Tracking simply means keeping a record of what you are doing and this means it can be applied to a host of different aspects of health, fitness and bodyweight management. Here are a few additional options which may be worthwhile alongside tracking the foods you eat:
The most obvious one here is weight tracking. Your weight is not the be-all-end-all and it is full of issues as a marker of progress, but the fact remains that those who are looking to lose fat will almost without exception need to lose weight. Many will promote the idea that muscle weighs more than fat and this is true, but as you saw in module 1 there is a finite amount of muscle you can gain at any one time, and that means that it’s hugely unlikely you will lose significant amounts of fat but stay the same weight.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t take precautions to ensure the information we are getting is accurate, though. Some tips for weight tracking are:
Write your weight down, and keep track of it because over time it will show you the overall trend, and if you have a month where nothing happens but you can look back and see that over the last 6 months you have lost 20lbs, you’re still winning overall. If you’re really geeky you could even make a spreadsheet and a graph to track the trend line.
Alongside bodyweight it’s a great idea to track your waist circumference as this can be a surrogate measure of your bodyfat. While your bodyweight can go up and down for all sorts of reasons it’s unlikely that your waist will go up during a dieting phase, and so this can be a nice clarification of where things are going right.
To measure use a dressmaker’s measuring tape, ensuring it’s horizontal, and take the measurement at the navel because unlike taking the narrowest or widest points, doing this makes sure you are consistent with your measuring place. If you’re happy to do so, having someone else measure you can make it a lot easier to get the tape right. As above, record this so you can see trends.
In order to live a healthy lifestyle, you don’t just need to improve the foods you eat, you need to alter the habits by which you live your everyday life. Breaking habits is hard, but building them is actually quite easy, you only need to start to consciously do something for long enough for it to become unconscious, and tracking your habits is a nice way to help yourself do this.
A habit is a routine which is done to get a certain reward. You might chew gum because it makes your mouth feel nicer than coffee breath does. You might always drink a coffee in the morning, automatically, because it makes you feel more awake. These rewards aren’t just the tangible thought “that was nice”, but the neurochemically driven, dopaminergically mediated response which is created in your brain. These responses reinforce behaviour and make them easy – how often do you talk yourself in to putting toothpaste on your toothbrush?
The ideal way to live your life is by forming as many automatic good habits (by your estimation and evaluation) as possible while eschewing bad ones, and habit tracking is a great way to do this. Sometimes your habits don’t give you an intrinsic reward once you’ve done them. For example, if you want to get into the habit of reading for half an hour every evening and you manage it, you don’t get the same ‘that was great!’ feeling as you do for spending the same half hour killing some zombies on a games console. This means you need to add in a reward system. Though it may sound immaterial, keeping a habit diary in which you add a tick, happy face, green spot or sticker on each day, for each habit you want to build and have successfully acted out can make a profound difference to your ultimate result. This simple self-reward system is the same one utilised by some fitness trackers that we will mention momentarily – once you reach a goal it flashes and tells you ‘well done!’ and that’s enough to create a burst of dopamine and reinforce the behaviour.
There are almost certainly a multitude of different habits and behaviours you could add into your lifestyle to make it a better one – from reading, meditating, planning and buying food for the week, drinking water, making your bed when you get up, tidying the kitchen once you’re finished dinner, to just about anything else. Many of these will seem irrelevant but the importance of small wins and easy goals will be fully explained in the module on goal setting, and you may be surprised. In short, task yourself to develop 1-3 new habits and reward yourself for every day you manage it. Very quickly, you’ll start to notice you don’t even need to try anymore.
To clarify, this is just for the ladies.
Tracking your menstrual cycle has a host of benefits, and it shouldn’t be thought of as something you do only while planning to start (or grow) a family. During your menstrual cycle, you will store more and less total fluid at various times in accordance with hormonal fluctuations and it’s not unusual to weigh dramatically differently from one week to the next. If you are using bodyweight as a metric and therefore weighing in a few times per week, consider tracking and comparing your cycle week 1 to week 1, cycle week 2 to week 2 and so on, from cycle to cycle, rather than simply going week to week. This should highlight general trends far more effectively.
This is the primary but not only reason to track your cycle. At various times, you will experience more hunger and cravings and being prepared for this can help. Some women find great success increasing their calorie goal slightly on these weeks and decreasing it to compensate on other weeks, for example. As a final consideration, women are approximately 3.5 times more likely to injure an anterior cruciate ligament (in your knee) possibly due to an increase in the hormone relaxin during the days before ovulation. This hormone causes an increased laxity of the connective tissue, possibly resulting in greater injury risk. The practical use for this information is to consider using the premenstrual days as a de-load or lighter training time, as a means of avoiding these issues.
How you sleep, as you will see, can hugely impact your health, happiness and waistline. We won’t go into detail here because there is an entire module devoted to it, but tracking your sleep (when you go to bed, roughly when you go to sleep, what you did for the couple of hours before sleep, when you woke up in the night, when you woke up in the morning, how well you felt you slept and how you felt when you woke up) can be a really useful practice.
As we discussed in module 1, NEAT is a huge component of your TDEE and walking comprises a vast amount of most peoples’ NEAT. Because of this it can be advantageous to keep an eye on it, especially if you are either moving into a calorie deficit or changing job/lifestyle significantly.
In module 1 we discussed the example of a postman and an office worker, who ended up with dramatically different TDEE’s due to their jobs. If that postman is used to eating one way and having a given result but then moves to an office job, his calorie expenditure will therefore drop dramatically, and being cognisant of this fact can help him alter the food choices he makes.
Similarly, those in a calorie deficit (or those starting a new training regime which is more difficult than anything they have previously done) may feel fatigued and may as a result walk less. By setting a step goal you can keep your day-to-day activity levels relatively high, intentionally, perhaps leading to a far better result. Moreover, if you are brand new to exercise it can be completely life changing to go from 2000 to 15000 steps per day, without even thinking of joining a gym just yet.
Many inexpensive and readily available lifestyle trackers can help you with sleep and step tracking, and are a valuable addition, should you have the spare money to purchase one. If not, step counting apps can be downloaded for your smartphone.
We do not really recommend you track the glasses of water you drink per day, given what we’ve said about drinking to thirst in module 4. Rather, it would be prudent to add ‘drink water when thirsty’ as a habit and to track that way instead alongside your total rough daily fluid intake.
A final area which should be considered as a must-track activity is your gym progress. This is not an exercise course and so we will only briefly mention this, but tracking what you have done, what you plan to do and what your ultimate goal is can help you make sure your training is effective and as productive as possible. Always plan your exercise properly, and if you’re not able to do so consider consulting an exercise professional who can assist you.
It’s a great idea to use as many methods as you or your client are happy to use. Taking as much data as possible allows you to cross-reference and validate the quality of what you are seeing. If a client is reporting an intake of 1000kcal but gaining weight, when they are already obese, you know that something is amiss and are in a better position to deal with it. As a final note here, when collecting data on others client confidentiality rights should be adhered to at all times and therefore any information regarding them should be stored securely and never shared with anyone without the client’s prior consent.