5 Tips to Help You Track Your Diet Progress

Keeping track of your diet progress is an important part of effective weight loss. When you’re working towards a specific goal, such as dropping a dress size or hitting a certain number on the scale, keeping tabs on your progress can help you stay accountable and motivated. Experts recommend tracking as a vital path to weight-loss strategies.

Keep track of your food problem areas in your diet, see how certain habits affect your weight and get an overall sense of where you stand on nutrition. In other words, tracking gives you insight into where your habits need an overhaul so that you can take action to improve them. If you’re ready to keep tabs on your diet progress, here are five tips for doing so effectively:

1. Set Realistic Goals

When setting diet tracking goals, it’s essential to keep them realistic. For example, you don’t want to aim to eat a certain amount of servings from each food group daily since this will likely be too difficult to sustain long term. 

Instead, set goals that are more attainable — and that you can track. For example, you could set a goal to eat two servings of fruits and vegetables daily. Once you’ve set your goals, track them each day to help you stay accountable.

2. Take Weekly Weigh-Ins

A weekly weigh-in can help you see your diet progress over the long term. Every week, hop on a scale to see where your weight is at. Over time, you’ll see trends and notice when your diet is beginning to affect the scale. The data from a weekly weigh-in can help you identify problem areas in your diet so that you can take action to improve them.

When taking weekly weigh-ins, be sure to factor in any fluctuations that might happen. Eating certain foods, traveling, or other factors might cause the scale to move up or down by a small amount. When weighing yourself at the same time every week, these factors will likely even out over time and allow you to get an accurate idea of your overall progress.

3. Use a Tracker

Being aware of what you eat every day is crucial to proper tracking. Having a tracker is necessary to maintain awareness of what you consume. It is a no-brainer, but many people don’t do it. 

The reason is that it’s difficult to gauge how much you eat when you eat. The awareness that comes with keeping a food journal helps you make informed food choices. You can’t make informed nutritional choices if you’re unaware of what you consume. Get a free macro calculator to ease macros and calories calculation.

4. Track the Right Things

When tracking your diet progress, it’s important to track the right things. Not all calories, macronutrients, and nutrients get created equally. For example, when counting calories, it’s important to note that calories from protein and fat are considered “dietary essential” — meaning that the body doesn’t need to get these from food.

It is different from carbohydrates, which the body must get from food. In other words, counting dietary protein and fat is an estimation, whereas carbs are an exact number. Protein: You likely need more than you think. Carbs: You likely need less than you think. Fats: You likely don’t need to count these at all.

5. Be Realistic About How Long Changes Take

When tracking your diet progress, it’s important to be realistic about how long changes may take to show up on the scale or in your overall health. For example, you shouldn’t expect significant weight loss in just one week. Experts say it takes three to 10 weeks to see significant weight loss. It is because your body needs time to adjust to your diet and its new calorie intake.

So while tracking your diet progress can help you identify problem areas in your diet, you also need to be patient as you start making changes. Be sure to track your progress over time to understand better where you’re at.

Bottom Line

When you’re ready to start tracking your diet progress, there are many things to keep in mind. First, you’ll want to ensure that you write down everything you eat daily. Once you have a better idea of what you’re consuming, you can start setting realistic goals and tracking your progress weekly by weighing yourself and tracking your macronutrients.

One thing to keep in mind is that dieting and tracking your progress takes time. You likely won’t see significant results over just one week of tracking your diet. With that in mind, you should be patient and track your progress over time to see how effective your new dieting habits are.