HOW TO TRACK YOUR MACROS: THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE BASICS
At first, tracking macros can seem cumbersome or obsessive, but there are so many benefits that arise from learning to track your food! Whether your goal is weight loss, muscle gain, athletic performance, or improved health, tracking macros empowers you to make informed choices about what you eat to help you reach your goals.
The purpose behind tracking macros is this: measure and record all the food you consume to gain knowledge about food and your eating habits.
As humans, we frequently underestimate our actual food consumption (this is shown again and again in studies), and tracking our food brings heightened awareness that enables us to make more informed dietary choices. For instance, we might discover the need to increase our protein consumption to build muscle while reducing our fat intake to lower overall calorie consumption. This knowledge allows us to customize our diet to align with our health and fitness objectives.
An added benefit: Macro tracking can promote mindfulness around our food choices, bringing awareness to impulsive or emotional eating and helping us address those challenges.
Macro tracking is not about strict limitations; it's about awareness, education, and empowerment. It's not about obsessive control and perfection; it's about gaining knowledge that helps us progress towards our health and fitness goals.
Okay, so tracking macros can be helpful. Where do we go from here?
HERE’S HOW WE CAN SIMPLIFY THE MACRO TRACKING JOURNEY
STEP 1: CHOOSE AN APP TO TRACK YOUR FOOD
Several user-friendly apps, such as MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, or MacrosFirst, can track your daily food intake and calculate macros effortlessly. MFP has the most robust database, Cronometer has the most accurate tracking abilities, and MacrosFirst has a lot of cool features that can make meal planning easier. Take your pick!
STEP 2: WEIGH YOUR FOOD
Buy a food scale. We love the Ozeri for the price point, long battery life, and ease of use.
While the scale can seem intimidating at first, I promise you it gets easier with just a little practice. You can weigh in grams or ounces (or a combination of both) but I find it easiest to stick with grams. Ounces may come in handy for weighing your protein.
For most meals, you can place your plate or bowl on the food scale, tare (or zero out) the scale, then add the components of your meal. An example here is a yogurt bowl:
Place your bowl on the scale and press the “tare” or “zero” button.
Add an ingredient. In this example, it’s Greek yogurt.
I then added other ingredients such as berries and hemp hearts, taring (zeroing) the scale out between each ingredient. You can see in this last photo that I zeroed it out before adding in 20g of hemp hearts.
STEP 3: ENTER THE FOOD YOU EAT INTO YOUR APP
Weighing and entering your food may feel cumbersome at first, but like any new skill, it becomes easier with practice.
Using the example of the yogurt bowl above, here is how I would track it:
In all, I weighed out 150g vanilla Greek yogurt (the brand I used has a barcode so I can scan it to get the accurate nutrition input for the yogurt), 75g of fresh raspberries (I will track raspberries, trying to use a verified food entry with a green check), and 20g hemp hearts (I purchased these in bulk so don’t have a barcode to scan. I will search “raw hemp hearts” and look for a verified entry to log.
While I understand that this looks or sounds cumbersome, I can assure you that the process becomes quick and easy, and eventually unnecessary! Tracking is a temporary tool; not a forever crutch.
The practice of weighing and entering your food into an app is also what teaches you about food. Do you know how many carbohydrates are in a banana? Do you know that peanut butter is actually a pretty poor source of protein because it's mostly fat? Probably not, but after seeing all of that information displayed in your app, you'll start to gain knowledge about the food you eat.
Another valuable skill you learn is how to recognize appropriate portion sizes. How much cereal is in one serving? Measuring your cereal will teach you this answer (hint: it's may be less than you think!).
STEP 4: REPEAT STEPS 1-3 DAILY FOR A WHILE
One day of eating doesn't change our bodies. A week still doesn't have much of an effect. In one month, you start to see some changes. More time and practice = more change and more knowledge gained.
EASY TRACKING WITH THE TARE METHOD
The tare method is handy when measuring ingredients with a food scale. It involves resetting the scale to zero after placing a container on it. This effectively subtracts the weight of the container, allowing you to more easily measure the precise weight of the ingredient you're adding.
Let's use peanut butter as an example again;
First, turn on the food scale and put an open jar of peanut butter directly on the food scale.
Next, press the "tare" or "zero" button on the scale. This action resets the scale to zero while the jar is still on the scale, accounting for the weight of the jar.
Then, scoop out the desired amount of peanut butter from the jar. Say you want one serving (32g). Scoop out peanut butter until the scale shows -32g.
This is a time-saving technique, especially with sticky substances like peanut butter, as it allows you to measure the ingredient without using additional utensils or containers.
MAKING THE MOST OF TRACKING MACROS
The steps above are the absolute basics to tracking and measuring your food, but there are some factors to consider when it comes to accurately tracking intake! There are times, especially in the beginning of the journey, when we do want to be as accurate as possible in our tracking. This isn’t forever! But it can make a difference in our awareness of our intake as well as our progress.
FINDING ACCURATE FOOD ENTRIES
In some tracking apps, anyone can add their own food entries which can lead to a lot of inaccurate options out there (this is especially true on MFP!). Where possible, aim to track using verified entries, typically indicated by a green check mark. If you’re feeling really confused about the calorie or macro value of a specific food, you can often check on calorieking.com or nutritionix.com.
USING WEIGHT VS. VOLUME
Weighing our food in grams or ounces helps us with precision in knowing how much we’re eating and tracking it as accurately as possible. Weighing our food leaves no room for guesswork or discrepancies and can be really beneficial in the beginning of your tracking journey.
Volume measurements, such as cups or tablespoons, indicate the space occupied by a food item as opposed to mass (weight). Volume measurements are less precise, but can still be convenient! Weigh when you can and utilize volume measurements when weighing isn’t possible (like when eating out or estimating a meal!)
Here is an example of weight vs. volume:
Let's consider peanut butter. A serving size is two tablespoons. However, one tablespoon of peanut butter might weigh slightly more or less than another tablespoon depending on how compacted or loose it is. Weighing out 32 grams, on the other hand, ensures that you are consuming 32 grams, and consequently improves the accuracy of the macros you're tracking.
WEIGHING RAW VS. COOKED FOODS
Many raw foods (think: meats, rice, potatoes, and pastas) change pretty dramatically when cooked. The cooking process can cause foods to lose moisture, shrink, or change density, leading to weight and volume differences. For this reason, there can be large discrepancies if weighing raw food as cooked, or vice versa.
The best rule of thumb is to track it as you weigh it. If you’re weighing dry (uncooked) pasta to cook, track it as uncooked. If you’re weighing crockpot shredded chicken that you’ve already prepared, track it as cooked.
Example: Let's consider a chicken breast. A raw, boneless, skinless chicken breast might weigh 200 grams. However, when you cook it, it loses moisture, and the weight decreases. After cooking, the same chicken breast might weigh around 150 grams. If you weigh it raw, track it raw. If you weigh it cooked, track it cooked. This is an easy step we can take to be as accurate as possible in our tracking.
Tracking macros is not about restriction but empowerment and knowledge. It’s not about perfection, but progress. It's an approach to nutrition that builds self-awareness, education, and mindfulness.
Taking even just a few weeks to track your intake can help you gain so much understanding of your eating habits and tendencies then adjust them to align better with your goals. If you can, pay attention to factors that can affect your tracking accuracy and, consequently, your progress. It’s not forever, but it can make such a difference in how efficiently you can work towards your goals.
Want some more help tracking your macros? Make sure to grab a free copy of Everyday Macros: our macro-friendly meal prep cookbook. It’s full of simple recipes, batch prep tips, and insights on how to weigh and track these foods in your app.
Check out a few other related articles that can further help you navigate your macro tracking journey:
HOW TO TRACK A RECIPE IN CRONOMETER