00:00
Hey everybody, Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipeidia and today I want to chat about something that comes up constantly in my nutrition work and it is the question of whether you should be tracking your food, why it feels so hard when you start and what the evidence actually says about using an app properly. Because here's the thing, tracking is not hard in the sense that it is complicated. It is hard in the sense that it is arduous.

00:28
there's a difference. I think that difference gets lost when people decide where the tracking is for them. I'll be upfront, in my nutrition clinical work, which I've been in now for over 25 years, beginning to sound like Clif Antai, like to remind people of how old I am. If I had to put on a time scale the times that I've actually used macro counting with clients, it would just be minuscule, minuscule in the big scheme of things. I've always been

00:57
sort of food first. And this becomes a lot, and I'm sure I've mentioned this before, from my training in nutrition. Like I trained in a science degree in nutrition, and then in human nutrition went on to do my masters, very sort of research focused. And then of course, dieticians, they'll have the dietetics postgraduate work that they do with the same undergraduate work that I do. But they would have had some sense, obviously they would have had some macro tracking in their training.

01:26
But a lot of it is hospital and clinical, medical stuff as well. um But then you've just had this proliferation of macro coaches, of people who get a weekend course, or it's part of their personal training course, and now suddenly they can set macros. And so this has become almost normalized, whereas actually it's something I've actually haven't used a lot. And majority of my time it is food first.

01:53
Anyway, let's start with where most people go wrong even before they open an app. A lot of people think that they want to macros. They've heard that it's the gold standard. They see it on social media. All of the macro, Harry Menopoulos coaches are talking about counting macros, et cetera. And they've downloaded MyFitnessPal or Chronometer with really good intentions. And what they have usually underestimated is the time it takes to do it accurately. And if you're not accurate, you are not really tracking.

02:23
You were guessing with extra steps. You think you're in a deficit, you are not. You think you are hitting a protein target, you are not. You are essentially shooting into the wind and then wondering why nothing is changing. And the thing is, that it's not like this is without effort because there is still effort involved in the tracking that you are doing, but you just, unfortunately, more effort is required. So I've looked at some research around sort of

02:51
how many people use apps, how they use them, et cetera. And in one trial looking specifically at people actively trying to lose weight with a calorie tracking app, daily logging dropped from an average of 23 minutes a day in month one, down to under 15 minutes by month six. And that is only counting the people who were still logging anything at all by that point. And let's not forget, a huge chunk of people are not in that group anymore, or not even doing it.

03:18
This is active use we are talking about, not whether someone downloaded an app once. It tells you that even among motivated people in a structured program, the real world pattern is a steep drop off, not sustained daily tracking forever. What I will add, obviously, and I want to acknowledge, it does get easier over time. So some of that time differential will be reflecting the pre-logging of meals, the eating very similar foods, things like that.

03:48
However, it does also speak to the adherence to tracking actually. And I do think a lot of it isn't necessarily a discipline issue. It's a skills issue and skills take time to build. And you've got the likes of Eric Helms, ah Mike Isretel, Lay Norton. They speak a lot about this stuff. Brandon speaks a lot about it as well. Tracking is not one single skill, but a series of what are sort of mini skills.

04:17
that you have to learn over time. Things like knowing how to spot a bad entry in a food database, knowing how to find accurate label information when the app entry looks dodgy, knowing that it is dodgy, knowing how to log a food correctly depending on whether it is raw or cooked, knowing how to estimate a portion size when you do not have a scale in front of you, say you're at a friend's house or in a restaurant. And actually, this is a discipline thing, weighing the food you have at home when you are tracking it.

04:47
All of these are skills and habits and until you have built these, your accuracy is going to suffer as will your results. And this isn't about you failing on the front of tracking apps, but this is literally what learning a new skill looks like. And once you understand that tracking is a learned skill rather than this innate talent some people have or others do not, the natural next question is obviously how long that learning curve actually is and whether or not it gets easier.

05:17
And I will tell you right now, the answer is an emphatic yes. So I would say, and I have spent months tracking my food. In fact, it was so helpful for me to really get a sense of my caloric requirements over and above what I thought I needed because I'm someone who would naturally restrict. And I would also catastrophize certain foods.

05:40
thinking they were well worse than what they are. This is me being in this industry for decades, right? So what I found and what others report as well is that that first couple of weeks genuinely feels hard. It does take a good hour some days just to figure out what you ate and log it properly. It doesn't feel intuitive at all. But also once you get through that initial learning curve, it does become exponentially easier to the point where

06:09
It might only take you about 10 minutes a day to do it. And this is a thing, particularly if you've been doing it for months, if not years, some people have been doing it for years at this point. You don't even really need to weigh some products because your estimation skills will be so well honed from years of practice. But that's not well honed from months of practice. Do know that it is years of practice. And over the course of months and years, as I said, tracking gets easier.

06:38
But in addition to that, and this is the important thing, and this is what I see so helpful for so many people, your underlying knowledge about food increases. You do start to understand what 100 grams of chicken looks like on a plate without thinking about it. You understand what a high protein meal looks like compared to a high carb one. That knowledge doesn't disappear once you stop tracking. It becomes sort of like this internalized expertise that lets you make more informed decisions.

07:06
even when you're not logging a single thing. And I do see people on social media talking about this intuitive way with eating, and these are people who've literally tracked the same meals for years. And I'm kind of like, that's not intuition. You just have that knowledge. You are informed. And so it is different from intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is a defined approach. It's about eating based on internal hunger and fullness cues without any internal structure. So what I'm describing is different.

07:35
There is already structure underlying your decisions. It's an informed estimation. The ability to look at your plate and have an educated guess about what is on it, built from months or years of calibration against a food scale in an app. So one is built on body trust alone, and certainly isn't what I would recommend at all for fat loss. And the other is built on data you've collected about your own body over time.

08:01
They can look similar from the outside, but they do come from completely different places. So does the research back up the idea that tracking improves over time and pays off in better outcomes? I'd say broadly yes, with of course some caveats. There's a well-known data set from behavioral weight loss programs showing that self-monitoring is consistently associated with both short and long-term weight loss success. In one analysis of dietary self-monitoring in extended care,

08:29
found that the combination of high frequency and high consistency of self-monitoring was what predicted reduced weight regain, not how comprehensive or perfectly detailed the records were. So in other words, showing up and logging something most days or a couple of times a week mattered more than getting every gram perfectly correct every single time. And another study identified that tracking at least two eating occasions a day

08:57
was actually the strongest predictor of weight loss success at six months, more so than tracking every single thing that passed your lips. But there is nuance though, because the same body of research consistently finds that self-monitoring adherence declines over time, and it tends to decline fast. In one trial, fewer than half the participants were still tracking by week 10, no matter which tracking method they used. And again, this isn't that they've failed, just to sound like AI.

09:24
This is just what the data shows happens to most people most of the time, regardless of how motivated they were on day one. So if you have started tracking, gotten three or four weeks in and felt your motivation drop off a cliff, just don't beat yourself up over that. You are an extremely well-documented company. What seems to actually help is not white-knuckling your way through perfect adherence forever, but finding a level of tracking intensity that you can actually sustain.

09:54
And some researchers have looked specifically at minimum thresholds and found that self-monitoring at least three days a week was enough to meaningfully reduce weight regain during a maintenance phase, biggest benefit seen at five to six days a week. So that is still significantly more than not tracking at all, clearly. But you do not need to log every single day for the rest of your life for tracking to be worth doing. My last point on this before I get into how to actually track,

10:24
is just to remind you that thousands and thousands and thousands of people lose weight successfully in ways that I would advocate without tracking a single thing. It doesn't mean they're not weighing. It doesn't mean that they're not aware of portion size. It doesn't mean they don't know how to build a plate. And it doesn't mean they don't know where protein is or carbs are. It just means that they haven't used tracking as the tool for them. As you know, I've got my ASMR program, my Mondays Matter program, the accelerated program.

10:53
we don't track at all. I don't count calories in that program. I don't need to because it is a fat loss tool, a fat loss method whereby you inherently eat fewer calories because of the ways these days are structured. You still need to weigh, but you don't need to track. Anyway, let's actually talk about how to track well because there is a right way and a lot less, a right way and a wrong way essentially.

11:18
So you've got to weigh your food in grams, not cups or tablespoons, because a cup of anything is wildly inconsistent depending on how it is prepared, how tightly it is packed, and which actual cup you used. Half a cup of oats on the label might say 45 grams, but depending on how you scoop it, could be anywhere from 35 to 55 grams in reality, and that will add up over the day. Ideally, you would weigh your food before you cook it, not after.

11:44
Cooking changes water content but not the actual nutrition content, so a chicken breast that loses water weight on the grill will show a different number on the scale than what the nutrition label was based on, even though the actual protein and calories you are eating have not changed. Vegetables and meat tend to lose weight as they cook, or pasta and rice absorb water and increase in weight. So if you are weighing after cooking, your numbers may be off in a way that does skew your results over time.

12:14
Do not forget the extras, cooking oil, salad dressing, the butter you put on your toast, sauces, the splash of milk in your coffee. These small additions can easily add up to several hundred calories a day that never make it on the log. And there are very often the difference between someone genuinely being a deficit, someone who believes they are in a deficit, or their weight refuses to budge. Fourth,

12:37
Be a little bit skeptical of your app's food database, especially for mixed dishes like a curry, a stir fry, or a pasta bake. These entries are frequently user submitted and are wildly inconsistent again from one entry to the next. Where you can, you want to build the dish from its individual ingredients rather than searching for chicken curry and picking whatever comes up first. does take more time on the first occasion, but you can save it once you have it built properly and it is there for next time.

13:06
still gotta weigh it. If you are eating out, you just have to do your best to estimate and round up rather than down. Restaurant meals are almost always higher in calories than the home cooked equivalent because chefs are using more oil, butter, sugar than you would at home just because it makes food taste better and they aren't the ones eating it every day. If you're unsure, picking the higher estimate in the database rather than the lower one is generally the safe bet, then add a tablespoon or two of fat in addition.

13:36
So of oil or butter or anything like that is your little buffer. And sixth, if you genuinely do not know what is in something because someone else cooked it or it is a packaged product without the label, do a quick search for the basic ingredient on its own, like strawberries or chicken breast. And they'll usually point you towards reliable reference data rather than whatever random entry someone else submitted in the app five years ago. Do that search in Google and just cross reference. This is what we're doing here.

14:05
Most food databases are mostly user generated and you will regularly find some that the same food listed three or four different ways with wildly different numbers attached. If something looks off, it probably is and it is worth taking an extra few seconds to check it. And where possible, use a food that is USDA food database approved, New Zealand food database approved. Use those green ticked entries because they are much more likely to be accurate.

14:35
Also, I want to say something about where to start if you're completely new to this, because most people might make a mistake of trying to hit specific macro target from day one. Honestly, a better starting point is to track your current diet for a week or two without trying to change anything at all. That takes a bit of discipline, it? Just log what you're eating already as accurately as you can. Just takes the pressure off because you're not trying to hit a number. You're just trying to observe.

15:01
What this does is let you build those foundational skills. The label reading, the portion estimating, the database skepticism, while also showing you things you might not have noticed about your own eating. The handful of nuts at three o'clock that you never really counted as a meal. The dressing you were pouring rather than measuring. The day you skipped breakfast and then ate twice as much at dinner without realizing it was connected. None of this requires any sort of discipline. It just requires looking clearly at what is happening. Now, a lot of you understandably are thinking, well,

15:31
God, that sounds like a lot of work. Is there an easier way? And of course, I want to get to photo based tracking. So this is relatively new, if you like. It's not new new, but snapping a photo of your meal instead of weighing and logging every component sounds very appealing in this instance. What does the evidence show? Honestly, it depends entirely on what you're using it for. If your goal is understanding overall patterns, what your week generally looks like,

15:59
whether you are eating vegetables most days, whether your meals are mostly built around protein source or mostly built around refined carbohydrates, photo-based tracking absolutely does the job. A scoping review, which is a type of research review that looks at all sources of research or information, looked at AI-powered photologging tools.

16:22
and found they could identify food groups with reasonably strong accuracy, particularly for distinct categories like vegetables. And large studies analyzing thousands of real-world meal photos found that photo-based estimates of macronutrients were generally close to those from a traditional way to food logs, even if not perfectly matched. There's also this nice piece of qualitative research where dieticians reviewed photo food diaries and described using them specifically to spot long-term eating patterns.

16:52
variety and context, rather than relying on them for gram level precision. So, where photo tracking consistently falls down is at the individual level, particularly around portion size. A study comparing image-based dietary assessment against weighed food records found it performed reasonably well at the group level, but was specifically described as unsuitable for individual assessment, largely because people consistently underestimate portion sizes from a photo.

17:20
especially as the amount of food on the plate increases. Another comparison of food photography against a written food diary found that photography came in with worse accuracy and a tendency to underestimate energy and macronutrient content. And in a study using photos taken by visually impaired participants and assessed by trained nutritionists, even the experts correctly estimated the actual amount of food only about 25 % of the time, despite being quite good at identifying what the food actually was. So,

17:50
How to frame this practically? A photo is a brilliant tool for pattern recognition. It will tell you whether your week looked mostly like whole foods or mostly convenience foods, whether you're getting protein in regularly, whether vegetables are showing up at all. What it will not reliably tell you is whether you ate 40 grams of protein at lunch or 60. And if you're working towards a specific number, particularly around protein or fat, which I know a lot of you are, you do need something more precise than a photo at least some of the time. And

18:19
You know, this does map quite nicely onto something I touched on earlier, which is that different goals demand different levels of precision. If you are a few months out from a half marathon and trying to make sure you're fueling adequately, or you are in a structured fat loss phase and protein really matters for preserving muscle, photos alone are not going to cut it. But if you're in a maintenance phase where you're simply trying to build general awareness around your eating patterns without obsessing over exact numbers,

18:45
Photo tracking might be the entire tool you need because you've got other monitoring tools in place to help see how you're going. And it is far less burdensome than weighing everything. And of course, there's also an interesting practical use case here for anyone who finds the idea of a food scale at work lunch or dinner out mortifying, which will be 99.99 % of us listening to this podcast. Quick photo before you eat gives you something to review later without making your eating an event at the table.

19:14
What I do just want to quickly address is that if tracking ever starts to feel like it's really distressing rather than useful, you need to pay attention to that. There is reasonable evidence that people already struggling with body image or disordered eating patterns are more likely to use tracking apps. And many report that tracking made their symptoms worse. But most of us agree that it's not that tracking causes disordered food patterns. It's just that

19:43
Probably people already struggling are simply more drawn to tracking in the first place. So most adults without a pre-existing history of disordered eating, their tracking will not meaningfully harm your mental health, just so you know. But if you do tend towards perfectionism or if you have a history with food that makes rigid food rules feel dangerous rather than helpful, then do be honest with yourself about this before you commit to a tracking habit.

20:13
So yeah, it is worth a conversation with a professional who knows your history. So tracking properly, to sum it up, is genuinely work at the start. And it is not a sign that you're not good at it. You just need to build these skills. And it's a skill that has multiple components, label literacy, proportion estimation, database skepticism, all of which take repeated practice. does get a lot easier over time.

20:40
the mechanical process speeds up, you've got a bit of a database, and your underlying food knowledge will grow alongside it to the point where you can make informed decisions without logging a single thing. Photos are a great tool for that pattern recognition over a week or a month, but they're not precise enough for you to be able to build your fat loss around. So I do just want to say that. And ultimately,

21:06
Regardless of whether or not you track, the goal is not perfect permanent tracking. It is a skill to use when it serves you and being able to step back from it without falling apart because you've built enough of that knowledge along the way to make good decisions either way. Alright guys, I would love to hear what you think about tracking and if your experience was like mine, like quite freeing or you just found it a little bit too much, let me know. Hit me up, I'm on threads, X and

21:35
Instagram @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com, scroll right down to the bottom, pop your name in the email there and jump on my email list. All right guys, you have a best week. See you later.