Properly tracking your calories is very confusing to a lot of beginners. There are so many apps and programs that are supposed to help you, but many of them are just too complicated or full of annoying ads. To help you make this process as simple as possible, I will share my tools and strategies with you in this lesson and teach you which foods are important to track and which you can simply ignore. An interesting side note before we get started, research has shown that people who track their calories lose more weight. Not only that, they're also have an easier time keeping the weight off in the long run. Now, to properly track your food, you will need three things.

Food obviously, a calorie tracker app I use for tattoo which you can get for free in the app store and the kitchen scale. Some people will tell you that you don't need a scale and can simply guess the weight of your fruit. You can try this of course but from what I've learned over the years, this takes quite a bit of experience and is not a good strategy for beginners. Looks good. be deceiving. And if you're not careful, a few inaccuracies here and there can quickly add up to a few hundred calories or more, that might be enough to completely throw you off your target value, leaving you unmotivated and wondering why the health things aren't working out.

That's where the food scale comes into play. It takes the guesswork out of counting, you weigh the exact amount of any food that you want to the gram and does know exactly how many calories of it actually is going into your body. A good Kitchen Scale doesn't have to be expensive. Mine was around 30 bucks, but you can get cheaper ones for a lot less. Now in this video, I want to teach you how to utilize your scale to accomplish two things. One, ensuring that your calorie and macro counting is sufficiently accurate and to simultaneously making the overall process easier and less time consuming.

Because if you use your scale correctly, the whole process will actually be a lot faster than if you get your food waste all the time. Here are my five top tips on how to do this correctly. Number one, you don't always have to worry about the small things. As a good rule of thumb, anything less than 50 calories isn't worth worrying about. This includes things like a splash of cream and coffee, a little bit of ketchup on sandwich or some parts of your salad like lettuce. As long as you're being generally consistent with your system, which is way more important than being accurate By the way, you can often neglect those minor foods.

I say often because every calorie counts. And if you forget to track too many of these minor foods, they will add up to something big and it will have an impact on your diet. Also, keep in mind that some foods like olive oil, for example, are very calorie dense, and even just a teaspoon will already have quite a bit of calories. Number two, sometimes you only have to wait once. If you eat certain foods regularly, you only have to weigh the ones. Use your scale to measure out the normal daily portion of your oatmeal inner bowl for example.

Now you have your frame of reference, you know what the right amount actually looks like visually, and it's just much easier to eyeball accurately from here on out. Maybe you'll eat a little more tomorrow, but you'll probably eat a little less than next day. It'll be close enough over the long run. Number three, raw or cooked, always make sure it's the calorie value for your food that you're tracking. As for the raw food or the cooked version. For foods like rice, which taken a lot of water when being cooked.

This makes a huge difference and getting this right will make or break your diet. The same goes for foods with skin or appeal. Bananas are usually weight without appeal, but you will find different calorie values for chicken with and without skin. So watch out for this. Number four, check the calorie and macro values in your tracker app. Even though most calorie tracker apps come with a pretty large database, there are often false or misleading values.

Sometimes other users have added their own foods with wrong macro values, which is why you should always check your truck At source like Web MD is online calorie tracker if you feel that a value for certain food might be off, trust me, I've come across many of these false values, and it's really frustrating. Number five, you only really need the food scale for one off occasions if you follow a recurring meal plan, which is what I recommend, because it's by far the simplest and easiest way to do calorie and macro counting, then the prepping and logging of food is going to become routine and automatic. You know what this day's portion is going to be because you know exactly what it was last week and the week before that you don't need the scale again. The scale should be used for one off foods or foods that aren't totally easy to eyeball each and every time.

When I start a diet I usually only use my scale for the first week or two and then cook the same meals again. I only need to scale again when I want to try new meals