To Track, or Not to Track
I am sharing our own experiences here, so this is not a “how to” but rather a “we did this” type of post. Something else may work for you, but I get the question all the time, “How did you do it?” So this is one of those “hows.”
As I mentioned earlier, we started off using Atkins for our meal plans, and their online food tracker. Mainly because (1) it was free, and (2) it was really easy to use. The only downside to their tracker now that we are past tracking anyway, is that they track net carbs instead of total carbs. There are trackers you can get that will track total carbs, but Atkins is the one I became familiar with and what I am talking about here.
First, I would strongly advise that you put the items you are planning to eat into your tracker BEFORE you eat them if at all possible. Eating a meal or cooking a recipe, and THEN putting it into your tracker can sometimes give you a big surprise…and not the good kind. LOL. I would sometimes put the whole day into my tracker before I ate anything. That’s one good thing about meal plans. You already know what you plan to eat (see what I did there?).
This is what the tracker looks like for a new day. On this way of eating, every day is a new day. No matter what happened yesterday, you always get a clean slate every day.
If an item simply does not exist in the meal tracker, Google the item with the word “carbs” and find it somewhere online and manually enter the carbs. Just be careful that you use a reliable source, some folks like to dream that the high-carb food they love is really low-carb, and they’ll fudge (definitely a high-carb item) on the count.
Another great feature of the Atkins tracker is that you have have access to all their wonderful recipes linked right to their website. So if you are looking for, say, a homemade ranch dressing, type that into the recipe finder, locate the one you want to use, and then select the “recipe” tab and look it up and add it into your tracker. Their ranch dressing recipe is the bomb, by the way)
A food you eat often is great to save in your “favorites” so you don’t have to input everything every single time. For instance, a basic side salad that will have basically the same amounts and same items in it every time. Simply put the ingredients and amounts in one time and save it as a favorite, then after that, just click “Favorites” and select that salad. If you’re out of cherry tomatoes that day, once you enter your salad into your tracker, simply delete that from the individual ingredients listed your tracker. You can make adjustments to any item after it’s in your tracker. One of my first “Favorites” was my breakfast: Bacon and 1 egg. Yeah, I suffered. LOL.
If you create your own recipe, or find an off-site recipe you want to use, the other great feature I used a lot was the “groupings.” You can create a grouping where you list all the ingredients and amounts, save and name it (i.e., “Cauliflower Pizza Crust”) and every time you eat that, just select that item from your “groupings” to enter into your tracker. If you eat half of that recipe for your portion of the pizza, just enter .5 as your serving size. Or, you can do like my live-in computer guru, and after you enter .5, you can then save that list as your own separate grouping, so from then on you don’t even have to figure out the size of serving, just put the item in your tracker. The main thing is getting the right amount of the right ingredients tracked at the end of your day. (Just be sure to save that first because if you’ve already put in other things for that meal, when you save it as a grouping, it will include those, too).
Atkins also has a great running breakdown of your daily nutrients: Proteins, Fats, Fiber, Calories, and most importantly, Carbs. You can see how your day will add up in case you need to adjust one of those to reach a goal, or reduce if you went over a maximum allowable limit. Truthfully, I was unable to reach my “minimum” in most of these categories on most days. I just could not eat that much! Here’s a screen shot from one of my tracked days.
And speaking of limits, you set that yourself when you enter your current weight and how much you want to lose each week. That is what establishes your “limits” on those nutrients above. The more you want to lose each week, obviously the fewer of those you are going to be able to eat. So, you may want to consider the old adage “Slow and steady wins the race.” Because it seems that is the healthier way to lose weight, and ensure it STAYS LOST!
The more you get into your low-carb lifestyle, the less you will need helps like trackers because it will become like second nature. You will be able to eyeball a portion size and calculate it pretty accurately! I still like to weigh my foods occasionally, but at first, I weighed everything because I was determined this was going to work! And it has.
Don’t let beginning overwhelm you into giving up at the starting gate. This is not a sprint. It is a life-long journey, and you will find your stride and love it in no time! And let’s face it, how hard is it to make yourself eat bacon, steak, seafood, cheese, and all those other healthy foods after a lifetime of being told “Don’t touch!”
It is liberating. It is healthy. And it is a recipe for a whole new you!
#lowcarbjc