Tracking macronutrients is a great way to learn about your diet and start to understand how to manage your nutrition on a daily basis.
By tracking macronutrients — or “macros” — you’ll learn where your calories come from, and how to manipulate your diet over the course of each day in order to achieve your goals. Tracking macros applies to any health or fitness goal: weight loss, building muscle, building strength, maintaining a healthy physique, and much more.
But there’s a system to do this effectively — a method to the madness, if you will? Learning how to track your macros is going to be of the utmost importance (at least until you get familiar with measuring, estimating, etc.).
In this article, I’ve broken down all of the tips and tools to help you get started with tracking your macros. Let’s start with the tools!
Tools
In order to accurately track your macros, the following three items will provide you with just about everything you need to weight and measure what you eat. You can get all of these for right around $20, which will be money well spent.
A food scale is what you’ll use to weigh out just about everything for your meals. The exact scale I use every day is linked above to where you can purchase it on Amazon (only $12).
Initially, weighing out food will probably seem like a hassle or appear to be extremely confusing. Hopefully I can ease some of that by giving you examples of how I use my scale on a daily basis.
I meal prep over the weekend for the majority of the food I’ll be eating each week. I cook up my meats (usually chicken, steak, ground beef/turkey/chicken, etc.) and my carbohydrates (almost always a big batch of rice) and put them into Tupperware containers. I regularly detail my food prep processes on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook so be sure to follow me there to learn more!
Each morning I pull everything out of the fridge, get the food containers out that I take to work, and weigh my food out for the day. Weighing and measuring your food is really no different than how you’d normally do it. The only difference is you’ll put a scale under your plate or container, or you’ll scoop something up with a measuring cup rather than a spoon. Once you get the hang of it, the whole process becomes second nature and truly doesn’t cost you any extra time.
There will be other instances where a food scale doesn’t quite fit the mold for what you’re measuring, and normally measuring cups can fill in those gaps.
I often find myself using measuring cups for my breakfasts. Whether it be measuring out two cups of cereal and one cup of milk, or if I’m having protein pancakes and I want to add 1/4 cup of maple syrup, having measuring cups at the ready makes the process easier.
Most foods will have their serving size listed in cups, fractions of a cup, ounces, or grams on the nutrition facts label. Between a food scale (most measure in ounces, grams, and a few additional metrics) and measuring cups, you’ll be all set to track just about everything you eat.
Check out my video on how to weigh and measure your food to learn more about the do’s, don’ts, and process of tracking!
Now, how do you keep track of all of the calories? Do you have to tally these up on a pad of paper every day?
No. If you have a smart phone, download the My Fitness Pal app. In it, you can scan just about any food barcode and have it show up automatically in the app. From there, you can select the serving size, number of servings, and view the macronutrient breakdown for everything you eat.
You can also search for foods in the app, just like you would do a search on Google, and virtually every food commonly found in the grocery store is there. You simply select it, adjust the serving size, and voila! The app will tally up your macros as the day goes on.
Tips
A couple of tips I’d throw out there are to pick easily measurable foods to start, if you’re new to tracking, measuring, weighing, etc. Also, buy in bulk and meal prep ahead of time.
I’ve always found rice and meats to be very simple to measure out and weigh, and they’re easy to buy in bulk, cook in bulk, and store.
Measuring out a few cups of rice to boil and cook is simple. Storing rice is simple. Weighing a specific amount of ounces of rice to eat is simple.
You can’t get much easier than that.
Same goes for chicken, turkey, steak, etc. You can slice up an exact amount you want to eat in any sitting and put the rest back in the refrigerator for next time.
When you’re cooking foods that have a lot of ingredients to them, it gets harder and harder to track. For instance, if you’re layering together a lasagna or cooking a vegetable soup from scratch, there will be a lot of ingredients involved. Measuring out everything is not something I’d recommend — at least not to start.
Start with some simple items, tailor them towards your diet, and then build from there as you get more comfortable.
Final Notes to Keep in Mind
Tracking macros is normally best done within the framework of an overall diet plan, as well as an exercise routine that is keeping you active. We want to encourage healthy habits all around here.
For beginners, I believe learning how to track your current diet is an extremely beneficial practice before you begin any type of fitness or nutrition program. Learn what your current diet means in terms of calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fats. This will give you an excellent starting point, from which you can add or subtract calories and macros in order to work towards your goals.
Check out my Dieting Guide if you’re interested in learning more, which walks you through exactly how to set up your macros based on your goal, as well as different strategies you can use to continue seeing progress.
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I hope you found this article helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. And if you’re interested in coaching to learn more about fitness and nutrition to take your wellbeing to the next level, let’s start a conversation about your goals!
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CGF