How Tracking Your Food Can Help You Improve Performance...and Health!

Here’s something I see way too often in the athlete community: most endurance athletes UNDER eat!
You read that right, the people who should be taking in quality food to ensure their bodies are getting what is needed to perform optimally are missing the mark.  Instead of experiencing PRs and strong races, these athletes are dealing with fatigue and poor performance. 

But maybe they aren’t even realizing they are undereating!  I don’t blame them. In today’s world, we are often bombarded with messages of “eat less” so even when we think we are eating more, we aren’t simply because of some preconceived notions of what a meal should look like.

That is why today I want to talk to you about tracking your food.  

​Yes, it can be tedious and time consuming but tracking your food can reveal A LOT about your eating habits and how they are contributing to your performance outcomes.  Essentially, you can’t manage what you don’t measure so it’s time to make food tracking a priority! 

​THE PROS AND CONS

Before diving into the WHAT AND HOW, let’s quickly talk about some of the pro’s and con’s of tracking your food.

I believe the most beneficial aspect of tracking your food is that you gain an awareness of your habits.  Once you know what and how much you're eating (and potentially how you feel before and after meals, if you log that!) you can take action.  No more wondering why you hit a wall during that long training block or why you were ravenous on a rest day.  Tracking gives you data, and data is a wonderful thing - especially for athletes!

Related to awareness is the idea that people tend to improve their behaviors when they are being watched, even if it’s by themselves!  How many times have you written down what you ate only to find yourself making better choices purely because you want to log those better choices?  It’s an interesting psychological effect, but it works!

I also love that tracking your food is simple and gives you something to look back on.  No need to spend excessive amounts of money on a fancy test or tool.  A free app or a cheap notebook will do.  Then, when you’re training for an event in the future, you can look back and see what helped and what didn’t.

​TRACKING ISN’T ALWAYS THE BEST IDEA

Now we all know that most good things still have some negative consequences to them, and tracking your food is one of them.

Eating can be an emotional behavior and so tracking food can sometimes make someone obsessive.  This is especially true if they are trying to stay within certain calorie and macronutrient ranges.  As you’ll see below, this is why I think short-term tracking is more than enough to provide you with the information needed to make positive changes.

Also, unfortunately, it can be time consuming and tedious to track every meal and snack you eat.  There are apps that help and ways to make it easier and quicker but the reality is you still need to take time out of your day to make sure you are logging your food in order to obtain accurate results that you can work off of.

​GETTING STARTED WITH TRACKING YOUR FOOD

Before you start counting every calorie, let’s make sure you have an accurate idea of how much you should be consuming each day.  Start by completing this online calculator.  Do one calculation for your highest activity day and then one calculation for your rest day.  This will help you better understand what your energy (aka - calorie!) requirements are based on your activity levels.

Once you have your numbers in place, it’s time to start logging your meals.  There are two apps that I recommend to anyone wishing to track:

My Fitness Pal 
Cronometer

Both of them are great and provide tools that make tracking easy!  For example, you can save meals and recipes, import recipes from websites, manually enter recipes you’ve created, and even scan food products to enter information. 

MACRONUTRIENT RATIOS
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In the past, tracking caloric intake was usually all people focused on but as we got smarter about training, we realized that we needed to place an emphasis on macronutrients, not just calories.  

Different macronutrient ratios are required for different goals.  Most athletes need about 1g of protein per pound of lean tissue.  This equates to somewhere around 20-30% of your daily caloric needs.

When it comes to fat and carbohydrates, those can shift depending on your performance and body composition goals.  For example, if you are a lean athlete working on short but fast training and races (think sprinting), you’ll want to keep your fat intake on the lower end with carbohydrate intake on the higher end. 
Whereas, if you are an athlete who trains and competes in longer distances (anything over 2 hours), you’ll want to focus on a higher fat intake with a moderate to low carbohydrate intake.  A typical range for carbohydrate intake is 10-50% and for fat it is 30-70%.

​IIFYM: NOT ALWAYS THE BEST IDEA

With the popularity of tracking macronutrients growing, many in the health space advocate for IIFYM: if it fits your macros.

Essentially the idea here is that regardless of what you eat, if it fits your macros, it’s good to go.  That way, people have more flexibility with the QUALITY or TYPE of food that they eat.  So, if a bag of doritos still fits within your daily macronutrient and caloric requirements, they are good to go.

If you know anything about me, you know that IIFYM won’t fly with me.  The quality of our food DOES matter.  For some reason we have been taught that if we exercise or train, we can eat whatever we want.

Sure, our caloric needs are likely higher but that doesn’t mean we should be scarfing down junk to fill those needs.  Fueling your body to optimal wellness and performance is more about eating NUTRIENT rich foods in the right amounts, at the right times.

In my opinion, it’s not “I exercise so I can eat” but rather “I eat so I can exercise”.  Focus on high quality foods that provide nutrients to fuel your body so that you can reach your goals.

(And don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy something here and there!  But keep it to a minimum so that your body gets what it needs to perform).

To get a better understanding of your nutrient intake, I highly recommend using Chronometer as it will track micronutrient AND macronutrient intake.  This will ultimately give you a better idea of what nutrients may be lacking in your body so that you can work towards improving those numbers with real food and/or supplements.

DAILY GOALS VS. TRAINING/RACE GOALS
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As athletes, we understand that our day-to-day intake varies greatly from our training and race nutrition.  You may eat a generally low carb, moderate protein, moderate fat diet day-to-day, but your training/racing fuel is likely mostly carbohydrate.

For this reason, my suggestion for you, during training season, is to track the meals and snacks you eat before and after training sessions but skip entering your training foods.  This allows you to focus on meeting your daily requirements without stressing over the rest. 

Now, this does come with a caveat.  As you become more comfortable with tracking your food, you COULD choose to do what I do (if any of this goes over your head, it’s okay to skip it!):

1. Get an understanding of what your approximate calories burned is for a training session (ex: on a four-hour ride I burn somewhere around 3200 calories)
2. Calculate what your caloric intake is during your training session (ex: on the same four-hour ride, I take in approximately 200 calories/hour for a total of 800 calories consumed)
3. Calculate the difference between calories consumed and calories burned (ex: 3200-800 = 2400)
4. That number now becomes the amount of calories you need to replace/consume the remainder of the day.  You can use that number in your tracker using your usual macronutrient ratios.

I do this because it allows me to track my calories on high volume training days to better understand how much energy I burned and need to replace.  However, since I can and do replace some of those calories with carbohydrates DURING training sessions, tracking that food throws off the numbers in my tracker.

Go ahead and give this a try once you’re more comfortable using a tracker!

WHAT DO I DO IF TRACKING IS TOO MUCH FOR ME?
​

Everything I’ve written about so far in this post can be applied to anyone - athlete or not.  But, as I’ve mentioned above, tracking food can take up a lot of time and cause stress in certain individuals.

It’s not for everyone! 

​But rather than feel like you don’t have a tool to use, I’d recommend you use a journal instead.  The difference is that you focus on what you're eating and not the quantity of calories or macronutrients.  
Food journals are better for two different types of people:

1. Those that are micro managers and who love to stress about every little thing.  It may sound a little backwards but the reality is, food tracking will be too time consuming for you.  By utilizing a food journal, you can get a general idea of what you're eating, and even general quantities, without forcing you to record every single morsel or calorie.   
2. Those that are experiencing symptoms like bloating, acid reflux, body aches, pains that come and go, headaches, etc. In this case, a food journal is a great tool to help you tune into your body and learn about which foods help you feel energized (and without symptoms), and which ones leave you feeling flat and unwell.

​IN SUMMARY

If you’re an athlete who hasn’t been seeing improvement in performance or have been struggling with your training (especially if you’re feeling a lot of fatigue), it’s a possibility that you are undereating.  And the only way to know for sure is if you start tracking your food.

Now let’s be clear, despite the time-consuming nature of tracking your food, you can get a whole lot of information from just tracking your food for one week.  And the same goes for those opting for a food journal rather than a meal tracking app.

The majority of what we eat on a weekly basis stays generally the same so one week of information can help you get an idea of your daily habits and allow you to understand:

• Your caloric intake
• You macronutrient intake + ratios
• The connection between your eating habits and your performance
• The connection between how you feel and what you’re eating (**if you notate your signs and symptoms while tracking your food**)

If you haven’t tried tracking your food once, my send away message is this: try it for one week and see what you learn!

Of course the long term goal is to learn what types of foods and in what amounts help you fuel your performance and your health WITHOUT food tracking, but it's certainly a tool to help you get there!