Tracking
MyFitnessPal has become a huge app in the diet world
It can’t be stressed enough, the importance of tracking while on any diet, much less a keto diet. Over the years we’ve had some pitfalls and plateaus and it typically was the result of poor tracking. It’s easy after a few months to get into a habit of eating the same meals, then get lazy with tracking.
Tracking Food
MyFitnessPal has become a huge app in the diet world and happens to be the one we started using. There are some great benefits to using this particular app and the two most significant ones are the cloud based nature of storing all of your data and the huge library of foods.
The library of foods is massive which has ups and downs of its own
The cloud based storage means you can use the app on your phone, your tablet, or log through a browser on a desktop. Once you save your log it’s instantly available and in sync on all of your devices. It limits the excuses of “I forgot my phone”, or “my tablet was dead”. There are endless channels in which to update the log.
“Losing weight is always a matter of a calorie deficit”
The library of foods is massive which has ups and downs of its own. Chances are whatever or wherever you are eating the food is already in the app with all of its nutritional information. The upside is this makes tracking incredibly easy if you are eating out at a franchise style restaurant or fast food. The downside is, with such a massive library, many listings are missing key nutritional information or are just incorrect.
Losing weight is always a matter of a calorie deficit, and that holds true for a keto diet as well. Once you lose start losing weight counting calories starts to become a fact of life, especially as you come closer and closer to your goal. Macros are important from day one, and that will be discussed in-depth in another post, but in short ‘macro’ is just a fancy term for goal. It’s essentially the limits you want for carbs, protein, and fat, along with which percentage of each you should eat on a daily basis.
Why Tracking is Critical
A log, or for simpler terms a diet diary also provides a few additional benefits, one of which is accountability. When you plug in an entire day’s worth of food up front in the morning, it makes it psychologically more painful to deviate from the plan and have to go in, delete what you were supposed to eat, and replace with the mistake you actually ate. There have been endless studies that demonstrate writing something down helps to achieve a goal.
Often it’s easy to get in a habit of eating the same foods everyday
By keeping a log and writing down your food it will help, and even it only helps a tiny little bit it still makes a difference. Any opportunity to make our lives easier and help maintain our healthy eating is a good thing.
Another time a diary can really come in handy is during times of weight gain or weight plateaus. Often it’s easy to get in a habit of eating the same foods everyday, and without tracking it’s also easy to slowly wander from the original plan. There have been times I’ve been stuck, often correlated with a lack of tracking, where I’ve been able to look back a year or more and ask “What was I doing back then that was working so well?”. I’ll often find that I was in fact doing something different and can go back to that routine with ease without having to guess.
A huge part of sticking with a goal is accountability
Lastly, we are the keto couple, and a couple the diets together succeeds together. The MyFitnessPal app has some great sharing mechanisms which allow us to hold each other accountable during the day. A huge part of sticking with a goal is accountability, and having accountability to yourself as well as your significant other can really help motivate and maintain progress.
Fitness Tracking
Fitness tracking is also important, and without surprise a feature of the MyFitnessPal app. However, we also used Fitbit’s, and I’ve more recently moved to the Apple Watch. All of these devices wirelessly sync exercise data into the app to show how many calories have been burned.
Gamification
Gamification is becoming a popular motivational tool. Gamification is the process of an app making a game out of achieving certain goals. Apple Watch encourages you to ‘close rings’ throughout the day, where a ring may represent standing each hour, another ring is exercising for a certain number of minutes, while a third ring represents how many steps you’ve achieved in a day. Fitbit also offers many ‘awards’ and achievements that are unlocked in the Fitbit app by sticking to your plan.
When I was about a 1000 steps short on the 7th day you better believe I got out of the house and walked around my block to hit the 10,000 mark.
Again, making a game of a diet plan is not going to be the make it or break it, but research again shows here that these small things help engage and self-motivate people to achieve their goals. It’s the ‘small wins’ that add up to massive success. For me, a personal example was trying to achieve 10,000 steps for 7 days straight. It was something that took me a very long time to do (years). When I was about a 1000 steps short on the 7th day you better believe I got out of the house and walked around my block to hit the 10,000 mark. The rings closing and the ‘congratulations’ from my watch motivated me to keep the streak going for as long as possible.
Fitness Tracking Devices
Speaking of steps, one major thing I’ve learned is Apple Watch and a pocket based Fitbit is very accurate. In my experience the wrist based fitness trackers (outside of Apple Watch) are wildly inaccurate. When a friend said they had 30,000 steps in a day, I found the number to be impossible based on their description of their physical activity. After all, that would have been about sixteen miles of walking – they would have had to walk about 6 hours straight to achieve that many steps. I found my Apple Watch and my Fitbit in the pocket were always within a few hundred steps of each other. The conclusion here is not all physical fitness trackers are created equal.
Tracking Your Weight
The most obvious item to track is your weight. This is usually pretty easy, especially the first few months where each morning is an exciting moment, pushing you closer to your goal weight. Sure enough you can plug it into the app, or if you want to spend a little dough you can try a wi-fi scale which will automatically sync with the app.
The scale we use was purchased from Amazon: http://amzn.to/2zSzJKD
It’s the “Bluetooth Smart Body Fat Scale by Weight Gurus”. It’s an accurate scale with a modern look and has nice Bluetooth and wi-fi functionality. It’s a little tricky to setup and I’ve had to manually reconnect the Bluetooth to my phone on a few occasions, but I never lost any of my weight data.
Another great feature of this particular scale is it can automatically detect multiple people and track them separately. I’m not exactly sure how this works, but I assume it uses logic based on previous weigh-in history. You can also manually select which user is using the scale, I suppose this would be important if you had multiple people in the household with nearly the same weight.
Track for Success
Tracking just makes sense, it doesn’t take long and with all the technology these days doesn’t even have to be a mild inconvenience. Do the right thing, hold yourself accountable, plot and track your progress and goals. At the end of the day you’ll be rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment, but also be rewarded with real results!
