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When you press down the gas pedal on your car, it signals the carburetor or fuel injection system to increase the fuel/air flow to the cylinders, which in turn makes a bigger bang, causing you to speed up. Regulating how much you’re accelerating is a normal and expected part of staying in control while you’re driving. What if someone else was running the gas pedal though and you couldn’t communicate with them? It would be pretty darn hard to drive safely, that’s for sure. Accelerating when you’re trying to slow down, slowing when you’re changing lanes, unpredictable changes of speed, it would all be very confusing and tend to make you feel out of control. This is exactly the situation when you don’t track & measure your food intake.

Every time you eat something, you’re sending more fuel to the engine. If you take your foot off the pedal long enough you’ll starve to death, while driving with a lead foot will cause you to become excessively fat. In order to have a pleasant drive, you need to know exactly how much fuel you’re adding (calories), and the octane rating (protein). It’s not very glamorous, but measuring your portions, writing down everything you eat, and doing daily totals is an integral portion of weight control.

The food log is the main tool you’ll use in your quest for better intake control. It’s basically just piece of paper, or a computer document where you record everything you eat. For example, here is my log for yesterday:

Oat Muffin + Coffee w/creamer (316, 16)
Hamburger Patty w/mustard (340, 50)
Egg + Bacon x2 + Cheese Round + Carrot (297, 22)
Protein Shake + Post Workout Drink (590, 81)
Spaghetti + Garlic bread (425, 42)
1/4 Crustless Pumpkin Pie (270, 19)

Totals: 2238 Calories, 230g Protein

(All items were made using no sugar, slow digesting carb recipes which I’ll be discussing more later.)

At first, tracking things and figuring out all the numbers is pretty annoying, but there are a few tricks to make things easier:

1) Use standardized containers. I use Gladware sidedish 1.75 cup bowls. This way when you cook something, you just fill up all the bowls and divide the total recipe calories and protein by the number of bowls. Whenever you eat something after the first time the numbers are already figured out for you. I find it’s pretty easy to adjust my recipes so that the numbers come out right for this size container, and they’re large enough to make me feel like I’ve eaten something without being too much food.

2) Keep a list of the foods you most commonly eat along with their portions, calorie counts, and protein counts handy. It’s surprising how often you eat the same things.

3) Figure out your meals in advance for the week. By the end of Sunday you should have 90% or more of your food for the week cooked, packaged, and in the fridge ready to eat. The easiest way to avoid cheating is to appeal to your lazy side. For me it’s so easy to just reach into the fridge and microwave something after a long day at work, I don’t even consider making something else that I probably shouldn’t be eating anyways. The mass prep on the weekend does take a while, but once you get used to it, it’s actually less hours per week of work spent cooking.

4) For meals you don’t care about psychologically, eating the same thing, or a small selection of things can really save thought, and prep time. For me, lunch and dinner are the important meals, so I try to make sure there is plenty of variety there. Breakfast however, I’m hardly awake, and essentially just washing it down with my coffee, so on weekdays, I have pretty much the same thing every day. For my afternoon snack at work I have a few different food choices that I mix up to create slight variations on the same basic theme. On the weekend, I have more time, so I usually cook more custom meals to get some variety.

5) Cook in large batches. I usually make enough of any dish to feed four people. Given the size containers I use that normally makes for about eight meals worth, which will last one to two weeks depending on how often I eat it. I normally keep one breakfast dish, two lunch dishes, about six easy items to mix and match in snacks, two dinner dishes, and one “desert” dish in the fridge at all times.

Tracking your intake daily will also show you some surprising things you may not otherwise have noticed. For example, look at this dinner from The Roadhouse:

16oz. Prime Rib, 3 Texas Egg Rolls, 2 Buttered Rolls, Sweet Potato with butter & sour cream, Salad with blue cheese dressing, diet coke.

Given our 50% restaurant rule you only eat half, count it as your pre-planned cheat meal, and pat yourself on the back for being a good person. Yet it calculates out at 1789 Calories, 85g Protein FOR HALF! Even as a half meal that’s a huge amount of calories, and it just doesn’t seem like it’s that much food. I certainly didn’t leave feeling stuffed, heck prior to dieting, I used to eat the whole thing! Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised, my spaghetti recipe is heavy on sauce and actually turned out to be low calorie after I made a few minor modifications. (such as using Barilla Plus pasta, which has a much lower insulin impact) So put in the work with your food log, and your ability to control your weight will increase.

When you’re trying to get into better shape, your primary goal is to lose fat. While many people describe this as “losing weight” they’re not the same thing at all. Your overall weight is a combination of your lean body mass (organs, muscles, and bones), adipose tissue (fat), hydration (how much water you have in you), and any food currently in the process of digestion or waste disposal. Saying that you “lost 10lbs” could mean a number of different things, depending on where those pounds came from. For example someone with a cast on both legs could easily lose quite a bit of muscle mass due to atrophy, yet this is not a positive result from a weight management standpoint.

You two best tools when tracking your progress are the weight scale, which everyone is pretty familiar with, and the bodyfat tester which measures your bodyfat as a percentage of your overall weight. Measuring hydration and current food in process is pretty difficult, and results in quite a bit of confusion about your current weight, since it can vary your totals by as much as 5lbs either way on a daily basis. Since there is so much built in error it’s difficult to see what the actual results are when you’re dieting.

The solution to this problem comes from the stock market, where daily prices can fluctuate wildly, but traders still need to be able to see trends. What they do is use a moving average, so that the average price is updated daily. Here are the closing prices for Microsoft for the last five days:

11/29 33.59
11/30 33.60
12/03 32.92
12/04 32.77
12/05 34.15

If we were going to use a three day moving average it would look like this:

11/29 33.59 = 33.59
11/30 (33.60 + 33.59) / 2 = 33.595
12/03 (32.92 + 33.60 + 33.59) / 3 = 33.37
12/04 (32.77 + 32.92 + 33.60) / 3 = 33.09
12/05 (34.15 + 32.77 + 32.92) / 3 = 33.28

As you can see each day the oldest price is dropped and the newest is added. Normally traders use a longer moving average, say fourteen days or so, to see trends. With modern spreadsheets, this is actually very easy to do, and the computer does all the heavy math for you. So why is this important? Well since your daily weight and bodyfat numbers aren’t that reliable you can use a moving average to help you see the trend values. I’ve found that the best kind of moving average for this sort of thing is called a “10% smoothed exponential moving average”, as recommended by John Walker, inventor of AutoCad, and writer of “The Hacker’s Diet”. His work was very influential in helping to shape my thoughts on weight loss, though there has been considerable progress in terms of understanding fitness and nutrition since his original document was written.

Each morning you should weigh yourself and take a bodyfat % reading (using calipers or an impedance unit), and note the results in a spreadsheet. Then the program will automatically make pretty graphs for you, and you can even tell it to put in a linear regression line which will show you the overall trend and slope (rate of progress). This sort of exact information is very useful in terms of feedback. You’ll be able to see your exact calorie deficit and the results of any modifications you make to your diet will show up very clearly on the graph.