Why Start a Food Diary
What if I told you that simply keeping a food diary is enough to double your weight loss. A recent study shows that people who kept a food diary 6 days a week lost twice as much weight as those who only tracked once a week. It increases your awareness of what you eat and how much of it. Often, that’s enough to deter you from eating something you know you shouldn’t be eating.
Benefits of PaleoTrack
PaleoTrack goes one step further and encourages you to stop eating grains, legumes, dairy, and sugar with positive reinforcement. Will you really reach for the bread basket if it means you’ll lose the “Grain Free” achievement for that day? How long can you keep your grain-free streak going?
Other food trackers will let you continue eating junk, as long as you limit your calories. And, if you are eating a paleo diet, the other trackers will nag at you for eating too much fat, protein, and cholesterol, and not eating enough carbs. I know, because when I started following the paleo diet, there was no PaleoTrack. I was getting enough grief from my friends and coworkers about my diet, I didn’t need a judgemental food tracker to also give me a hard time. I wanted and needed positive encouragement. That’s why I created PaleoTrack.
How to track
If you’ve read The Primal Blueprint, The Paleo Solution, or any of the other great paleo books out there, they recommend that you limit your carbs if you want to lose weight, and that you should eat enough protein for your bodyweight to maintain muscle mass. How can you possibly do that if you don’t know how much protein and carbs are in the foods you eat? That’s why thousands of others like you are using PaleoTrack to help them get started.
Now, don’t go out and buy a scale and some precision measuring cups and start treating your food like a perfectionist chemist (don’t be like Walt from Breaking Bad). That would be overkill and a waste of time. You just need to guesstimate the weight and size of your food. Besides, the meat you buy at the store already comes with its weight printed on the label. So, if you split that pound of ground beef with your family of four, you probably ate 0.25 lbs. That’s close enough.
Quick Tip: When you’re eating out, you can use your hand to estimate measurements. Of course, your hand size is unique, so you might have to round up or down accordingly. In general:
- 1 cup = your closed fist.
- 3-4 oz of meat or fish = your palm.
- 1-2 tbsp = your thumb.
- 1 tsp = the tip of your index finger.
- 1-2 oz of nuts = your cupped hand.
Simply be mindful and honest with yourself, and PaleoTrack will do all the heavy lifting and generate the most accurate estimate of your nutrition for you.
Easy as pie… uhh… I mean bacon
Everyone who uses PaleoTrack agrees that it only takes seconds to log a meal, especially after a few days of using the site. You quickly become a master of estimating portion sizes, and some people become walking encyclopedias of nutrition data. After a while, they can look at any fruit and tell you how many carbs are in it. Talk about being a mindful eater.