Snacks #005: How I Guarantee My Clients Can Get Results Without Tracking (and You Can Too)

Welcome to issue #005 of my Saturday Snack series.

Each weekend I send out bite-sized practical advice and takeaways for you to apply to your training and nutrition for the upcoming week.

Today I want to help you get results, despite inaccurate (or not) nutrition tracking.

This will reduce the pressure you feel around getting it perfect or even doing it in the first place.

Most people go on a diet or nutrition program, think that everything needs to be gold standard, and then fall off the bandwagon at the first sign of resistance such as not being able to log a meal they’ve eaten out of the house. Sometimes this behaviour is perfectionism, but a lot of the time the perfectionism is just an excuse to stop the program.

If you can understand why you don’t need to get your tracking 100% perfect, or actually track at all to get results, then you can stop roadblocking yourself and giving up every time you’re not sure how to log a snack.

Precision is more important than accuracy.

What’s the difference?

→ Accuracy is how correct the measurement is.

→ Precision is how replicable the measurement is.

So, let’s say you weigh yourself using a multi-million dollar instrument that measures people to within the GRAM and it tells you that you weigh exactly 65kg. (Let’s say we know this is highly accurate because it weighs people within the gram and it’s the gold-standard). This is accuracy.

Now you go home and use a set of scales in your bathroom every day, and they’re measuring you at 68kg. This is 3kg too high, so it’s not accurate, but you do it every day for the week and you notice it’s consistently 3kg high. This means the measurement is precise. You CAN use these scales daily and they’ll show you your fluctuations even if they’re not showing you the exact weight that you are in real life.

The same thing applies to your nutrition:

If you are tracking your nutrition inaccurately, but precisely and consistently, then you can still adjust your food to get the results you want.

Let’s say you are tracking your food and it’s showing that you’re eating 1500 calories per day and not losing weight. As a coach I can tell you that 99% of the time, you’re actually eating your maintenance calories of 1800, but just under-tracking this by 300 calories (easy mistake).

Thus, you can adjust your calorie intake and try again. For example. if you reduce it by 100 calories then this will now show you that you are eating 1400 calories (but in reality you’re actually eating 1700 calories) and then you can monitor your results from there.

Make sense?

Now, if you don’t like tracking and don’t want to do it, that’s fine - you can simply apply this principle to a nutrition program with one simple tweak.

You just eat the same thing every day.

You monitor your results, and if it’s not working then you change something you’re eating.

This doesn’t actually mean you have to eat the exact same food, you just need to follow the same structure.

For example, 1 cup of any cereal, 1 piece of fruit and a protein shake or high protein yoghurt on the side at breakfast time. There is a million different combinations here so you’re not going to ‘get bored’ but it’s going to give you the same nutritional quality.

Likewise, a serve of protein (chicken, tuna, fish, beef, tofu) at lunch with 1-2 cups of veg or salad, a serve of carb (rice, pasta, quinoa, bread, a wrap etc) and some salad dressing, nuts or cheese for fat. Again, there’s a million combinations here that work.

Conveniently, this is the structure I use for my client’s nutrition plans. This means they can follow a precise nutrition intake each day without tracking it accurately (or at all) and I can easily adjust it if we need to push for more results.

The takeaway?

No matter what’s tracked, what’s actually happened is the thing that affects your results.

Precision and consistency allow you to make changes to your program to get results.

Try sticking to your plan first and worry about tracking after.

Yours in health,

Dom xx