The Importance of Food Tracking

i'm so glad you talked about the the structure things from your plans um because i suppose like coach like the talk about the coach is not tracking it's almost it's more in probably more in denial i always when i look at tracking who dies now i go right is there something i'm i'm very i'm aware whenever i start dieting start tracking stuff of my my habits and the things i want to do whether i do it or not because if i do it i know my clients will do it so like i would things a couple things i would do so i used to have these last i was like these dairy like dairy to um blue cheese triangles like 20 calories a pop and it was just like a couple of them would just get me through the meal i wouldn't track it's 40 calories yeah but it's what a client would do with a cookie oh it's only small yeah and it's 200 300 calories four five six seven times a week and or i remember going to a restaurant once and really wanting the spare ribs and it's my mini diets that always that always show me these things my proper diets like tunnel vision i'm in but if it's like yeah mini diet i've got no goal for it doesn't really matter. This is where I was like, I looked through my fitness pal, like scrolling up, like which spare ribs is the best. I will take an hour of need. It's not the 4,000 calorie, but definitely that 400 calorie. Like no fucking way that that is the case That when I started to notice more things in my food clients food diets Like what a couple couple things I remember was 13 and a half cashew nuts like who breaks a half yeah yeah like precise or they've just gone that's about right you know or they were like yeah one of them was a bit smaller than the others so we just said 0.6 0.7 I don't know um one ounces of steak one ounces of steak who the fuck eats a one ounce steak i don't understand too like living overseas now like i don't understand why people don't use the fucking metric system it drives me insane when i when i go okay so if you're using my fitness pound you know i use chronometer when i go into chronometer and i see one of our clients has put pounds in for their weight i i immediately text them and i go nah put your scale on kilograms get with the rest of the fucking planet stop using it you gotta here's the way i think of it too especially it's the americans right it's the americans and sometimes the people in uk and you never know with the uk what you're gonna get you could get pounds you get kilograms you get fucking stone you could get some other fucking medieval way of fucking counting somebody's weight or height like hands and shit and i used to get so mad because i had british i just got this image of holy grail i'm just seeing an odd way of saying i was a duck yeah i get like i get guys from england and they'd send me this fucking uh yeah today i weighed 10 stone and i'm like fuck now i gotta fucking convert to stone is 14 and then divide by 2.2 for kilograms and it just i'm like can you just fucking put that in his kilograms please the one thing i like to do with the americans i make them especially the women flip their scale to kilograms because then when they gain weight, it's not so scary because if you gain one pound, they lose their fucking minds. But if they gain 400 grams, they're like, oh, it's just that's grams. That's nothing. And I'm like, that's fucking, that's a fucking pound. 454 is a pound, but they don't know that. So it just, it tricks them. So you get away with that for a while. And then they start getting smart and they go, oh, hold on a minute. I've been gain of 454 grams a week. That's a pound and I'm like, yeah, and you haven't freaked out and you look great. Fuck it. But that's not bad. Yeah. The meal, the meal plan things interesting as well, because it's almost it's almost become my catchphrase in last year, because it's almost been trendy for coaches to go. meal plans don't teach you anything. I'm like, what, what you want, like meal plan, your structure, it'll teach you like food prep or teach you habitual habits or teach you so much based off this and how a diet should actually look like them stop big maps. Yeah. And like, it's mad that people think like, I the dog colors are great. And I've always thought it's like learning a language. It's like, the meal plan is like you look you saying I will learn Spanish over here. Here's a Rosetta Stone take the macros approach to go just go to Spain. But I don't need to learn any words first. No, you'll pick it up. Like, hope it makes up you know, it never does. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, when you learn a language, it's like you learn all the conjugations and all that stuff. And that is they give you the conjugations. You got to write down your present, past, future, all that stuff. And that's how you learn it. The way I see it is I don't like giving people static meal plans, but I like working with my clients to create their own meal plan. So what I typically will do is I'll write their macros and I'll write their calories and then I'll go in a chronometer and I'll separate that out into, say, four or five sections for meals. OK, I want you to have around 500, 600 calories per meal to so much protein, carb and fat. Now, let's work on what proteins you'll eat every day and not get that bored. And if you do get bored, we can make an exchange list. But I make my clients write their own diet, but I'm there helping them do it. So I'm like, okay, let's put in some starch. You could have some starch, you could have fruit. So that could be rice, potatoes, sweet potato, whatever. Or you could have grapes or bananas or whatever you want. And they're like, oh, I think I want some potato. Cool, put that in there. and then they see they're like, holy shit, that's a lot of carbs. I'm like, that's okay. We'll just use charisma potatoes, which are 25% less carbs. And they have more carbs or more volume. They're like, oh, that's cool. So we do it as an educational thing and they create their own meal plan. And what I find is they eat that pretty, you know, pretty consistently for three, four, five weeks, they started getting bored, but then they say, holy shit, I've lost five kilos in the last five weeks. I'm like, yeah, look at that. That's what happens. We follow a static plan. that doesn't have any deviations. You've got accuracy, you've got precision and the way it goes. The most successful clients that I see are the people who do that who have structure and eat the same shit every day And they might pop a little of this a little of that out But it pretty much the same stuff every day And we see I telling you we see at least most of them one kilo of weight loss significantly and consistently over time Yeah, I agree with that from the people I've seen. You just eliminate margin for error because regardless whether, even if there's tracking error within it, if it's static, at least you know. like they're eating this if you think it's 1800 is actually 2000 it's still consistently a 2000 and i i often i find that the people that want decadence i always panic a little bit when i get a client asking me for recipes and it's not because i'm against yeah like and it's two reasons one you don't want my recipes they're boring as fuck um and two like when you're looking at like often i find if someone's like resourceful and has a sort of detective mindset i'll go and find the recipes themselves i go hey do these work yeah we're cool here's a few more but it's more this oh i i want everything to taste like gordon ramsey prepared it for me especially on a wednesday between meetings and it's like not every not every meal needs to be it's like that's that's what that's why you look like you do right now because you've been eating gordon ramsey shit all the time and you don't want to look like gordon ramsey shit anymore so let's get lean first and then you go back to eating gordon ramsey shit every once in a while not every meal.