Real-time Tracking for Food Foundations

Don't wait until Monday - you can start this now

Tracking food intake has the greatest return on investment for both time and effort when you are getting things started (or restarted).

The best way to improve your food intake is to understand what it looks like right now. Most people think they have a pretty good understanding of what’s going in, but when they track their intake over a week or so, they are surprised by their actual consumption.

The challenge is we eat quite frequently - 3-6 times a day for most people - so it’s hard to remember everything we ate over the past week if we try to recall it. This leads us to rely on our typical intake or what we think we should be eating.

So if we typically eat tuna and rice for lunch during the week, when trying to remember what we ate last Thursday, we often assume that’s what we ate. The longer the timeframe, the more likely we will replace actual intake with aspirational intake. 

The issue with inaccurate food recall is that it can make a new strategy harder than it needs to be. If you recall two meals of tuna and rice that were actually schnitzel and chips, there could be 700 kcal of additional food intake you are missing for last week (100 kcal/day).

By underreporting intake, any changes are then made at that lower intake. So if we remove 300 kcal/day from the underreported intake, it’s a total of 400kcal/day from the actual intake. 

While this can be good for accelerating change, it’s not great for facilitating adherence because the actual changes are greater than anticipated (33% higher). And we all know that adherence is critical to getting results.

So this week, I’m going to run through how to track and analyse your food intake so you can begin making changes to improve it from tomorrow.

How to track - food recall v real-time tracking

Food recall involves sitting down and trying to remember everything you ate over the past week. It’s often inaccurate due to portion sizes being hard to recall, our bias to eliminate bad foods and general forgetfulness.

Dietitians trained in food interviewing have been shown to underestimate food recall by 10% and this goes up to 25% for the general population. 

Most people will use food recall when they want to get started but don’t want to delay progress by spending a week tracking their intake in real-time. Whilst I understand the importance of acting while motivated, taking the time to understand intake using real-time tracking is much better for long-term adherence and results.

Real-time tracking is the best way to understand intake. I have been using real-time tracking with all new clients since 2016. 

It is a simple, effective and accurate method to understand our food intake and provide a base for future changes. Real-time tracking makes it easier to estimate portion sizes and ensure all food intake is captured.

We can still omit food intake from our tracking, but we have to make this decision more frequently (multiple times a day) than food recall (once). I can also ask clients the question ‘was there anything you found yourself frequently omitting?’ and anything that comes up is probably the place to start building strategies.

There are plenty of food tracking apps such as Easy Diet Diary and My Fitness Pal alongside using a notes app, spreadsheet or pen and paper. It doesn’t matter what you use - just pick something accessible and convenient.

The benefit of food tracking apps is they will analyse nutrition information such as energy, carbs, fat and protein, but this doesn’t matter for most people getting started. All you need is an accurate and objective representation of your food intake that you can review to start making changes.

How to analyse - review what’s going in 

Once you’ve got some data, it’s time to analyse it. I can give you a nutrition calculator or help calculate optimal nutrition intake for your goals, but that’s not where most people start.

The first thing to take note of is what’s different to your expectations. This provides a handy insight into why the current routine might not work and where it needs to be tightened up.

Most people are surprised by how many additional snacks they consume and how frequently they eat out. We tend to think we eat out once or twice per week, but then looking at actual intake, it was 4-6 times over that timeframe. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - it just gives more insight into the routine. Instead of eating out less, the change might be to find healthier options for when you do eat out. This allows the routine to stay mostly similar while still optimising nutrition intake. 

You can take your analysis down to the finer levels of nutrition intake such as energy and macronutrient intake. 

However, my general approach is to focus on broad nutritional changes (i.e. add a healthier meal out or snack less) until these no longer deliver results. Then we can focus on energy and macronutrient targets. 

Most people can get pretty good results by focusing on broad nutritional changes. Macronutrients become important when getting abs or performance goals are required, but most people are happy just getting a bit leaner and feeling more energised.

How to change - find easy changes (low-hanging fruit)

Remember: fewer changes help facilitate adherence for most people.

Let’s say we want to cut energy intake by 10%, there are a couple of ways we could do this.

We could keep food intake the same and reduce every portion by 10%. This is simple, but it takes a bit of work to ensure intake is accurately reduced (usually weighing foods for a week or so).

Alternatively, we could look at some of the bigger intakes over the week. Most of the time this means we are looking at targeting snacks, junk food or eating out.

If you’ve found a muffin or few biscuits are creeping in alongside your afternoon tea or coffee, even though you aren’t hungry, these can be an easy fix. Most people find it easier to pull these out of the diet and leave everything else the same.

Likewise, if you’re eating out more than usual, it’s easier to swap this for something healthier than reducing everything you eat.

Targeting these low-hanging fruit can make adherence simple, as the rest of the nutrition intake remains the same. Start by focusing on these three.

Common low-hanging fruit includes:

• Eliminate juice or soft drink intake

• Eliminate snacking with tea or coffee and eating when preparing meals

• Change eating out habits

Many people get good results just by focusing on managing these three areas. Forget about hitting a protein target, just implement some changes here and your diet will improve.

Our tendency to think we eat better than we do comes with a silver lining - we often know what we should eat and are OK at making that happen. So if we can just do that a little bit more, results will come.

Wrap up

Real-time food tracking is the best place to start if you want to improve your nutrition intake. I’ve been using tracking with all new clients since 2016 and it underpins the body recomposition process. 

If you want a copy of the Base Point Tracking Challenge I use with them, just reply to this email and I’ll send it your way.

The best thing about tracking is you can start now. It doesn’t matter if today has been a good day or not, you simply need to record it, keep going for seven days and then sit down to identify where you can make some changes.

I’ll be talking through more of those changes and building your own strategy throughout the rest of the year, so if you want to work in and start implementing some of these tactics, get tracking today!

---

Q&A

Four months ago, I started keto and running 5km 2-3 weekly. I’ve lost weight and am still losing it. I’m interested to know if fasting (skipping breakfast) before running is more beneficial and at what time after getting back from my run I should eat. Also, do I need extra protein to maximise benefits and recuperation?

Answer

It’s great to hear you’ve found an approach that is adhereable and delivers results. There are three questions to address here, so let’s break them up and address them individually.

Is skipping breakfast before running beneficial?

I’m going to assume the benefit we are looking at is increased fat oxidation, a commonly purported benefit of exercising while fasted. The idea is: if you haven’t eaten, the body has to tap into fat stores to fuel the activity.

The reality is it doesn’t work like that. Whether the body burns carbohydrates or fat is determined by exercise intensity. Both are stored in the body and can be released to fuel activity as required.

So if you run at an intensity where carbohydrate is the predominant fuel (>70% maximum heart rate), then carbohydrate stores will be used. It sounds simple, but this is where it gets confusing.

The fasting idea is that if no stored carbohydrate is stored, then fat must be used as fuel. This is correct.

However, if no carbohydrates are available, exercise intensity will drop to a level where fat oxidation can fuel the activity (<60% of maximum heart rate).

This often happens to people running marathons who don’t consume enough carbohydrates during the event. They deplete their carbohydrate stores and then suffer from a significant decrease in pace as fat becomes the primary fuel source.

This is known as ‘hitting the wall’.

You might think running slower is a hack to burn more fat. However, slower running does more fat as a fuel source, but it also burns less energy over the same period.

It’s better to focus on managing energy balance in a way that works for you and keep building your running fitness over time than trying to optimise training for fuel utilisation.

Short answer: no, skipping breakfast before running is not beneficial to changing body composition. 

What time after getting back should you eat?

This depends on personal preference and food tolerance. Some people find exercise causes some intestinal discomfort and prefer to wait at least an hour after exercise to eat.

Running is a culprit for many people due to the repetitive bouncing, especially if you’ve tipped a warm coffee into your stomach before stepping out. 

However, if you tolerate food well, then it’s best to eat what suits your schedule. Meal timing will have little impact on performance or body composition.

Do you need extra protein to maximise benefits or recuperation?

It’s impossible to answer without knowing the current protein intake. Generally speaking, running 5km 2-3 times a week will not ramp up protein demands. So if your intake is already sufficient, you should be fine.

Thanks for the question and I hope that helps.

---