I looked at my fitness tracking app this week and it said today was the one year anniversary of beginning to log my food. I can’t believe I made it a year. I remember when I started tracking it was my next step in gaining control over my diet. When I began my weight loss journey a couple of months prior, logging my food was not an option. I wasn’t ready yet. I started logging my food when I made all of the small changes I could make without having to count calories. Looking back, I’m glad I waited. Counting calories would have been too stressful in the beginning. When I did start counting, I was already hovering around 1800 calories a day. I don’t even want to know what my daily calories looked like before then. I wasn’t perfect at it in the beginning either. I made a few mistakes until I got the hang of it. Over time I learned not just to count calories, but macros too. A fitness app made it easy. I have people tell me they don’t have time to log their food intake. With the app, it takes me less than five minutes. There’s really no excuse. I couldn’t imagine logging with a notebook or even a spreadsheet. THAT’S too much work.

Right now I’m in maintenance mode. I still log my calories. Why do I still log my calories when I’ve lost all the weight I plan to lose? The reality is, I worked too hard to get here. I don’t want old habits to come back. I believe you shouldn’t stop logging, even if you reach your goal. One of the reasons people gain the weight back is they stop doing all of the good things that helped them lose weight. Logging my food is a small part of my day. I have my app set up to log the things I eat the most in one click. For breakfast and snacks, I just copy what I ate yesterday. Do I have days where I cheat? Of course. With logging, they don’t derail me entirely. Logging also helps me keep track of nutrients I eat. That eliminates the need for vitamin supplements. The bottom line is I’m not a slave to logging, but it keeps me on my toes.

For those of you who look at logging your food as pure druggery, find a way to make it easy. One way to do that is to eat the same things every day. If you find a group of things you like to eat, just eat those things. There are a lot less things to worry about when you keep your diet the same. For me, I hate to eat the same things. My breakfast and snacks are the same, but my lunch and dinner are varied. All of the recipes I make are logged in the fitness app. All I do is select a frozen meal, look at the label, search, select and move on. You guys get to see me cook my one big meal for the freezer each week. If you haven’t, check out my YouTube videos.

I plan to keep this up for years to come. I’m sure I’ll learn more things along the way to share. Leave a comment below if you want to know the app I use or have other questions about logging your food.