The Convienence Of Food Logging
Understanding the importance of tracking food is a discipline that most serious weightlifters have become accustomed with over time. With the inclusion of innovative apps on smartphone devices, there are now convienent methods to record your meals without breaking out a pad and pencil.
Some of the new apps like OpenFit or See You Fit allow you to scan your food and instantly upload the data to a food journal saved to your device. Having seemless access to your food journal with such little effort helps avoid the task of micronutrient, macronutrient, and calorie counting or stepping on the weight scale often.
When most individuals rely on calorie counting, it tends to make their relationship with food a very negative one and sticking to their diet nearly impossible. This is one of the reasons why I stress using the portion size method for calculating meals consumed for clients (see How to Properly Use The Portion Sizing Method).
Although the process of scanning food to your phone has become very straightforward over the past few years, food labels can often deceive us into thinking that the information printed on nutrition labels are 100% accurate (see The Deception of Nutrition Labels).
Becoming less reliant on labels and being more in tune with our sound judgement is the best way to make smarter choices with our food.
How to Use Food Logging When Consuming Meals
Portion sizes at each meal becomes a priority when you’re preparing a plate or eating packaged foods that have serving sizes printed on them. When you ignore portion sizes and just consume food, this can become problematic as there’s no account to know whether your in a caloric surplus or caloric deficit.
Although I don’t recommend counting calories, calories are important to keep accountability in order to reach your goals of fat loss or building muscle. If you’re further away from your goals, you can simply had more portions to your plate or have less to adjust for the proper amount of calories needed.
Photo logging makes this process very simple, as recording food is a daily habit and you can account for all the food consumed in the week visually. When your dieting or putting on weight, the amount of food consumed for the week makes the difference, rather than what you ate in a day.
To keep account of your food using the photo logging method, review all your meals where you have your photos saved and review the serving sizes for what you ate during the week. Now use a measurement tool of your preference (weight scale, measurement tape, body calipers) to determine whether you’re making progress in the right direction.
If your not losing weight or not making any gains, adjust the portion sizes on your plate to meet your desired outcome. It make take a week or two to adjust the servings right, but as you continue to photo log it will become easier with more experience.
Why People Have Difficulty Losing Weight
While many individuals adhere to diets that extremely calorie restrictive or with very strict protocols in general, weight loss still continues problem for the masses and is a constant struggle (see Why Your Dieting Style is Mostly Irrelevant).
Most weight loss struggles come from serving sizes not being accurately measured, not from the quality of food that’s consumed. Many individuals have lost weight using junk food or fast food diets in the past.
When serving sizes are much larger than we assume, this can throw us of with our physique goals as we’re consuming more calories. This typically occurs when dining out at restaurants and bars on a frequent basis. Restaurants offer larger plate sizes for their meals to make customers feel justified for paying the steep prices of their food.
The larger portion sizes from restaurants skew our perceptions for portion sizes at home as we become accustomed to larger meals and we eat more food than normal.
The second problem with our diets is the packaged foods that we often consume. Most individuals don’t adhere to the recommended serving sizes listed on the nutrition labels, as no one will actually count the amount of chips eaten or measure of the exact amount of tablespoons of peanut butter each time they consume it.
Serving sizes also change over time. The size of a fountain drink cup has increased twofold since 1990 and many other foods have increased vastly as well.
The Wrap Up
Photo logging is one of the most convenient methods to keep account of your diet and accurately measure the foods that you’re consuming. In combination with portion sizing, this keeps consumers less reliant on nutrition labels that are often not accurate and cause individuals to overeat foods. Controlling how much you eat is much easier task than controlling the quality of foods on your plate, as you can see visually what’s going in your body.
What else do you want to know?
Why Your Dieting Style Is Irrelevant
The Deception Behind Nutrition Labels
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