Do you use an app to help you track your meals or keep you motivated? Do you have a fancy spreadsheet or a complex whiteboard - post it note system? I am having a hard time “just sticking with it” and wonder if some data collection would help keep me motivated.
Thanks!
I use an app (MyFitnessPal). Personally I really enjoy tracking. I like meal planning and prepping, it keeps me eating better foods and hitting the macros and calories I want. I’m way more conscious of not only how much, but what I’m eating, and how it effects my mood or energy levels. I dunno I just genuinely enjoy the process, and I like that it gives me visual structure. Some people hate it. Different strokes.
I used an app at first to track calories.
But eventually the app taught me to remember the caloric value of the most common things – That is, it was a huge pain in the ass to punch everything in every meal, so it was motivation to learn instead. The 50 calorie margin of error was NOT worth the futzing. And being the tracker myself really taught me to check what’s in food, instead of taking it for granted.
Motivation, however, is more complicated. As it depends on the person. It varies a lot, so I can only say that amongst my friends that lost weight, the biggest or most common effective motivator across all of them was Before pictures.
You’ll look the same and feel the same, but then see an old picture and be like ‘whoa’. I’ve seen it plenty of times, by now.
Even me – when I feel like I’m wasting my time, I have an old picture of me overlooking a cliff, looking like the heavyweight champion of Auschwitz.