Use your calorie tracker as a meal planner If you don’t have time/patience to enter your meals after you eat each mouthful, then take 5 minutes in the morning on the bus/train or at your desk to enter what you think you will eat that day. This will let you know if you need to cut back on any snacks you realise you can’t afford, and also allow you to keep your meal plan in mind as you move through the day. It also lets you know when you have calories left over with which to enjoy a little bit more of something you love!
Start tracking at your biggest meal of the day
Although it takes some fiddling, you can change meal names on most calorie trackers. Make your first meal ‘Dinner’ if that’s your largest meal, and track from 5pm to 5pm instead of midnight to midnight. This way, if you go overboard on dinner, you can dial back your breakfast and lunch the next day to compensate, since that will likely be more comfortable for you than scaling back dinner.
Make one change at a time
It can be tempting to turn around one day and think “Right! I suck at this eating business – I’m going to eat salads for every meal and only drink water and track everything and it’ll be wonderful!”. Bzzzzzt – wrong! This so rarely works, and is a recipe for disaster and feelings of disappointment in yourself when you fail. There are very, very few people in this world who can change everything at once (I’m not one of them!) that I always recommend trying to make one change (e.g. cut down to one can of soft drink a day) then when you can maintain that change for a month, moving onto the next goal. It’s slow, but it will be effective. Other steps you can take (one by one!) to clean up your diet and/or portion sizes include:
- add another serving of veges to whatever you eat now
- cutting down your ’empty’ carb servings
- cutting down on alcohol intake
- drinking more water (instead of soft drink, fruit juice, etc.)
- drink green tea instead of milky/sugary coffee drinks
- track your protein intake and aim for at least 0.8x your body weight in lbs
- try to keep your sugar intake under 50g per day
- serve your meat with extra veges instead of rice/bread/pasta
- replace rice with cauliflower rice (grated cauliflower fried in a pan with some oil/onion)
- replace pasta with spaghetti squash
- reduce the amount of butter, mayonnaise and cheese on sandwiches or burgers
- substitute unhealthy snacks with protein bars, nuts, tuna, etc.
Use the 90/10 or 80/20 guideline – also known as “Don’t sweat the small stuff!”
The 90/10 guideline is basically that you eat good stuff for 90% of your calories, but 10% is whatever you want… even if it’s just pure lard or beer or whatever your guilty vice of choice happens to be. If you’re following a diet, it will be very very unlikely that you can stick to it 100% because we’re all human and so many opportunities come up in day-to-day life to try to lead us astray from all the healthy options. Enjoy a little snack each day, or save up your 10% to have one or two meals each week which don’t fit into your eating plan. Enjoy life and don’t be disappointed if you have a crap day!
Health is a journey, not a race – so just make the healthiest choices you can, when you can, and don’t beat yourself up when it’s not quite working!
