obsess over macros. If your goal is weight loss then your total calories and a good amount of protein is all you need to focus on. The carbs and fats can move around but as long as you’re under your calorie target (calorie deficit) and you’re keeping yourself full with high protein, it’s all good.

* Don’t use the pre set calorie calculator. My Fitness Pal doesn’t really know anything about you! and often suggests quite a bit less than you can have. More often than not you’re much better off with trial and error. If you’ve tracked for 10 days and not lost any weight, bring your calories down by 50-100 per day.

* Check you’re inputting the correct values. They don’t always make it easy for you. Check the label and make sure it’s the same on My Fitness Pal. Some items are cheeky and only show 25% of the calories when we all know you’ve munched the whole thing but only inputted a quarter of the calories consumed.

* It’s never going to be 100% perfect. Especially if you cook a lot of home made meals. There’s nothing wrong with you inputting one of the default Roast dinners for example. The more you use the app the better you become at knowing what a 300 or 500 calorie meal looks like.