How to Start Your Nutrition: A Step by Step Guide
When it comes to counting calories, what is the first thing that pops into your mind?
I bet the first words you think of are “pain in the ass”, “annoying”, “obsessive” or anything along those lines.
And you know what? I agree; it definitely can be.
However, here's the thing, you should count your calories, at least for a few months. It is the best way to retake control of your eating, and ultimately help you build a solid nutritional foundation for the rest of your life.
The ultimate goal of tracking your nutrition is to build awareness and a solid nutritional foundation for the rest of your life!!
When it comes to dieting, it can be absolutely difficult, stressful, overwhelming, time-consuming, boring, and a pain in the ass. It’s no wonder dieting pushing people away from trying or causing them to quit prematurely.
As a coach, this frustrates me beyond belief. How can I get my clients to adhere to a long-term diet plan??
The best way to adhere to a long-term plan is to create a sustainable diet structure that fits your lifestyle. This means finding YOUR Ideal starting point and slowly progressing you while educating you every step of the way.
Creating Actionable Steps
When it comes to creating new habits, most people can handle it for a few days before their motivation fades and then they settle back into their old habits. One of the most influential books I’ve read in creating sustainable habits is James Clear’s Atomic Habits
In his book, James Clear is all about making a new habit super easy. Like ridiculously easy and as close to automatic as possible.
When first starting a new habit, it’s easy to assume you’re gonna be perfect out of the gate. However, this can actually work against us as we are trying to do too much, too soon.
Let’s take a look at my journaling habit for example. I’ve been wanting to consistently journal to document my thoughts, feeling, ideas, and overall life. Despite my strong desire, I would fall off after a couple of days. So I made a commitment to myself that I would journal for 5 minutes 3 times a week.
Unlike my previous journaling attempts, I was actually able to stick with it. This was that low bar of success that I needed, in the beginning, to reinforce the practice until it became a habit.
That’s the whole idea of having progressions; it’s to make changes super easy and actionable so you have to execute. Then, once the habit is created, you can add a little bit more.
At the end of the day, it’s about finding what works best for you! We all start at different experience levels, so what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for someone else.
Consistency will always trump perfection.
Progressions for Tracking Calories and Macros
Similar to my journaling habit, If you are feeling completely overwhelmed by tracking your calories and macros, then it’s time to reduce the amount of work so you still make progress while cultivating your motivation.
The following steps are to help you break down the essential ways to track your nutrition from the most simple to more advanced (i.e. macro counting). Within the realm of nutrition, there are hundreds of ways to make progress, yet there are only a few universal principles that actually drive progress.
There’s a famous quote that perfectly sums this up, “The Methods are many, the Principles are few. The Methods may change, yet principles never do.”
The overall goal here is to find a method that works for you while adhering to the Universal Principles of Good Nutrition.
The time spent on each step is going to depend on the person. Once comfortable and consistent, you can move on to the next progression.
Based on my experience, my online clients need 2 weeks to get comfortable with each step before moving on.
If that new step is too challenging, you can always drop back down.
Step 1: Tracking your Food
As I mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal of tracking your nutrition is to build awareness and a solid nutritional foundation for the rest of your life.
Awareness is the unsung hero in a fat loss phase and it’s the most important. When you are aware of something you can change it.
Being aware of how much you’re eating and what you’re eating can help you make better decisions to fix the issues.
Does this mean you need to become obsessed and track everything you’ll ever eat from now and forever?
Hell no.
When stuck, tracking your food for a few days to see how many calories you’re eating. With that knowledge, you can make small adjustments (i.e. portion sizes, choosing less calorie-dense foods, etc.) to get you moving towards your goal.
Initially, you don’t have to be 100% accurate (as this is an ongoing process) right out of the gate.
The importance here is to build awareness and knowledge while slowly improving your accuracy to build that solid nutrition foundation that will improve the rest of your life.
Just like the journaling example, keep it simple, start small, then layer on the complexity.
Step 2: Tracking Calories
After tracking your food, the next step is to ensure your calories are matching your goal.
I cannot tell you how many times my online clients email me, telling me they are eating healthy, yet still struggling to lose body fat.
My response is always: “are you tracking your calories?”
No, they say. But I’m eating soo well and healthy!
Eating healthy and eyeballing meal sizes is extremely subjective. What we think is an actual portion size is completely different once we start measuring our foods.
We are absolutely terrible when it comes to accurately guesstimate (a combination of guessing and measuring) actual portion sizes.
There is absolutely nothing worse than being in a “calorie deficit” only to realize that you weren’t actually in a calorie deficit. To ensure this doesn’t happen, all my online clients go through an educational-based dieting primer phase to fully prepare them for fat loss success.
After tracking your foods, the next progression layer is paying attention to portion sizes and hitting your calorie goal. In the process of tracking your calories, people always do better when there’s some accountability and knowing you are answering to someone else.
While you may be making better food choices, if you’re going over your calories, you won’t lose body fat. Keeping your total calories in check while dieting is how all diets operate. It’s the foundational University Principle of Good Nutrition.
Step 3: Track Total Calories and Protein
Once you’re making good food choices and keeping your total calories in check, the next step is to focus on your protein intake and for good reason.
By tracking protein, this will ensure that you’ll be
Preserving your lean muscle
Keeping you full and sane during your diet
Burnings additional calories by revving up the metabolism.
When in a fat loss phase, hunger and cravings are your diet’s Kryptonite. When in a calorie deficit, the best thing you can do for your overall results (and sanity) is to shift your food choices to having more satiating food.
Satiating foods are foods that take a while to digest so they take up more space in your stomach for a longer period of time. In addition, they will usually be loaded with protein and/or fiber.
When selecting satiating foods, there are a few things you want to look for:
Unprocessed: Think of whole food products (i.e. lean meats, potatoes) as it takes more work for your body to properly digest.
Protein: The literal building blocks of your muscles and keeps you feeling full longer than carbs or fats.
Fiber: Takes a while for the body to digest while providing essential vitamins, and minerals with fewer calories.
Low Calorie: To maintain your calorie deficit, you’ll need to keep calories in check.
High volume foods: These are foods that are low in calories so you can eat more as it takes up more space within your stomach, subduing your hunger. Ideally, these foods will have a combination of all the listed elements above.
All and all, these are the essential steps to
A major key to long-term success for my online clients is teaching them how to auto-regulate their appetites by constantly selecting the most satisfying foods per calorie aka high volume foods.
In fact, I wrote an entire article on the best dieting high volumes foods to focus on and you should definitely check it out.
Step 4: Tracking Carbs and Fats
Depending on how in-depth you want to get and what types of results, this stage is completely optional. In a fat loss phase, total calories are the most important factor along with protein.
By consistently adhering to these two factors this will allow you to lose weight (via calories) and help preserve muscle (via protein).
If your goal is simply to lose weight, then you can just focus on calories and protein. It’ll get you all the results you want and your food choices are pretty wide open.
However, if you wanna get lean enough to see your abs, then you’ll have to track carbs and fats as they play a bigger role since you’ll be pushing your body that much harder.
Carbs are going to help you recover from y our workouts and help you repair muscle along with protein.
Fats will help regulate your hormones and metabolism.
To effectively combat hunger, you’ll want to still prioritize those high-volume food items as they are the solution to any dieter’s dilemma. Veggies, potatoes, lean meats, oats,and big ass salads are all excellent options to start with.
And there you have it!
There is your step-by-step guide to get into the habit of tracking calories while seeing results every step of the way.
The most important step is clearly identifying which step you are at and slowly progress. Start slow and double down on being consistent. There’s absolute to coaching adjustment for a lack of consistency
Regardless if you are trying to transform your body, improving your relationship with food, changing your habits, or just building your nutritional foundation, please head this message.
“When it comes to transforming your body and/or changing your habits, you can only optimize the actions you are aware of. This is where calorie counting comes into play. It will give you the ultimate insight into developing the best diet that you can enjoy while making long-term objectively based progress.”
The ten minutes it takes every day to track will give you the necessary awareness and discipline to improve your eating habits for the rest of your life.
And that, my friends, is priceless.
The Next Step:
The goal of this guide (and online coaching) is to empower you through education.
I want to help you stop guessing when it comes to making sustainable progress and start achieving the results you desire.
So, what is your next step?
Realize that all the knowledge you’ve gained from this guide doesn’t equal real change.
If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach.
If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.
If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach.
If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.