Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 60: How I make tracking calories easier and less time consuming!
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And today I thought I'd talk about something very, very practical, which is how I track my calories and how I make my life easier for myself. So there's a few things that I do to make tracking a little bit easier. So the first one I've talked about before, but it's really, really simple, is repetitive eating. Like, I don't mean eating the same meal every single meal of the day on repeat, like having chicken, broccoli and rice three times a day. I'm not a madman, but what I do use is I will have smoothies most day of the week for breakfast. And then for lunches, I will typically have like two or three lunches the same. Usually it's a chicken pesto pasta, something along those lines. So I'll kind of do that. And that keeps life really, really simple because immediately I know what I'm having for breakfast. Even if I have that maybe four to five days a week for smoothies, that means five meals are ticked off or four meals are ticked off. And then I might have that chicken pesto pasta for three days. that's, you know, seven, eight meals ticked off. And then that means I've got a bit more flexibility in the evenings, but there's a real predictability. I know exactly how many calories I have left for the evenings. There's no doubt about that. There's no uncertainty. So while that's nice and simple. So that's always a help for the kind of first instance, right? Is I know what I'm having and I know how many calories I've got spare for dinner. So that makes it a little bit easier. Now off the back of that, what I then do is I tend to create those as recipes or meals. in my fitness palm. So it means that they are there. So I can just click into it and I just make the chicken pesto pasta pretty much the same way every single time. Right. I try to keep it very, very similar. Now, sometimes it will change it up and that's absolutely fine. But it just means that when it comes to tracking, it's so lazy because I can just go in and click lunch like chicken pasta or pesto pasta. And that's it. Right. I know exactly what it is. I know what the proportions are. I know what I'm cooking every time. There's a real simplicity to it. So that's one little thing that I find really helpful. But in particular, something that I think helps a lot of people that you don't have to be as repetitive as that to utilise is something along the lines of this, where you cook once and eat twice. I think that's a really, really good way of approaching things. If you can cook once and make two, potentially three portions for yourself, so a dinner one night and two lunches is a format I quite like, that's bloody brilliant. Because when you go into track it right, you track it once. Now, if you've had it before as a meal, like I just suggested, even better, takes a little... like two seconds to do. But if you've made that meal and you just use the fajitas as an example, you make fajitas, what can be really, really handy is you can kind of have the fajitas for dinner and then for the lunches, what you can then do is you can just go into lunch on MyFitnessPal and then you go into the quick ad section and you just add from yesterday's dinner and you can just copy and paste that. That's a really useful function for a lot of people because if you're having the same meal and even if you're kind of thinking like, I had, you know, a chicken pesto pasta on a Monday and I'm having it again Thursday, it's like, well cool, you can just go click to Mondays. And it just means that your tracking feels really effortless. I mean, it feels like it takes less and less effort to do. So there are a couple of things, obviously eating a bit repetitively helps with that. Cooking once and having two to three meals off the back of it's really, really helpful as well. And then of course, another thing that I think is quite helpful too is to map your week out a little bit. So. what I like to do sometimes on a Sunday. And I've started doing this more recently, because I was always a kind of plan on the morning of the rest of the day. And I quite liked that or the night before. But recently I've been taking about 10 minutes on a Sunday to actually track some meals ahead for the week. Now don't get me wrong, I don't track absolutely everything. But what I will do is I'll kind of put in and be like, okay, well I'm probably gonna have a protein smoothie Monday to Friday. Cool, I'll pop that in. That's already tracked. Then for lunch, I know I'm gonna have the chicken pesto pasta for two, three lunches. and then I'll have omelettes the other couple of days as well. And I'll just put those in. Again, I have little meals made up now from the things I make. I have a couple of different variations of the omelette, to give me a bit of variety. So I quite like having that. And again, I just chuck that in, right? And the great thing is, is like, if you have individual components you need to slightly change, if for whatever and any reason you don't have that, it's easy to do, right? You just go in and you slightly tweak one of the ingredients for that day. Like it's dead easy. It doesn't take you any time. But that works really well as well. So sometimes like going into this week, I already had like four breakfasts mapped out, Monday to Thursday, because I'm away traveling, well, I guess tomorrow is the point of recording for Stag Do. But I had that planned out. And then I just made sure I had my lunches mapped out and I mapped out a couple of dinners as well. And I just felt like that was really nice because going into the week, it was so low effort to track. Like I didn't really have to do that much. I obviously added in a couple of snacks. I always leave some spare room for Like fruit, which will vary a little bit for me, the kind of fruits I have is a little bit based on availability. So I tend not to track that so far forward, like maybe on the day of, like in the morning of for the day ahead. But broadly, like I leave that a bit more flex. I know the amount of calories I have spare. So that's another really simple thing you can do, practically speaking, to make it feel really low effort is just take 10 minutes on a Sunday. And it's like, it's almost like you've half drafted your nutrition for the week. So you just feel like when you go to edit it, it's just so low effort. Like it doesn't feel like a hassle. So that can be something that's really, really simple but useful to use. So I definitely recommend that as well. just a quick couple of thoughts on some tracking things that I use too. Now it's very practical in the kitchen things as well and most people will kind of like know this but it's useful to know if you're new to tracking is like, remember as well, when you're tracking something sometimes it's just easy to like take the top off a jar, weigh what the jar is and then put in whatever you put in and put the jar back on and just take that number away. because sometimes it's impractical to, especially if you're making things in a set order, the ingredients need to go in a set order. It's not always helpful to have to spoon it out and leave it, so it can be quite useful to just kind of weigh the actual thing that stays in. So the jar or the packet in the first place can be really helpful rather than have to get a bowl, zero it, then put the pesto in it to know how much is in that, and then you get another dish for the next thing. It just becomes a bit impractical. You zero that and... It's just, there's different little tactics, but I find that super, super helpful as well. And that's something that's handy. And that sits within, I guess, tracking tips in general. It's like try and weigh as much as you can. The more you eyeball, the less accurate you are. And having that in your head, being like, oh, the more I eyeball, the bigger the wiggle room for me to see slower progress is. Whereas the more I weigh things, the less room there is for that as well. So that's a useful thought too. But hopefully that was helpful. Some practical kind of tips around tracking and nutrition as well. Oh, and a final one as well. Please, please, please, please, when you're doing something like pasta, make sure you're the right thing. So you'll notice on most packs of pasta, and this catches people out, that there is dry weight and wet weight, if you like. So the weight that it is after you've added it to water and then before. So a lot of pastas, when you enter it, you'll be entering the dry weight, which might be 75 grams. And then in the column to the right of that, you'll see that it's 200 grams or 180 grams when added to water because of the absorption. So just something to be savvy with as well is make sure you are doing it the right way around because the wet pasta's obviously gonna be less calorie dense because there's more water in it. So if you put 200 grams of pasta in a pot, then you add water. But what you actually enter is you enter the kind of wet weight of pasta, if that makes sense. You're gonna get completely different numbers, right? You're going to end up getting roughly half the calories. So it is just worth remembering as well, it's like what you put in was 200 grams of dry pasta, not 200 grams of pasta that's already been added to water. So make sure you are picking the correct option. In this case, with pasta it's usually the higher calorie option that you need to be taking. So that's just a simple thing as well, is to keep an eye out for that because I've definitely seen that before, where someone will be putting in, I'm like, okay, well, what you said there is you've had a portion of this much, but. actually when I'm seeing a picture of that food or that item of food I'm thinking that that looks like almost double and I think what we've done is we've maybe just taken the kind of wet weight rather than the dry weight of pasta. Anyway just a quick rambling thought there on pasta because that comes up a lot. Hopefully that was helpful. If you are struggling a bit with your nutrition right now and you are not making the progress you want with weight loss then in the show notes there is a link to book a chat for one-to-one coaching where I can run you through what one-to-one coaching involves and how it can help you and kick you on to where you want to be in terms of getting to the best shape of your life, whilst also having a much better relationship with food and feeling a whole lot less stressed about everything nutrition and training gym related. So if that's helpful, jump into the show notes. Otherwise have a great day and speak soon.