Food tracking (or logging) refers to the concept of monitoring your dietary intake with the goal of obtaining information about your diet. This is usually done as a means to the end of manipulating diet, most often for the goal of weight loss but also for muscle-building or simply general health.
Whilst food tracking can take many forms, it is most often done using apps. There’s been a lot of debate about these apps for food tracking and the potential harms that can come with their use. I think this is mostly unjust; in fact, there are a lot of positives to tracking food intake that could probably help a lot of people who are struggling with managing their weight. The obesity crisis is more severe than ever, and we desperately need to find ways that can help manage this.
However, as with everything in life, there are certainly also cons. Tracking food intake seems to be unsuitable for certain populations with an unhealthy relationship to food (or tendencies towards one) and can also cause some issues in those who are otherwise healthy. In the same way that food tracking is not all bad, these considerations should not be ignored either.
The current article aims to deal with this by presenting both the advantages and points of caution with the use of food-tracking applications. Although my experience with these apps with myself and clients has been very positive, I do my best to give a balanced account and, rather than sell them as a one-size-fits-all solution, suggest them as another tool in the box that may or may not be used to help one in achieving their nutrition goals and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Pros
Eliminates Guesswork
I heard Steve Hall of Revive Stronger compare dieting without tracking to driving a car without a map — you might arrive at the same place eventually, but you just might end up taking a few wrong turns here and there. I think this is a great analogy.
Overall calorie intake is the only thing that matters for weight management. That’s not to say food choices aren’t relevant for health — they very much are — but for weight management, it’s a question of calories. Since it’s just a numbers game, then, why leave this to guesswork?
There is so much room for variability in our day-to-day food choices that complicate estimating caloric intake. Seemingly harmless decisions between different foods and brands can have significant effects on caloric intake, ultimately meaning that you may sometimes be left pretty in the dark about how food choices will impact diet success. This can cause inconsistent progress and be pretty demotivating.
It’s often said that, instead of calorie counting, you should listen to the internal satiety signals of your body. There’s definitely some truth to this, but this is obviously ineffective for most people. Our body is not necessarily designed to stop eating when it’s full — it’s designed to survive, which thousands of years ago probably meant eating as much as possible at once to build up fat stores because your next meal might not be for a few days. This is entirely out of tune with the food environment of the modern world.
Additionally, satiety signals can also be deceiving. For example, a big bowl of fruit salad would leave you feeling pretty full because fruit tends to be high volume / low calorie, whereas a mini-chocolate pudding with the same number of calories is low-volume, and probably won’t.
This same logic can extend to tracking protein intake, nailing certain dietary vitamins or minerals you may be lacking, or whatever else you feel you need to have a clearer picture of your intake for. Ultimately, tracking your intake is a great way to rid yourself of this uncertainty and mysticism surrounding how foods can affect your goals.
Provides Valuable Data
Ask any good coach or nutritionist and they will tell you the importance of having reliable data for their decision-making process. To make the best decisions for clients, you need to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Imagine having the goal of running 10km in 40 minutes but never timing yourself. This would be preposterous, yet it’s much more frequent for people with the goal of losing fat to neither track their weight nor their calories, despite that body weight is a very good indirect indicator of fat loss and that calorie balance is the only thing relevant to weight changes.
By tracking your intake, you provide yourself with valuable data to aid decision-making, not only for your current goals but also in the future. I remember dieting without tracking for years in the past, and every time the next fat loss phase came around, I was always left wondering (and misremembering) how much I really ate last time, and from which foods, and so on. Having data to refer to gives you so much more information to make better decisions and be more successful with your diet goals.
Allows More Precision
This one is very similar to the above two but slightly different.
Let’s say your goal is to lose weight sustainably (one of the most common nutrition goals). A very effective approach to achieving this is maintaining a modest and manageable calorie deficit for an extended period of time. For most people, this would be much more effective than crash dieting, which leads to a large and unsustainable deficit and, ultimately, causes rapid weight regain and yoyo dieting.
By tracking your intake, you can know exactly how many calories you have on a given day, allowing you to eat as much as possible whilst still maintaining a deficit, making dieting much less intense and much more sustainable.
I used this approach when preparing for my bodybuilding competition last year. By tracking my calories, I was able to control the size of my deficit and avoid frantic or emotionally charged sharp drops in calories that might have compromised my physique by compromising training performance or leading to muscle loss.
Accountability
A very interesting phenomenon in nutrition studies is that when people start tracking their food they spontaneously eat less [1]. Why? A big reason is that if you commit to tracking more of what you put in your mouth, you become more aware of how much you’re putting in your mouth. For example, when you realize the seemingly harmless extra scoop of peanut butter will add another 200 calories to your daily total, you may think twice about having it.
Another explanation for this spontaneous reduction is reduced snacking. I think pretty negatively about snacking for many reasons — it’s distracting, snack foods are usually of lower diet quality, it’s bad for your teeth, it’s not great for the digestive system — but it’s especially terrible for weight loss because it makes overeating so much easier. Having “a biscuit at work”, “having a few Maltesers in the car”, and “pecking away at a bag of popcorn during a movie on a night” can easily amount to 400 calories when summed. Since it’s unlikely that food portions in other meals will decrease in response to these extra calories, it’s a safe bet that these will simply be surplus calories. If you know you have to track all those little bits across the day, sometimes even the perceived effort of gauging how much you eat, opening your phone, finding the food, and entering the amount, is enough to discourage you.
Both of these points converge on the theme of accountability. In this sense, logging your food becomes a way of holding yourself accountable for what you’re really eating. It’s far too easy to convince yourself you’re eating healthy because of the brain’s sneaky ability to shove the bad stuff under the rug and emphasise all the good you’ve done. But unfortunately, eating a salad at lunch doesn’t always “counterbalance” having a family-sized pizza with cheese-stuff crusted for dinner. Logging your food forces you to come to terms with the reality of what you’re really eating and that, to achieve your goals, you might have to update your eating regime.
Calorie counting gets a lot of negativity for the effect it can have on one’s relationship with food (discussed below), but in this counting calories can encourage a healthy relationship with food by bringing to attention unproductive habits, such as snacking or grossly underestimating food intake, and correcting for the difference between what one thinks they are consuming versus what they really are consuming.
More Flexibility
I hear the argument sometimes that calorie counting is rigid and inflexible; I really think the opposite is true. By knowing the contents of your diet on a given day, you can organize your diet so that it best suits you and your lifestyle. For example, I know that I tend to be hungrier at night than during the morning; thus, by planning my food I can plan less food in the morning and more in the evening, making dieting more manageable.
Another great example of this is that if you decide you want to have some type of “treat” on a night, let’s say a little tub of ice cream, then you can account for that by simply planning your other meals around it. For example, if the ice cream will add 400 calories to your daily total, you could consider reducing 100 calories from breakfast and lunch of that day and the day after — viola, you just managed to have a treat you wanted without overeating and without feeling like you’ve “cheated”.
Yet another way in which tracking can increase flexibility is by giving you the freedom to rotate foods without worrying about how this will impact your progress. I have a few clients that come to me and say they need a “rigid” food plan, otherwise they can’t stick to it. I get this, but this is not ideal since we know that there are certain advantages to rotating food sources and increasing diet diversity [2,3]. Logging your food can help with this because, as long as your calories match from day to day, you don’t have to worry as much about the impact of changing foods.
An Opportunity to Learn about Nutrition
One of the most underrated aspects of logging your food is how it gives you the opportunity to learn about the nutritional content of foods. In reality, there is no such thing as inherently “fatty” foods — just those high in calories that are more likely to put you in a caloric surplus. Once you become aware that 500g of watermelon — a sizeable portion — contains approximately the same number of calories as a bag of Doritos, you will start to learn the impact of food choices on your weight management goals.
Many people in the general population don’t get enough protein; by tracking food intake you can see which foods are richer in protein and make more sensible choices that facilitate reaching protein targets. If you have a decent food tracker, you should also be able to see things like micronutrients and vitamin content, which is an opportunity to learn about which foods are more nutritious versus those which are basically empty calories.
It Doesn’t Have to be Everyday
A common criticism of calorie counting is that you have to track your food every day and that this is like a ball-and-chain in your daily life. This is a matter of perspective — I certainly don’t see it this way for myself — but even then, if that is your perspective, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Indeed, there are many ways around this. For example, you can choose random days across the month in which you do track, just to check that you’re not grossly misestimating your intake. Another approach could be to use it only for a period of time and then try eating ad lib but making healthier food choices based on the learnings that you will glean described in the previous subsection (An Opportunity to Learn about Nutrition).
You can also only use it during certain phases. For example, if you decide you want to run a weight-loss phase, you could track your food then for many of the reasons described above. When you’ve reached your target weight, you can then go back to eating ad lib.
By treating calorie counting as just another tool to help you achieve your nutrition goals, you can avoid developing negative feelings towards it and see it as something productive rather than as a tax on your daily life.
It is not as Laborious as it Seems
Another similar criticism of food logging is that it takes much time and effort to log your food. I understand this, but I think this perspective is overblown and that tracking is much less energy intensive than some will have you believe.
Firstly, your method of tracking is crucial. If you’re using an Excel sheet and googling the nutritional content of all the foods you want to eat on a given day, then it’s going to take a lot of time; conversely, if you find a good tracker like MyFitnessPal (the one I use), Carbon, or Chronometer, many of the foods you want are included in their database and you only have to search for them.
An additional aspect of these food trackers is that they have a history and convenient ways of adding foods you regularly consume. Even if you have a varied diet, some foods will be staples and you will eat them repeatedly. This means very often the foods you want to log for a given meal are already in the “recent” section and can be quickly added. Many of these apps also allow the creation of recipes which saves a lot of time. For example, Monday-Friday my breakfast and lunch are composed of almost the same foods (except the fruit and veg). Thus, I create a recipe with the staple foods, quickly add these to my daily plan, and then only have to account for the variation in the fruits and the veg. This saves a lot of time.
Of course, even with such tricks you still have to add the foods but, if we are honest, it’s really not that much effort. We’re talking about 5 minutes at most but often much less. If we’re happy to squander minutes mindlessly scrolling down Instagram or watching garbage on the TV, we can definitely spare a few minutes to log our food for the purpose of better health. Do it whilst on the metro, do it whilst pooping, do it in chunks across the day, do it whilst waiting for the microwave — find tricks that work and, better still, make it a habit, and you’ll notice the burden is reduced substantially.
Removes Decision Fatigue
Tracking and planning your food is a really nice way to reduce decision fatigue, or at least reduce the time and mental energy you spend on thinking about making decisions about eating.
Before I started tracking, I noticed that I would sometimes catch myself getting distracted throughout the day thinking about what I should eat that night, and how much, and whether I would have pasta or rice, and so on. By not having a plan or structure, I was permitting my brain to have as much vagueness as it needs (which for the human brain is usually not a lot) to have its attention consumed.
By tracking, I can spend one chunk of time thinking logically about how my meals in a day could look to best suit my goals at the time, write them down in my tracker, and then not think about it again until it was time to eat. I found this very productive for freeing up space in my head and avoiding procrastination.
Considerations
My experience with food tracking for myself and clients has been a net positive; however, that does not mean they’re suitable for everyone. For this reason, I reached out to my Instagram audience and did some reading to find out for whom it might not be suitable. In this section, I present considerations for their use. Indeed, tracking is not for everyone, and if you can’t integrate it into your life in a healthy manner, then you should reconsider using it.
Associations with Unhealthy Relationships with Food
The elephant in the room with food tracking is always relationships to food and eating disorders (EDs). There are plenty of anecdotal reports about relationships between tracking and EDs and I came across multiple cross-sectional studies that support ED or ED-like outcomes and food logging in some way, such as more prevalent use of food tracking in those with EDs or ED-like symptoms [4,5] and worse ED-like symptoms in those using the apps [6–8]. Unfortunately, however, we cannot say much about causality based on these studies. For example, it’s also very likely that those with existing tendencies towards these types of behaviour are more attracted to using the apps, which almost entirely explains these outcomes.
I only saw one RCT on PubMed on this topic and it concluded that dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal “did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviors including dietary intake in those determined to be of low risk of eating disorder” (emphasis mine) [9]. Whilst this is encouraging that food tracking appears not to be causal in those at low risk for ED, it is also unfortunately not so informative. Firstly, the same size wasn’t great (n=200), but more importantly this says basically nothing about how food tracking might affect those who are at risk or have existing tendencies towards EDs. It’s good to have evidence to support that food tracking is not causal in general, but it seems that the dangers in question are restricted to certain subpopulations, and this study doesn’t shed much light on this outcome.
EDs are complicated, serious, and something which I am definitely not educated enough on to speak with authority. I think it would be unfair to conclude that food tracking contributes to ED-like behaviours or is causal to EDs in the general population based on the current evidence. However, it definitely seems like some people are more susceptible to the potential harms of tracking and tracking apps, and if you believe you may fall into such a category or notice unhealthy attitudes developing towards tracking your food, you should contact a health professional. Always keep in mind the goal of logging your intake is to improve health — if that ever changes, we need to reassess our use of it.
Obsession
A step down from EDs, we encounter another negative consequence of tracking: obsession. From speaking to people, it’s clear that this is an issue even if it does not lead or is not connected to an ED. Some people report that they feel they cannot go without tracking and if they can’t track (e.g., at a restaurant, at a friend’s place) they simply won’t eat.
Dependency on anything is never a good thing. We should do our best to perceive such tools as a means to enhance our life and, if they don’t, learn to reconnect with them in a healthier manner. This might mean having certain days in the week in which you intentionally do not track to remind yourself that they need to track — it’s just a means of getting information on your eating behaviours.
Another trick you can try is not tracking every little detail. To use myself as an example, one day this week I planned to eat 300g of tomatoes but only had 280g left. Naturally, I went to grab my phone to change this but just before doing so I realized that we’re talking about a difference of 4 calories here. Who cares? With the amount of error in a standard scale weight and between food products anyway, a difference like this is meaningless.
Hopefully, such tricks can place a bit of distance between you and tracking and allow you to minimize possible negative impacts from food-monitoring.
Can Increase Food Focus
Another step down from obsession but of a similar nature, it is also possible that tracking can increase food focus. It could lead to becoming fixated and overplanning meals.
I’ve experienced this to some degree — there is something rewarding about planning your food for the day that makes it attractive to want to do — however when I’ve noticed this happening, I try to remind myself of the points above and sometimes avoid trying to add fancy combinations of different foods within my calorie limits, instead going for something intentionally plain to make this a bit less exciting.
And of course, employing mindfulness in such moments is helpful; noticing such thoughts and distancing yourself a little from them, reminding yourself that this is just a tool to help you on the way to your goals, will never do any harm.
Shameful Feelings When Seeing You’ve Overeaten
I’ve emphasised the positive aspect of the objectivity of being able to see exactly what your caloric intake amounts to when you plan your food for the day; but also, this could lead to negative feelings such as shame or guilt when you notice you go over.
Of course, if you have goals that you want to achieve then sometimes you have to make sacrifices or work to get there, and this might mean at times setting yourself calorie targets and sticking to them. If you don’t, you might never end up reaching those goals. However, the occasional failure to hit goals in any aspect of your life (and not just diet) should always be assessed mindfully, objectively, and as an opportunity to learn how to achieve them next time around — we should always be cautious to become hung up on feelings of guilt and shame, which are often not productive. You will always have bad days and there will always be failure; learning how hard you should be on yourself in such cases is a valuable art.
In addition to the above, I would also refer those who experience such feelings to the paragraph More Flexibility, which outlines ways to deal with instances of overeating in a way that can be easily solved with little effort.
Taking the Fun Out of Food
A personal trainer told me in a recent conversation on this topic that some of his food-tracking clients have noticed that the fun aspects of fun like the taste, social bonding, exploring new flavours, and other pleasurable elements of eating can become washed away.
These are great points, and my suggestions would be similar to those in other paragraphs in this section. Remind yourself you don’t have to track everything. Remind yourself you can have days in which you don’t track or estimate a few things instead. Remind yourself you can go and have meals off plan, and nothing will happen in the long run. Tracking intake and enjoying food are not mutually exclusive; we shouldn’t lose these pleasurable aspects of food.
Getting Lost in the Numbers
Whilst talking to a different PT about the same topic, I was also told that for some people it becomes so much about calories that they forget about other important aspects of nutrition, such as macronutrients, minerals and vitamins, and food quality in general.
I think this is an example of fixation and we should encourage ourselves to always keep the bigger picture in mind. Yes, weight management comes down to calories, but health is much more than that. Overall protein is crucial for maintaining muscle mass, which is also very relevant to health; we all know vitamins and minerals play important roles in maintaining health; substances like fiber and polyphenols (which I’ve written about extensively) are also important for health and preventing disease. We should be sure to keep these in mind however we decide to log our food, and not just get fixated on one aspect of food logging (i.e., overall calories).
Conclusion
Taking everything together, I think food logging is definitely a net positive for most people and it should be something that most of us with nutrition-orientated goals should at least consider experimenting with to see which positive aspects we can take from it. At the end of the day, it’s just a tool in the box to help you achieve your goals.
No tool is perfect, and everything has pros and cons. Just like with anything else, the best way to deal with this is to learn how to maximize the advantages and minimize the negatives by learning how to incorporate them into our lives in a healthy manner, and not by throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
References
[1] Lovegrove, J., Sangita Sharma (Professor in aboriginal and global health research), Hodson, L., & Sharma, S. (2015). Nutrition Research Methodologies. Wiley.
[2] WHO & FAO (2003). Diet, nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases. World Health Organ Tech Rep Ser, 916(i-viii), 1–149.
[3] Kennedy, G., Stoian, D., Hunter, D., Kikulwe, E. M., Termote, C., Alders, R. G., … & Thilsted, S. H. (2017). Food biodiversity for healthy, diverse diets.
[4] Levinson, C. A., Fewell, L., & Brosof, L. C. (2017, December). My Fitness Pal calorie tracker usage in the eating disorders. Eating Behaviors, 27, 14–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2017.08.003
[5]McCaig, D., Elliott, M. T., Prnjak, K., Walasek, L., & Meyer, C. (2019, November 25). Engagement with MyFitnessPal in eating disorders: Qualitative insights from online forums. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 53(3), 404–411. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23205
[6] Linardon, J., & Messer, M. (2019, April). My fitness pal usage in men: Associations with eating disorder symptoms and psychosocial impairment. Eating Behaviors, 33, 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2019.02.003
[7] Messer, M., McClure, Z., Norton, B., Smart, M., & Linardon, J. (2021, December). Using an app to count calories: Motives, perceptions, and connections to thinness- and muscularity-oriented disordered eating. Eating Behaviors, 43, 101568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2021.101568
[8] Simpson, C. C., & Mazzeo, S. E. (2017, August). Calorie counting and fitness tracking technology: Associations with eating disorder symptomatology. Eating Behaviors, 26, 89–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2017.02.002
[9] Hahn, S. L., Kaciroti, N., Eisenberg, D., Weeks, H. M., Bauer, K. W., & Sonneville, K. R. (2021, December). Introducing Dietary Self-Monitoring to Undergraduate Women via a Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 121(12), 2377–2388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2021.06.311
