To celebrate the launch of ‘Meal Tracker’, our new meal tracking app, the October challenge is going to be to track everything you eat and drink, every single day, for a month – using our new app of course! Or if you prefer a Check it before you wreck it book, is fine too.
Why track?
Tracking gives you absolute clarity and control over your chances of success.- Tracking ensures you know exactly what you have put in your body, and whether it was a good choice or not.
- Tracking gives you the flexibility to have treats and then make up for it, later in the day or week, to ensure that you still get your calorie deficit.
- Tracking is proven to double your weight loss, over not tracking. In a 2008 study in the US, people who tracked their food intake, lost twice as much weight as people in the study who didn’t track their food intake.
- Tracking doesn’t take that long. Research suggests that to track a whole days food throughout the day, it only takes up between 15 and 23 minutes. Surely, you can spare yourself that much time, to double your weight loss!
What happens when we don’t track?
I think we all know, that when we don’t track, we aren’t as successful – but why?
- There is less, or even, no accountability when you don’t track– if you don’t write it down or record it, you didn’t eat it!
- We ‘forget’ what we have actually eaten
- We can’t easily calculate how many calories we have had in a certain day if we are trying to keep a tally in our heads
- We mindlessly pick at food without conscience, if we aren’t accountable to recording it somewhere
- When we are big, we are clearly unable to moderate our food intake, and probably not very good at guesstimating how much we have eaten, so we will overeat, if there is nothing keeping us in check.
Meal Tracker
The new Be Strong tracking app, ‘Meal tracker’ is the app where you still learn about the food you love eating. It’s completely personal to you.
The app pulls your personalised nutrition data from your weight tracker and allows you to track food against your daily calorie allowance. Giving you complete control over your weight loss.
Every time you eat and drink something (preferably before hand) you add your food and drink to the app. However the calories aren’t pre-populated as they are with other apps, so you still have to look the calories up on the packaging or ‘google it’ first, so that you learn about the food you eat.
Every time you add some food or drink along with it’s calories, it tells you how many calories that you have consumed as a percentage of your personalised allowance, and how much you have left.
The progress ring is a really great visual, to be able to see how far along you are for the day. If it’s still morning, and you are less than halfway round, you know you are doing OK. If you’re over half way, then you know you need to pull it back a bit. It makes you responsible to your choices.
Meal tracker keeps your food entry history, so that once you have added a particular item, it is stored as an option for you to select, so that the next time you come to eat it, it is there. But the best bit is, it is only your food that it stores, so you can’t get mixed up and pick the wrong option, leading to inaccurate tracking.
You add your food and drink in either the breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and evening time categories. However, all food that you enter is saved in the background to be used in each of the categories, so you don’t have to add it again – if you have had eggs for breakfast one day, and then have them for lunch on another, the eggs are there in both categories.
You can access the meal tracker app through the website, or on your Be Strong app where you will find it in the main menu. Now everything you need to lose weight is in one place! All the advice, guidance and motivation, along with the place you go to for ideas on what to eat, or for a quick HIIT Session, and now where you record what you are eating and drinking! It’s a one stop shop!
This Month!
Get tracking and see how far it can actually take you. For those of you on the 2 stone for Christmas challenge, it will be the one thing that you do that will almost guarantee you hit that target for Christmas!