Read this before our call
Most women who tell me "I eat healthy and I'm still not losing" have never actually measured what they eat. Not because they're hiding anything. Guessing is just really hard, and almost everyone guesses low.
Tracking takes the guessing out. It's not a punishment and it's not forever. Think of it like checking your bank balance before deciding you can't afford groceries. You want the real number before you change anything.
The first week is clunky. By week two most women are logging a whole day in under 5 minutes.
Get set up
You need three things:
- A tracking app. MyFitnessPal, Cronometer and MacroFactor all work. Pick one and stick with it. The best app is the one you'll open.
- A digital kitchen scale. About $15 to $25. Grams are more accurate than cups and spoons, especially for things like rice, peanut butter and oil.
- One protein target. Take your goal body weight in pounds and multiply by 0.7 to 1. That's your daily protein in grams. A 150 lb goal means roughly 105 to 150 grams.
Notice what's missing: a calorie target. For your first week, don't set one. Log what you normally eat and we'll set your number from your real data, not a calculator's guess. Calculators can be off by a few hundred calories either way, and that can be the whole deficit.
Macros in plain English
"Macros" just means the three things food is made of. Each one has a set number of calories per gram:
| Macro | Calories per gram | What it does for you | Where you find it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protein | 4 | Keeps your muscle, keeps you full | Meat, fish, eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, tofu, protein powder |
| Carbs | 4 | Fuel for training and daily energy | Rice, potatoes, oats, bread, fruit, beans |
| Fat | 9 | Hormones, flavor, absorbing some vitamins | Oil, butter, nuts, cheese, avocado, fatty meats |
Alcohol is a fourth one at 7 calories per gram, with none of the benefits. Just saying.
At the start, only care about two numbers: total calories and protein. Hit your protein most days and let carbs and fat fall where they land. Once that's easy, we can fine-tune the rest together.
How to log it properly
- Weigh food raw when you can, and pick a raw entry in the app. Cooked weights change depending on how long you cooked them.
- Scan barcodes for packaged food, then check the serving size against what you actually ate. One "serving" of chips is a hilariously small number of chips.
- Choose entries carefully. Lots of app entries are user-made and wrong. Look for a green check or a verified tag, or use a generic entry like "chicken breast, raw."
- Enter recipes once. Put a family recipe into the recipe builder, set the number of servings, and log one serving.
- At restaurants, look up the chain's own nutrition info. For a local spot, log the closest match and add a tablespoon of oil, because restaurant food is cooked in more of it than you think.
The mistakes I see most:
- Not logging cooking oil, butter and dressings.
- Not logging bites, tastes and the kids' leftovers.
- Logging a "medium" banana when it was a large one.
- Logging Monday to Friday and taking the weekend off.
- Logging from memory at night instead of when you eat.
Make it fast
- Save your regular meals. If your breakfast is the same 4 days a week, that's one tap, not four entries.
- Log ahead. Put tomorrow's food in tonight. Then you're not deciding anything, just following your own plan, and it shows you whether there's room for dessert before you've eaten it.
- Copy yesterday. Most apps let you copy a whole meal or day. Then just edit what changed.
- Don't chase perfect. Logging 80 to 90% of your food accurately, every day, beats logging 100% for three days and quitting. When you can't weigh something, estimate and move on.
A bad log is fixable. A blank one isn't.
Reading your numbers
Once you've got 2 weeks of logs plus morning weigh-ins, you can actually read what's happening:
- Work out your average daily calories for the week, and your average weight for the week.
- Compare this week's average weight to last week's. Ignore single days. One salty dinner can add 2 pounds of water overnight.
- If your average weight held steady while you averaged, say, 1,900 calories, that's roughly your maintenance. That's your real number, with no calculator involved.
- For fat loss, aim about 300 to 500 calories under that. Hold it for 2 to 3 weeks before you judge.
- Only change one thing at a time, and only after 2 or 3 flat weeks of averages and waist measurements.
This is the part people struggle with most, and it's a big chunk of what we do together in coaching.
Your 7-day tracking starter
Before our call
Bring whatever you've logged, even if it's only 2 days. Then have a think about these:
- Have you tracked before? What made you stop?
- Which part felt hardest this week: weighing, finding entries, or remembering?
- Did anything you logged surprise you?
On the call we'll go through your numbers together and turn them into targets that fit your life.
See you on the call.
Aaron