Fitness Tracking, Your Training And Food Intake
Don’t underestimate the value of fitness tracking! By tracking your progress in your diet and/ training, you will notice the result of your 
training or dieting sooner; this will also help you understand and appreciate the compound effect that may be working against you and give you new insights on how to get it to work in your favour.
I am not saying that you should always track every calorie, but I do think that it is a good idea for everyone to be made aware of the sometimes devastating effects that can be caused by not understanding what too much of the wrong foods can do to you, as well as how these small bad habits can add up to a huge problem over time.
This article is primarily aimed at helping you get an overview of your diet, but the knowledge that you’ll gain can also be applied to your training.
Fitness Tracking And The Compound Effect
If you are tracking how far you run, how long your route takes you, or your heart rate on your cardio sessions; if you are tracking the calories you are eating each day, the weight you are lifting in your resistance training sessions, etc., you will become more aware of what it takes to reach your goals and you will start to appreciate the effect of the small increments of development that are being compounded to make those big milestones of progress. Most people will use fitness tracking in this way already.
There are other forms of fitness tracking that are not so widely used, such as tracking diet. There is a lot we can learn about our fitness level by the food that we eat; Take a look at this example:
If you drink a can of cola containing 140 calories every day of the week, you will have consumed 980 calories by the end of the week. If you keep this up for a month, you will have knocked back around 3920 calories.
This, to me, is shocking, as the recommended daily allowance for an average person ranges from 2000 — 2800 calories per day; and if you look at the amount of useless calories that are coming from this single seemingly harmless drink each day, it is nearly 2 days’ worth of food at the end of a month.
This is an example of the compound effect really kicking in. So, even if we just cut this down to ½ a can of cola per day, or a can every other day, we will be consuming 1960 calories at the end of the month coming solely from this fizzy drink. This means we will have saved 1960 calories merely by cutting our intake in half. If you cut the useless drink out altogether, you will have saved yourself a whopping 51100 calories in a year!
Now, I will point out again that this is a single can of cola per day, and which does not provide any useful nutrition for your body. If you did not track these calories going into you, you would not know where that massive chunk of calories came from.
This is just one small factor that may not have been evident without tracking your food intake, but hopefully, this has outlined the importance of the fitness tracking process and you can now appreciate how valuable it is when it comes to exposing the hidden foods (or even habits) that are not helping you.
So, you can see that the small changes that are applied to your lifestyle can have a great effect over time, and these can be either negative or positive.
Make Yourself Aware Of Your Actions with fitness tracking
If you are on a diet and looking for fat loss tips to help you along, or you’re thinking of starting one for whatever reason — to lose a bit of weight or gain some lean muscle — I believe that if you are aware of what you are pushing into your face on a regular day-to-day basis, you will have a much greater understanding of why you are in the position of needing to lose those weight in the first place.
If you are looking to gain some lean muscle, and already have a diet to follow, you will become more aware of the meals you have missed or substituted with bad food choices. You will also begin to see just how often this happens and it may shock you to realize how “un- strict” you are! Again, you may expose habits that you did not know you had.
The average joe will not know exactly what they eat on a day-to-day basis and wont use any form of fitness tracking. Also, most people will forget about the doughnut here and fizzy drink there. Now, as we saw earlier, all of these will eventually add up.
A great way to increase your knowledge and become aware of your calorie intake each day is to track what you are eating. I mean, become a “proper job’s worth” and carry a notepad and pen around with you, and write down everything you eat and drink every day for at least 2 weeks. I mean, everything without exception!
By employing this fitness tracking method, you will become very aware of the hidden junk that you are consuming. If you had not been keeping track, you would not have noticed or remembered that you ate so and so that other day. But when it is down on paper, it becomes very clear to you when things are not right.
If everything is tracked, you will get to the point where you actually decide that you don’t want that extra doughnut or those few Pringles you were offered at the office, just because you don’t want to enter it in your note book.
Now when this happens, you will actually be cutting back on the bad calories without even trying, or you may even chose the healthier option in the canteen at lunch time simply because it looks better in your note book.
If I wanted to lose all of my extra fat or someone asked me for help with their fat loss program and they were serious about it, the first thing I would do, before sorting myself or “my client” out with a diet plan, is to have them document everything that they ate for a week as part of their daily life (without trying to cut back on anything) and, of course, be 100% honest about it.
The honesty would give us more valuable information to work with. With this information, we can proceed to highlight in red all of the bad choices. Many people will be able to do this on their own without having to sit down with a dietician (we all know the basics of good and bad food).
I would advise, if you are going to try this on your own, that you document your food intake for, at least, two weeks. The longer you stick to it, the more valuable the information will become and the more aware you will become of the food choices that you subconsciously make.
To Sum Up
If you are going to give these fat loss tips a go and use this fitness tacking idea, get yourself a small note pad/journal that can be taken with you wherever you go.
Track everything you are eating to expose bad eating habits that would have otherwise slipped unnoticed.
Write down everything you eat on a day-to-day basis for, at least, 2 weeks. Be 100% honest and remember to include drinks. Remember that tea and coffee also sometimes contain sugar, so they are just as important. Be a “job’s worth” person: If it goes in your mouth, write it in the book!
After the two weeks is complete, highlight in red the bad food choices on your notes, identify the accompanying bad habits and work to finding alternative good habits to replace them.
You will be surprised at how much these fat loss tips and tracking of your food intake will aid your weight loss program or weight training.
If there are any questions that I’ve not addressed or you would like to share thoughts and experiences, please leave a comment. As always, I am happy to help out wherever I can.
Good Luck, and Stay Motivated!
If you are interested in fitness motivation, check out my latest book, Fitness And Exercise Motivation. If you follow the information in this book, you simply cannot fail!
Check it out here:
Please, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about health, fitness, etc. I will always do my best to get back to you.
All the best,
Jim