Do You Actually Need To Track The Diet For Fat Loss? | Triage Thoughts Ep. 174

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The short answer

Go on any social media account in the health and fitness space and you will find an influencer selling their method for fat loss. More often than not, the method is the same: here are your calories, here are your macros, off you go. That is the be all and end all, and then they see you later.

To be clear, that is a perfectly viable approach. We actually like it for a lot of people. It is simple, and it teaches you a great deal about nutrition along the way. But it is not the only way to go about things, and you do not actually need to track your food to get the result you are looking for, whether that is fat loss, weight gain or weight maintenance.

Everything still comes back to calorie balance. If you want to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit, which means consuming less energy than you put out, or putting out more energy than you consume. There needs to be some mismatch between energy in and energy out if you want to change your body composition in either direction. That is the requirement. But nowhere in that statement does it say you need an app that calculates your protein, fat and carbs. The calorie equation does not demand tracking.

Why tracking is still worth doing at least once

We would both argue that tracking calories and macros is a genuinely valuable thing to do at some stage in your life. It builds an understanding of food that stays with you. Once you have done a stint of it, you can look at a chicken breast and know roughly how much protein and fat is in it. You can tell different foods apart by how many calories they carry and how those calories break down across the macronutrients.

So we see tracking as a fantastic tool. It is not the only tool, and it is not the only way to get results, but it teaches you a lot. The caveat is that it only teaches you if you let it. Plenty of people track and still have no real clue about the diet. If you have a lot of calories to play with, you can hit your targets fairly easily without ever learning which foods are high in protein, fat or carbs. Some people use tracking to educate themselves; others use it to blindly chase numbers with no regard for food quality or timing. From a fat loss point of view, blindly hitting numbers is doable and effective. It is just not optimal for health, performance, muscle gain or muscle retention.

The three tiers we use with clients

In our coaches’ corner, where we coach coaches to get better results with their clients, we break the whole thing down into three tiers. Within each tier there are many shades, many tools and many protocols, but the structure is straightforward:

• Habit based change. No real understanding of nutrition beyond the fact that calories are what need to be manipulated.
• Portion control. Setting some food rules around how you organise your plate.
• Calorie and macro tracking. The most precise of the three.

As an individual chasing fat loss, you can do a number of things before you ever need to track calories and macros. There are also other approaches that do not fit neatly into these tiers, but we tend not to cover them because we see them as less effective or less relevant for the people we work with.

Habit based change

At the most basic level, you simply change a few habits. You might eat a little less food. You might swap some higher calorie foods for lower calorie ones, so a packet of jellies becomes an apple. You still get the sweetness or sourness you were after, and your calories come down a little. You might switch from whole milk to skimmed or one percent milk. And of course, if you are trying to gain weight, you do the opposite: you go from skimmed milk to whole milk, or even add cream, whatever it takes to get the calories in.

These habits can also be broad and sweeping. Skipping breakfast, for example, is a single habit that can lead to a substantial reduction in calories across the day. The point is that a handful of changed habits can be enough to get you into the calorie deficit that drives the outcome you want, with no tracking at all.

Portion control

Strictly speaking, every method here is a form of portion control, including calorie and macro tracking, because you are always controlling how much you eat. But when we talk about portion control as its own tier, we mean setting food rules around how you build your plate.

You can borrow an existing framework, such as the plate model put out by public health bodies, which shows you roughly how your plate should look if you are managing your weight. Or you can build your own rules: four meals a day, each with a fist sized portion of protein, a couple of fist sized portions of vegetables, and so on. The aim is to manage your overall calorie load while still getting your macronutrients, which is why protein usually comes first.

The hand is a handy measuring tool. A palm sized serving of protein from animal products gives roughly 25 grams or so, a fist for carbohydrates, a handful for vegetables, and thumb or finger sized portions for fats. Of course this scales with hand size, but the nice thing is that it scales together: a bigger person with bigger hands gets bigger portions. If you want someone on a higher protein intake, you might double the protein portion.

A lot of protein sources come pre-portioned, which makes this even easier. A salmon fillet might be 150 grams or 200 grams, but once it is consistent you can make small tweaks over time. The same goes for one medium chicken breast. A simple, realistic meal might be one medium chicken breast, half a serving of microwave rice and a fistful of vegetables. The rice gives you two servings in the bag, one for now and one for tomorrow. The chicken is already portioned. The vegetables go straight from the freezer into the microwave for two minutes. Done.

Rather than imposing portions from the outside, we often prefer to ask people what they already like to eat and then work out what a sensible portion of that looks like. The structure then gets tweaked over time. You might start someone at around 2,000 calories with three meals, a fist of carbohydrates, two thumbs of fat and a palm and a half of protein at each. If weight loss stalls, you might pull the fat out of the third meal, so the eggs that used to be cooked whole in olive oil become two whole eggs and two whites instead.

Portion control also travels well, which is one of its great strengths. If you go to a restaurant and get served a huge carvery dinner, you can simply have your usual fist of carbohydrates and leave the rest. The meat looks about right, and if there is extra sauce you account for it by having a little less fat at your next meal. A rough meal template gives you something to anchor to in the real world.

There are smaller tricks that fit under portion control too. Some people find them useful, others do not. A common one among bodybuilders is eating from a small or baby spoon rather than a large tablespoon. It slows you down, limits how much you take per bite, and adds a kind of intrinsic portion control because you feel fuller a bit sooner.

Portion control is easier if you already understand which foods are protein, which are fat and which are carbs. That is part of why we often start people with a stint of tracking. But the knowledge can absolutely be built over time, by going through your current diet meal by meal and asking where the protein source is, what could be swapped, and what is missing. People got in shape long before calorie tracking existed. Portion control is where we get most people to in the end.

Mindful eating

Mindful eating means learning to listen to your body’s internal cues. On its own it is a fairly ineffective method, because most people will have a poor hunger response until they already have some structure in place around protein and vegetable intake. You have to have other things working before mindful eating can carry the load.

If this intuitive approach worked straight out of the gate for everyone, all we would ever say is “listen to your hunger” and that would solve everyone’s problems. It does not, which tells you it needs a foundation under it. In obesity, you may not have what we would loosely call normal hunger or satiety cues. The same is true if you are eating poorly. Eat a thousand calories of fast food and you can be hungry again an hour later; eat a large volume of vegetables for far fewer calories and you can feel stuffed for ages.

Once calories and protein are taken care of, usually through some portion control or tracking, you can layer mindful eating on top. Then you start asking the subjective questions: How hungry are you heading into the meal? How satiated do you feel afterwards? How does it affect your energy? Did you time it well, or did you eat too soon and feel bloated, or leave it too long and turn up hungry and irritable? Are you actually tasting and enjoying the food? Because these are your individual responses, dialling them in lets you fine tune the diet with real granularity, right down to how you time your meals.

The environment matters too. It is easy to eat without being mindful at all because of distractions. A good rule of thumb, especially for fat loss, is to separate your meals from your work and other distractions, slow down and actually enjoy the food. You do not have to ban watching your favourite show while you eat, but you should not be eating on the go either. This is a habit personal trainers fall into through no real fault of their own: with little time between clients, you end up scoffing a meal out of a Tupperware on the gym floor with no chance to register how full you are. That undermines both the satiety response and your digestion, especially if you have barely chewed the food.

Meal plans

Meal plans get talked about as either all good or all bad, and neither is true. In the evidence based world people often dismiss them outright, while elsewhere people beg for a meal plan as if there is some magic combination of foods that will solve everything.

In reality, every day’s worth of food you eat was effectively a meal plan, whether you planned it proactively or not. You could simply look back on a day where your nutrition was spot on and turn that into your template: this is my breakfast, this is my lunch, this is my dinner, this is what I eat most days. Built that way, off the back of some tracking, a meal plan can work well.

The problem is the other kind, the off the shelf 1,200, 1,600 or 2,000 calorie plan handed to someone with no understanding of nutrition. Even then a meal plan does not teach you much. It is paint by numbers. It can help you on your journey, but you do not become a great painter by painting by numbers. A meal plan outsources the thinking without educating you, so it may produce results while you follow it, but it leaves you stranded the moment your life changes. If you used to cycle or walk to work and then start getting the bus, your daily activity drops, the plan stops working, and you have no idea why, because you never learned anything about calorie balance or the inputs behind it.

There are other failures we see constantly. Copy and paste plans that tell someone allergic to peanuts to have peanut butter with their oats, because the plan was never tailored or individualised in the first place. When we interview potential clients, we listen for what they actually want. If someone wants to outsource everything and just be told exactly what to eat, that is not what we offer. We want to teach people how to eat for the rest of their life. We do not want someone coming back in ten years still not knowing how to eat, because that would mean we failed them.

There is also a social cost. You can never really socialise on a strict meal plan, which is why bodybuilders following them end up eating out of Tupperware everywhere. At a wedding, at Christmas, at a funeral, on a date, the answer is always the same: stick to the meal plan. That is not the real world. You never learn how to integrate your actual life into your nutrition. So while meal plans can be effective for some, and we have used them with clients by getting them to build and tweak the plan themselves, they are something we steer most people away from.

Food rules

A close relative of portion control is creating food rules. Some food rules can be negative or even harmful, such as cutting out an entire macronutrient. But many are simply arbitrary rules that solve a specific problem.

Intermittent fasting is a food rule: my eating window is between these hours, or I am doing alternate day fasting. “No eating after 8pm” is a food rule. The portion control methods described above are food rules too. Some are arbitrary, some more specific, but the concept of building rules around food can be very useful.

Say you are good with your calories overall, but the evening is your downfall: a packet of crisps, some biscuits, some tea, and it gets out of hand. A rule of not eating after a set time can strip out those extra calories you never needed, and suddenly you are getting the results you wanted. That is not necessarily how we would deal with it, but it is one way people do.

The danger is when rules become excessive and drift into disordered eating, pulling you out of social events and damaging your relationship with foods you enjoy. There is a real difference between a useful rule and a rigid one. A useful version: during a six week fat loss phase, on a Wednesday night, instead of getting a takeaway, cook a steak dinner that comes in 500 calories lighter, and that is 500 calories saved. (Sushi would arguably be even better, since you actually eat some fish, though not everyone is convinced.) It is mildly restrictive, it is time limited, and it is sustainable.

The rigid version is “I will never eat a takeaway again,” or “I will never eat chocolate again” when chocolate is your favourite food. What happens is that the moment someone hands you a single square of chocolate, you decide you have ruined everything, so you may as well eat as much as possible before going back to zero tolerance tomorrow. A rule like “no alcohol” can backfire too, if the way you socialise with all your friends is built around it. Cutting it out might just isolate you, and simply creating the rule does not solve that situation for you.

The goal with food rules is to turn the useful ones into habits, so they become your norm. Come up with your own rules, form the habits that help you towards your goal, and break the old habits that do not.

What people are really reacting to when they say they hate tracking

A lot of people will tell you they tried calorie tracking before and just did not like it. Dig a little deeper and you often find it was not the tracking they disliked at all. They had tried to eat in something like a 1,000 calorie deficit, which nobody enjoys. Or they were only counting calories, never looking at their macros, with no food education attached. The poor diet setup put them off, not the method itself.

That said, some people genuinely do not like tracking. They tend to be the more spontaneous, slightly chaotic eaters: they want to wake up and decide later what to have, grab something from the shop or the canteen, keep a few options at home, with no real forward planning. Interestingly, tracking can actually enable that style of eating, because you can have whatever you like across the day as long as you hit your targets. But in practice, once people start tracking they usually begin planning ahead a bit more anyway, for example front loading protein at breakfast or lunch so they are not trying to force a huge amount into one evening meal.

Do you need to track calorie expenditure?

So far we have focused on the “calories in” side. What about the “calories out” side? There are plenty of apps, trackers and step counters that estimate your calorie output. None of them are perfectly accurate, but they vary. We have been trying a recovery and fitness tracker that has proved remarkably accurate: when we eat the weekly average it reports, body weight holds steady. Others are well off. Either way, we would never use a tracker or an Apple watch as the single thing that dictates the diet.

We would definitely not use it on a day to day basis to set a daily eating limit, as in “I burned 2,000 calories today so I am only allowed to eat 2,000.” That is not how to use it. Where it does earn its place is as a tool for keeping you on track, especially with daily non-exercise activity: the fidgeting, the steps, the general movement. Most people overestimate how many calories they burn in a gym session and underestimate how many they burn day to day when they are active rather than sedentary.

This matters because of how weight quietly creeps on over years. We had a client who had gained weight while apparently doing exactly the same things as always. The explanation was that a few events had pushed up their calorie intake through food and alcohol, while their movement stayed at roughly maintenance. They were never digging into the added weight. Christmas and various events nudge intake up, a few pounds go on, and because activity stays remarkably similar, those pounds never come off before the next event adds more. You can be hitting your 10,000 steps a day and still only be moving at maintenance, never eating in a deficit, never chipping away at what was added.

A calorie tracker can be genuinely useful for estimating your day to day expenditure, particularly if you do mixed activities. Between us we do jiu jitsu and resistance training, with the odd jog thrown in, and working out the caloric demand of that mix by trial and error alone is hard. What we would not do is integrate a tracker with a calorie counting app so that your exercise burn automatically inflates your daily targets. People do this constantly and it makes everything far more complicated. Do not link the two.

The principle is to look at averages, not single days. You modify your eating based on a week, two weeks or even a month of expenditure data, not on what you burned today. The only caveat is a day that is wildly outside your norm. If you usually do 7,000 steps and you spend a day walking around a big city like London instead of taking the tube, you might rack up 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 steps. That is obviously a different level of expenditure. But day to day, leave it alone; chasing every fluctuation just complicates things.

When being more precise actually helps

Some people are simply poor at estimating their own diet and training, and for them being a bit more precise makes real sense. We constantly meet people convinced they have a fast metabolism and eat loads, and then you look at the diet and they are on around 2,100 calories. The reason it feels like a lot is the structure. They have two biscuits’ worth of cereal for breakfast, a packet of crisps for lunch, and then realise at dinner they need to eat real food and protein, by which point they are too full to manage it. Space the same food across the day and getting the calories in suddenly feels far easier.

The same thing happens with younger teenage males who sleep until two in the afternoon and then complain that it is hard to get their calories in. Of course it is hard, because they slept through most of the eating window. In cases like these, a tracker, whether for intake or expenditure, can correct a badly skewed sense of how much someone is really eating or really doing.

The bottom line

Tracking calories and macros for fat loss is not necessary. It is a fantastic tool that teaches you a lot, and it is the best route, alongside a meal plan, if you want to get absolutely shredded and need very precise control. But for the average person there are plenty of other ways into a calorie deficit: changing your habits, controlling your portions, eating more mindfully, using sensible food rules, or working from a meal plan you understand.

Even things that look like outliers fit the same framework. Modern weight loss drugs largely work by supporting appetite regulation, helping you get back to listening to your hunger cues and eating in a non-tracking way while regulating body weight more easily, all without it taking up so much willpower. Bariatric surgery does something similar by limiting how much food can come in. A higher protein, higher fibre diet with more fruit and vegetables does the same job through food choice. Whether the recommendation is low carb, very high protein or very high fibre, every one of these is aiming at the same end: reducing the tendency to over consume hyper palatable foods, and therefore reducing total calories.

So whether you track or not is not really the important thing. What matters is getting into a deficit, sticking to it for long enough, and then setting yourself up for maintenance, because the point is not to diet forever. The right method is whatever lets you do that and keep doing it. Find tools and habits that let you put things on autopilot, so you are not forever asking whether you need to track this or that, and so the behaviours that get you results simply become your norm.