The Tracking Tightrope
Tracking all of your food can be be tricky and it can easy to become overwhelmed when trying to be exact.
This is why it’s good to understand the how accurate you need to be, depending on your goal.
A good analogy is the wide path to the tight rope.
The leaner you become, the more restricted you need to be and the less leeway or margin for error you have (walking a tight rope). Whereas if you just start your new healthy eating regime, then you don’t need to be too accurate (the wide path). lIkewise, if your goal is weight gain and performance then your margin for error will be far greater.
This is the reason I have come up with the “habit based”, “pretty good", “good" and “excellent" approach to tracking.
1. The Habit based approach - Rather than focus on tracking. Continue to add new habits into your routine by using the habit builder section. By building in new habits like eating more vegetables, eating more protein, drinking more water will in itself bring about change.
2. Pretty good - the most important factor to get right whether it be body composition or performance is ensuring you eat the right amount. This is why your initial focus should be on overall calories and not to worry about hitting your macronutrients
Your target - aim to be within 100 kcals of your daily calories.
To calculate your kcals, use our free macro calculator or book in for an RMR test - https://www.boxnutrition.co.uk/free-calculator
3. Good - Once you have begun to get a feel for the amount of calories you need to be eating, you should then focus on hitting your protein targets, as is the most important macronutrient to get enough of.
Target - hit your protein within -+ 5g and -+100 kcals of your calorie target.
4. Best - Once you have become comfortable with hitting your protein and calorie targets, you can then start considering your fat and carbohydrates numbers. Although this ratio doesn’t matter much for body composition, we want to get enough carbohydrates to fuel your training and help with recovery.
Target - hit your target kcals by -+100, hit your protein/carbs -+10 and your fat -+5g
So your task is to pick which strategy you want to focus on and do that. As you become more comfortable with hitting these targets, attempt to scale up to the next strategy.
Remember we’re not looking to do this forever, just the more you can learn about the food that you’re eating now, the easier it becomes to be intuitive later down the line.
Need more help implementing this strategy, then make sure you check out the 90 day challenge, or contact us for coaching options - Register for the next challenge - https://boxnutrition.clickfunnels.com/box-squad-sp29513017
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