In module 6 we spoke at length about the various methods with which you can track your food intake and other lifestyle factors along with the ways in which you can use this data to make decisions around what to do next. We then moved on to some key discussion points around the idea of dietary flexibility and clearly stated our position on these. As a brief summary, you learned:
You can consider your required tracking accuracy to fall within one of three bands:
- Level A: Tracking portions and adherence to your approach
- Level B: Tracking calories while adhering roughly to level A style meal building for the most part, unless you are proficient enough to consume your food in fewer meals or in a more sporadic and snack-based fashion while still meeting your needs
- Level C: Broken down into further brackets, but essentially tracking protein and calories or all three macronutrients as well as calories, probably using an app
- With all three approaches, planning your food is a good idea. This applies most for level A then less and less as your tracking becomes more accurate because you can adapt as you go more easily when you have all the available information
- You don’t have to track forever, and while tracking you don’t always have to use the same manner of tracking – you could be loose and then track more accurately in the run up to an event for which you’d like to lose weight, for example
- Misreporting calories is extremely common and you should be aware of it
- You can also track your weight, your measurements, your habits (desirable or undesirable), your menstrual cycle if you have one, your sleep and your gym progress. There are other things you could track, too, but this is a pretty comprehensive list of what would be useful for managing your body composition and health insofar as nutrition can impact it
- You can use the information on the food you’ve eaten and the impact that this has had to make informed choices on what to do next
- Being flexible with food choices is important, with a greater amount of flexibility being afforded by a greater amount of tracking rigidity