Meal Tracking: A Key Tool for Weight Loss

Learn how meal tracking can support your weight loss goals by increasing awareness and accountability and encouraging healthier choices with simple, sustainable strategies.

Whether on a weight loss journey or trying to maintain your weight at a healthy level, meal tracking can be a powerful tool. In fact, in one small study, adults participating in a lifestyle intervention program who consistently tracked their meals lost an average of 10 pounds, while those who tracked inconsistently or rarely did not lose a significant amount of weight. There are many ways to track meals, and no one way works best for everyone. No matter what method you use, implementing a meal-tracking habit brings awareness to what you’re eating and makes it easier to align your eating patterns and choices to your goals.¹ 

In this article, you’ll learn how meal tracking can support your weight loss journey and strategies to make meal tracking an effective and sustainable habit.

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What is Meal Tracking? 

Meal tracking includes writing down or digitally logging all the food, drinks, and portion sizes you consume daily. How you choose to track your meals is completely up to you. It can be as simple as writing down what you ate and when or as detailed as logging everything you eat and drink into an app that calculates your calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, and micronutrients. 

Meal tracking can be a useful tool for everything from losing weight to managing your blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, and digestive symptoms. It can also support healthier habits overall. You decide how flexible or detailed your food log is, based on your goals choosing a sustainable method for your life. 

By tracking your meals, you’ll see patterns, such as how often you snack or how going too long between meals impacts your food choices later in the day. It’s also an effective tool to bring awareness to what you’re eating, not just what you think you’re eating. After a week or two of meal tracking, what you see may surprise you! 

How Meal Tracking Supports Weight Loss

Recording what you eat is just part of the process. Tracking your food and routinely reviewing your logs can help bring awareness to your meal patterns, give you more power in making choices that support your goals, identify any patterns or triggers that may be holding you back, and promote healthier food choices. 

Adds Awareness 

Tracking your food and drinks can help you see everything you eat on any given day or week. This information can help you see where extra calories are coming from or if any foods you eat aren’t supporting your goals. As a registered dietitian, whether my clients have used meal tracking to decrease overeating, lose weight, or manage blood sugars, it always brings things to light that we would not have realized without a completed food log. 

One study found that whether participants got extra education and support or simply used a food-tracking app to monitor their diet, tracking meals more often was linked to greater weight loss.²

Adds Accountability

Improving your health and quality of life with your choices is incredibly empowering. Adding meal tracking to your action plan can help you make decisions based on the evidence you’ve collected through your food logs, putting you in charge. Research shows us that increased tracking predicts increased weight loss, making it a great way to stay accountable to your goals.³

Identify Patterns and Triggers

After a week or two of tracking, you may notice that your sugar intake skyrockets when you skip breakfast or that eating lunch in the breakroom always leads to more calories eaten than when you eat in your office or outside (thanks to the community desserts and snacks always sitting around). By tracking your meals, you’ll be able to see these patterns and triggers and take steps to address them. 

Promotes Healthier Choices

Seeing the foods you’re eating laid out in front of you may make it easier to naturally make healthier choices. You may put more effort into eating more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins or drinking less sugary beverages because you’re motivated to see a food log that matches your goals. 

Tracking your meals can also highlight gaps in your diet that may need clarification. You may notice that you only eat one vegetable per day or that your added sugars are higher than you thought they were, and you can adjust your meals from there. 

<div class="pro-tip"><strong>Also Read: </strong><a href=food-tracking>10 Best Food Tracking Apps of 2024</a></a>.</div>

6 Ways to Make Meal Tracking Work For You

If you’ve never kept a food log, writing down everything you eat may feel a bit overwhelming. Or maybe you’ve tried keeping a food log but gave up just a few days in. To give it a shot, try some of these practical tips to make tracking your meals an easy and effective part of your weight loss journey. 

Start Simple

One of the best ways to burn out when tracking your meals is to make it too complicated right off the bat. Whether you use a pen and journal or an app on your phone, start by tracking one meal each day. Once you’ve got the hang of it, track everything you eat or drink before lunch, then in the afternoon, then for the whole day. If it takes you a few weeks to start tracking an entire day’s worth of meals, that’s ok! 

You can also simplify what you track. While recording portions is helpful, you can start by not including portions, just using your plates and bowls to measure at first. Whatever you have to do to get the habit started without feeling overwhelmed is the right move. 

Be Consistent 

Meal tracking has the biggest impact when you’re consistent. One study found that those who lost over 10 percent of their body weight in six months logged into their meal tracking app an average of 2.7 times per day, while those who lost less than 5 percent of their body weight only logged in an average of 1.6 times per day.⁴

And if you’re worried about how much time tracking your meals will take you, the same study found that the time it takes to track can be cut in half the longer you do it. They found that people spent 23 minutes per day tracking their meals in month one, but by month six, the same people could track their food intake in just 14 minutes per day.⁴

Track Immediately

It’s way too easy to forget about the dressing you added to your salad, the cookie you ended your meal with, or the sweet tea you drank with your morning snack if you wait until the end of the day to log your meals. Tracking immediately after (or even just before) you eat can help you get a more accurate picture of what you’re really eating. If you don’t have time to log everything in at the moment, just snap a picture with your phone so there’s no guessing when you go to log your meal later on. 

Use an App

The best method is whatever feels good to you, but using a digital tracking app has clear advantages over pen and paper. Many apps make it easy to track your food with large databases and even the ability to scan food packages for the correct info. They automatically track calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients while allowing you to set goals and limits for various nutrients, seeing your progress in real-time. 

Reflect and Adjust

Recording your food is only part of the process. You need to routinely set aside time to review your logs and make adjustments to your diet and goals as needed. Regular reviews and adjustments will help you stay on track with your goals and help you make the best choices for your health. 

Know When to Take a Break

As helpful as food tracking can be for gaining awareness and getting closer to your weight and health goals, it’s important to acknowledge when it’s becoming more of an obsession or stressor than a helpful tool. In one study, 75 percent of people diagnosed with an eating disorder reported using the tracking app My Fitness Pal, and 73 percent of those said it was a contributor to their eating disorder.⁵

If you feel that tracking your food is adding too much pressure, anxiety, or guilt, take a break and seek help and support from a qualified professional like a therapist or a registered dietitian who specializes in disordered eating. 

Learn More About How to Improve Blood Sugar Health and Lose Weight With Signos’ Expert Advice

Meal tracking is a simple and powerful tool for bringing awareness to your eating patterns and helping you make healthier choices. Whether you use a pen and journal or an app to log your food, remember to start slowly and be consistent for the biggest benefits. For more support and to see if Signos can help support your weight loss or health goals, check out the blog and take our quick, free quiz. 

<div class="pro-tip"><strong>Learn More: </strong><a href=keeping-a-food-diary-can-help-you-lose-weight>Food Journal: How to Keep One for Weight Loss</a>.</div>