Tracking Food Without Tracking Macros 66/84

So bottom line of food tracking, tracking macros works. It just does, assuming you're doing it right and willing to weigh and measure all of your food for the rest of your life. If you want to lose weight tracking macros will help, if you want to gain weight tracking macros will help. I still start all of my new clients out by giving them a macro based plan because if they follow it they will make progress. The issue comes in when you have a client who just hates doing it. Sure, you could tell them to suck it up and just do it, but I think that makes you bad at your job. As a personal trainer, your job is to find a good nutrition and workout plan that your clients enjoy and will STICK TO. If they don't like it they won't do, that's the truth. It doesn't matter how amazing and perfect that plan you wrote is, if they don't like it it's not happening. If this is the case, I always have a backup plan.

So, you come across someone who hates logging all of their food into a phone app, what do they do? Are they doomed to be fat and unhealthy forever? Of course not, we just need to find a different way to track. Probably the simplest way is just to write your food in a notebook, not amounts or calories, just what you ate and when. This alone can be pretty eye opening for what people are actually eating. Another good way that I love is the "measuring" techniques taught by Precision Nutrition. These techniques involve using your hand as your only measuring tool for you food each meal. I would recommend Googling the pictures to get a visual but I'll obviously explain here (I don't want to post them because they're not mine).

Protein - Palm sized
Veggies - Fist sized
Carbs - Cupped hand
Fat - Thumb length

As a starting point, men should aim for 2 of each of those per meal and women should aim for 1 of each. Use this as a baseline then you can adjust as needed throughout a Bulk or a Cut. Just as with macros, I would suggest you start by increasing or decreasing fat as you go. All of the other procedures still apply such as make protein and veggies a priority, get your intraworkout shake and spread your food out evenly.

The whole point of this post is that there is more than one way to do just about everything in this field. The other point is that we need to be able to learn good habits so that we don't HAVE to relay on things like My Fitness Pal and Fit Bit to tell us what we're doing is right, we just know it. You need to be able to develop the skills needed to be healthy without the over complicated technology. Personally, I've dropped about 20 pounds in the past few months without tracking a single day in my phone. Was my Cut optimal? I don't know, but I've retrained plenty of lean body mass and my body fat is way down, so I'd call it a success.