Five Mistakes You're Making with Tracking Apps & How to Fix Them

There are some inescapable facts of life.

1. Death

2. Taxes

3. Nutrition tracking not being accurate.

Ouch, I know. this can be really disheartening to hear if you’ve been tracking every bite but not all hope is lost- it’s still a valuable tool when used properly. AKA in conjunction with a well-designed nutrition plan. Not by itself.

Let’s unpack this- because you need to be aware of the limitations of tracking and what you can do to reduce these limitations.

Let’s start off with WHY things are impossible to get 100% accurate here:

1. Tracking tools are inaccurate, especially when it comes to generic entries. Tracking 100g of milk in one app is going to give you a different result to another app, because they draw from different databases.

2. People are inaccurate (sorry team, it's true). Between entering data wrong, estimating weights of food wrong, entering things generically when the generic entry is far from accurate (“1 serve of homemade pasta” kind of generic), and the fact that humans have terrible entries- food diaries are far from consistent with reality.

3. Food labels aren't 100% correct. Yep this one sucks. Foods aren’t regulated with bomb calorimetry (a kind of quantification where the food is combusted to tell how many calories are in it) and food labels can be created from estimations that are also subject to inaccuracies.

4. People subconsciously under-report by up to 30-50% of energy intake. This means saying they’re eating 1200 calories when they could be eating 1800-2400. Interestingly, this effect is stronger the more overweight somebody is, pointing to psychosocial influences on reporting.

5. Inconsistent databases and mistaken entries. What happens when every Tom, Dick and Harry can enter food label into MFP? They forget decimal points, put the wrong serve size in, and altogether just f*ck the system up.

And if you don’t believe me, or are just a keen bean to learn more, I’ve popped all of the references at the bottom here so you can read the studies yourself.

What can you do about it?

There are some concrete strategies that you can put in place to improve accuracy, and remove the room for error.

Still, be mindful that it cannot be 100% accurate, ever.

I recommend these strategies to my clients at the bare minimum:

• Using Easy Diet Diary instead of MFP; this contains Australian food data so it’s more accurate to people eating within Australia, with Australian food products like grains, vegetables and fruits.

• Double-checking entries against labels; this prevents errors when people add food incorrectly into the databases. People do this all of the time by adding more macronutrients than is possible for the calories and vice versa, which can mistakenly think you’ve eaten over/under for nutrients.

• Choose tick-verified entries or USDA entries in MFP to sidestep the above problem if you can’t check the label. Emphasis on VERIFIED. This is also not an issue if you’re using Easy Diet Diary because it’s not as easy to add a rogue (incorrect) food entry.

• Actually weigh what you’re entering instead of eyeballing. There is no way you’re estimating food weight correctly. A “medium” banana will be approx. 90g in a tracking app, but in reality, a medium banana is about 130g. When this error is replicated across so many entries all day, you can see why you’ve under-tracked.

• Eat similar foods each day so that regardless of what’s being ‘tracked’, you have a similar intake daily and you can adjust this. Ie. if you’re tracking 1500 but eating 1800, then you know that if you reduce your calories by 100 to “1400” you’ve reduced your actual intake to 1700 and you might get some movement on the fat-loss progress front as you’ve created more of a deficit.

Helpful?

My experience with hundreds of clients (most of whom were tracking and getting nowhere before working with me) AND the research summarises that calorie-tracking apps shouldn’t be used in isolation. You need structure and assistance from someone who is trained in the area to actually guide you when it comes to nutrition, not just blindly trying to reduce calories and track through an inaccurate medium.

With my clients, I go over food diaries weekly, point out discrepancies or inaccurate entries, remind them of easily missed food components that I can see haven’t been tracked, and make adjustments to their nutrition approach based on their progress, food diary and feedback.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes:

“Cutting the wire: $1.

Knowing where to cut the wire: $999”

Happy tracking, and if you need more help- I suggest starting off with these resources here