Tracking: Why do it?

What should I track? How should I track? Is it worth my time?

You can choose to write things down on a sticky note, a journal, a notepad in your phone or use a mobile app. However you want to do it, it’s so important to record your habits. It’s very easy to get caught up in how you think your progress is going based on how you’re feeling in the moment, but having a set of data that you can refer to over a period of time really helps to see trends in the data that you may have missed. When you’re so focused on the here and now, it’s easy to miss things that are right in front of you. Be honest when you track, whether you’re doing well or not so your data will be as accurate as possible.

Take the judgement out of it.

You’re not tracking just so you can see a perfect trend of how well you’re doing. You’ll want to see positive and negative trends when you track. This means logging the days you didn’t meet your water goal. Logging the days you overate. Logging the days you didn’t sleep. Looking at all of these factors from a high level will help you see patterns in your behaviour often time and help you make better decisions for yourself. Don’t beat yourself up for bad days, just note them down and move on. No one is perfect and it’s going to take many times to get things right. Don’t beat yourself up when you fail, just get back up and carry on.

Tracking Water

Choose a water goal and decide how you want to track it. For me, I aim to drink 64oz of water every day and I use a planner with a habit tracker to mark this daily goal off as complete or not. I know that by 2PM, I should have drank 32oz of water and by 8PM I should be done. I’ve found it very helpful to use a water bottle with time stamps on the side to help me gauge how much water I should have drank by a certain time of the day, to avoid chugging a whole bunch of water right before bed.

To start off tracking water, I only aimed to hit 32oz of water a day and slowly upped my water intake. This made it much more manageable than starting off trying to drink 64oz of water.

Tracking Food

Tracking your food is very overwhelming to do at first. When I first started to track my food, I only tracked my dinners since they were usually different every day and were usually my biggest meal. I would eat the same lunch and snacks daily and just my dinners would be different. It was very eye opening to see how many calories I would consume. Most of the food I eat is whole food made at home however my portion sizes were HUGE. Sometimes I would be eating way too much of a calorie dense food and have no idea, thinking it wasn’t as much as it was. Tracking my food took away the guess work and made it easy to see why I have been gaining weight most of my life.

I started using a food journal to track just the calories of each meal I would eat. I would measure out everything and write it down in my book and tally it up at the end of the day. Over time, this started to feel cumbersome to always carry this book around and calculate my food. I also wanted to know how much fiber and protein I was eating every day since I started to pay attention to my calories in eat in a calorie deficit.

Cronometer

I switched to using a mobile app called Cronometer which shows you how many calories are in your food, then breaks it down into macro and micronutrients for you. It was so simple to use since 99% of the foods that I would eat with a barcode were easy to scan into the app to track. Now I was able to see my protein and fiber intake and set goals for them. It feels like a game now where I try to hit those targets while staying in a calorie deficit. It’s no longer overwhelming for me to track my food and I enjoy seeing exactly what I am consuming every day.

Tracking Sleep

Sleep is very important for weight loss. It is probably one of the most underrated tools in my arsenal. I started to notice on days when I didn’t get enough sleep, I would eat more calories. I would be more impulsive when it came to food decisions and I would be more suspectable to over eating. It felt like I didn’t care about my diet as much on those days and you can bet I was not moving much on those days either. By tracking my sleep, I was able to see these patterns and work on improving how much sleep I was getting, and keeping it consistent. When you feel your best, it’s much easier to make better decisions for yourself.

Tracking your cycle

I’ve always tracked my menstrual cycle but I never paid attention to how the different phases would affect me. I now understand that when I am in the luteal phase, I almost always feel like I was failing to meet any of my goals, gaining weight and just overall out of control. I would be tired, more easily overwhelmed and not want to track anything. On the flip side, when I am in my follicular and ovulatory phase, I am a powerhouse to be reckoned with. I am on top of my game. Everything feels easier, I have more energy and patience. I usually have no problem being in a calorie deficit around this time.

Knowing this information helps me to prepare for when I may need extra sleep, when I should take it easy on myself if I’m having a hard time with my calorie deficit and when I should push myself to do more activities. It’s by no means an excuse to binge eat one day but it does help me to understand why I feel the way I do and also to know that these feelings with pass and I will be back to myself soon.

Tracking your exercise

I use a Samsung Active 2 smart watch to track my activity. I like to see how many steps I get every day, even if that currently isn’t a focus or goal of mine right now. The more weight that I lose, the easier it is for me to move around so I naturally am moving more than I used to. It’s also great to see the progress I have made when I do the same workout over and over again.

Tracking your weight

There are a lot of great mobile apps out there to track your weight or pen and paper work just fine as well. Since I put a lot of my focus on changing my habits, I looked at my weight as a good indicator if I was doing well with my habit changes or if I needed to switch something up. I only weigh myself once a week since your weight will fluctuate over the span of a couple of days and I am not looking to track my weight fluctuations, just the overall trend of weight over time. Although some people do weigh themselves every day and take the weekly average for the week as their weight, I find seeing the scale go up and down so often very hard to deal with mentally. There are many reasons why the scale may go up and down over the course of a couple of days since our bodies will hold onto water for various reasons or we may be feeling bloated. I try not to get caught up on these changes and just focus on the weekly trends in my weight.

Graphs

I prefer to use a mobile app to track my weight so I can see how the data looks on a graph. This is a great tool to see trends in your data and see what direction the line is going. Whenever I see that I am staying the same or going up, I take a step back and look at what I’ve been doing over the last week. Usually this happens when I have been hanging out with friends and family where I was entertaining or eating foods that I normally don’t eat. It helps to put things into prospective to see patterns like this so I know that my regular routine does work, just time to get back on the horse and start again.

Tracking your measurements

I have been tracking my body measurements every month. At first, this felt useless since I didn’t see much change from month to month. It really wasn’t until I had been doing this tracking for 6 months, did I start to see that how many inches I have lost! I just used a blank page in my planner to write down my measurements, nothing fancy. It’s also handy to have this information written down as you start losing weight to make buying clothes easier since you always have your measurements on hand each month.

Progress Photos

I also take progress photos in the same poses every month. This was kind of similar to taking my body measurements at first since it was very hard to see any difference in the photos from month to month. It wasn’t until 6 months later, did I start to see a difference. The differences were small too, nothing major but it was exciting to see change for the first time in my life. I would not have seen this change just by looking at myself in the mirror on a daily basis and people around me that see me every day also would not have noticed these changes. I could only notice these subtle differences because of the progress photos I was taking and it made everything I have been doing worth it.

Tracking these variables have made this journey a lot easier for me to see trends and correct them as I make progress. In the past, I would only track my weight and wonder why I wasn’t seeing any change. Having this knowledge about myself has made all of the difference for me this time around and has helped me to understand why I can sometimes make poor decisions and other times, I’m killing it. This has been a tough journey so far and I wouldn’t be where I am so far without having this inside knowledge about myself.

If you’re interested in hearing more about my recipe for weight loss, leave a comment below! I have a more tips and tricks to help with tracking, as well as my methods to keep on track with tracking as well!

My Beautiful Life