148. Weighing / Logging To Build Awareness with Coach Justin Murphy, BS Nutrition, CPT
In this weeks episode, I sit down to discuss weighing / logging food and why it can be a great tool to help you build awareness around the food quantity side of the equation.
Ugh logging food sucks. We get it...
But, it’s extremely important to learn how to use the tools effectively.
If you have never tried weighing your food and logging it into an app like Myfitnesspal, we would highly recommend doing so. Weighing & measuring food is not something that is meant for you to do for the rest of your life! But, first you must create awareness in your life around your relationship with food and your eating habits.
Be patient with the process! Anything worth learning takes time.
Remember, no matter how hard you try, Myfitnesspal is never 100% accurate so just do your best to log as accurately as possible without stressing yourself out.
Top 5 Rookie Mistakes :)
1.) Treating Myfitnesspal as a coach rather than just a tool...
When you first download Myfitnesspal or any other tracking app, it’s going to ask you for height, weight, etc. DO NOT listen to the recommendations that it gives you in terms of how many calories you should eat in order to reach your goal. Simply use the app to log your food and that’s it. Period. Myfitnesspal is not a nutrition coach, it’s just a semi accurate food logging tool.
2.) Failure to plan...
How many of you log your food throughout the day?
You log breakfast, check your macros and think to yourself, “OMG! My carbs are so high, I guess I can’t eat any more carbs for the rest of the day.” Logging your food throughout the day is one of the fastest ways to create even more stress in your life, especially if you’re new to logging food.
Instead, we recommend planning your day out in advance. The night before or even week before, log your daily or weekly meal plan into MyFitnessPal in order to make hitting your macros consistently a little easier. It’s a small investment of time on the front end that can make your next day way less stressful and will allow you to crush your goals!
3.) Inaccurate entries...
How many of you have chose an entry in Myfitnesspal like “medium chicken breast?”
What does that even mean!? lol
The easiest way to make logging food an even more inaccurate process is failing to actually weigh your food. Small, medium, large, is not going to work well. Instead, choose the entry that allows you to accurately log food at its actual weight in ounces or grams, with grams being the more accurate of the two.
If you don’t have a food scale, go buy one! They’re extremely cheap and remember, they’re just another tool. You don’t need to carry your food scale everywhere, just use it at home when your cooking and meal prepping.
The goal is for you to cook the majority of your food, unless you travel all the time, which we will address later.
4.) Unhealthy relationship with weighing your food & the whole process in general...
Please do not obsess over weighing & measuring your food. At the end of the day, you are simply eating food. Food is supposed to be enjoyable, not stressful. Take a deep breath if you ever get stressed with the process.
When you first start logging your food, you will likely find it frustrating, overwhelming, and frankly quite annoying.
But guess what, after a couple of weeks it gets exponentially easier. You will continue to get better day by day, week after week, month after month until eventually you will not be reliant on these tools anymore. You will eventually gain the ability to eat intuitively because you have created awareness in your life.
Just give it time, enjoy the journey.
5.) Failure to log
The little things really do add up. Do you use cooking oil like olive oil? Do you log that into MyFitnessPal? Did you know that 2 tbsp. of olive oil at breakfast, lunch, and dinner adds up to about ~800 calories!?
Or are you the person that snacks on something small here or there throughout the day and forgets to log it? Did you know that 2 tbsp. night cap of almond butter that you forgot to log had about ~200 calories in it?
The point is, everything that you eat needs to be logged in order to get an honest assessment of calories and macros for the day.
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