Tracking your diet

[jimm]

From here on out im tracking every thing i eat/drink through the day..

I guess iv been at this for 3 years now and its time i stepped up the diet game.


How important is it to you guys to track everything you eat cals/protein/fats ect..?

i guess ive been sloppy in terms of, not keeping trck of what i eat i want to know exactly what im eating how much of it ect.

 

[Powermaster]

It depends on your goals. If you are going to compete, yes it is very important and a great habit to get into.

For me: http://www.ironmagazineforums.com/2708101-post9.html

 

[~RaZr~]

Overall, it is good to track it. Once you hit your "maintenance" calories and the weight isn't decreasing, then what are you going to do?

 

[hypo_glycemic]

From here on out im tracking every thing i eat/drink through the day..

I guess iv been at this for 3 years now and its time i stepped up the diet game.


How important is it to you guys to track everything you eat cals/protein/fats ect..?

i guess ive been sloppy in terms of, not keeping trck of what i eat i want to know exactly what im eating how much of it ect.

If you're competing, you definitely want tracking of baseline and tough diet. Especially when your 6-8 weeks out! And when you go brain dead from prep, you have notes for next show..

 

[sassy69]

If you're competing, you definitely want tracking of baseline and tough diet. Especially when your 6-8 weeks out! And when you go brain dead from prep, you have notes for next show..

This. IMO its good to have a basic idea of how much you're consuming. If its cheat day & you're out to shitload, go for it. But when you're setting up a continuous schedule, its easy to put a typical day's meal plan into a food counts program like FitDay - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal and get your baseline numbers. You also get an idea of portion size and associated macro numbers so you can easily ballpark your total cals if you need to make changes on the fly or work w/ what is available. For ex, 35 g of protein ~ 4-5 oz chicken / 6 oz fish /4 oz lean steak - all of these I can eyeball, typically to within 1/2 oz at this point. Same w/ my usual per meal complex carb servings ~ 30 g carb = 3-4 oz yam = 1/2 c oats = 1/2 c brown rice, etc.

If you don't have a couple of rules of thumb like this, just guessing people usual way over eat or under eat to the estimated cals they think they are getting.

 

[patricio]

In my case, the only way to lose weight is to track calories very carefuly. I use DailyBurn, it has free phone apps which let me count on the go

 

[ryl515]

I have a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I use to record:

Date
Weight upon waking
Weightlifting/time
Cardio/time
Food name/portion size/time
Total calories
Carbs
Protein
Fat
Sugar

It is especially helpful now that I am doing a CKD. When your weight changes from the day before, you can look at the macros to figure out how that impacted any changes.

 

[jimm]

thanks guys, my goal is always the same i want to add as muscle lean muscle as possible...

i have no plans to compete just bodybuild because i love it..

 

[MuscleGauge1]

There are some really cool mobile apps for tracking your diet. If your not fancy you can always old-school print your diet out and just log it