Tracking
By: Marcos Hernandez
I recently competed in a weightlifting meet where I had to cut weight in order to get into my weight class. It wasn’t fun, and with all the time I saved from eating + drinking I found myself thinking about the concept of tracking.
In order to be successful, I tracked what I deemed important:
How many hours I slept
Weight before bed and upon waking. This weight change could be divided by the number of hours slept to give a rough estimate of how much weight I could expect to lose in the final night before the competition.
ALL food. You’d be surprised at how many times there are little sauces here, little bites there… it all adds up! I have the benefit of being in a gym, and never have to worry about coworkers bringing in food for everyone. But still, I needed to know where I was in order to track how my intake affected the number on the scale.
Water. Part of the process was knowing how much weight could be lost from water, and I was drinking over two gallons per day some of the 10 days prior to the meet.
I did all this tracking with my phone, using the health app built into the iphone and an app called MyFitnessPal. If you have an iphone and open the health app, you can see how many different things it’s possible to track, everything from sleep to steps taken to minerals consumed (don’t ask me how they got THAT).
If you get a wearable fitness tracker, like an Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura Ring, or Whoop Band, it can track your sleep for you, along with dozens of other health markers. The Whoop Band has recently spiked in popularity within the gym. Using the data acquired through wearing the band 24/7, Whoops software can provide a score for how recovered you are. Hey, if it makes recovery sexy, I’m all for it!
Back to tracking, this level was way too much for me to sustain, and without an end goal (the meet) in mind I wouldn't keep up with the twice a day weight tracking. I actually track weight about once per week, on Saturday morning.
I DO normally track my food. I’m just that type of person, and enjoy the freedom it provides by taking all decisions out of the process. Do the numbers allow it? No? Then I can’t eat it. Makes my life simpler, but I understand we are all wired differently.
What tracking my food for such a long time does provide is a good amount of data so I know how my weight fluctuates with different food intake. I then used this information to make an informed decision about how to cut calories in order to bring about the changes I needed with minimal adverse effects. The worst thing to do is just stop eating altogether and show up underweight and underfed. Certainly not ideal competition conditions.
As the day of the meet got closer, I began tracking my meal times as well, biasing towards the morning so the weigh-in would be at my most fasted state. While this style of eating is popular (intermittent fasting, or IF), without a specific reason to get the number on the scale to read a particular number I’m not sure I see the point. I found that I felt extremely full eating about 2/3 the amount of calories as normal because my eating window was condensed, and if I continued to eat that way over days & weeks I’d get smaller by virtue of consuming less calories. IMO it would be better to get these calories spread throughout the day and monitor total caloric intake, making stepwise changes to the total number, which is where tracking becomes involved and can provide clarity.
Lessons learned from tracking everything under the sun:
It’s very helpful to take baseline measurements. Just knowing how much weight it’s possible to lose overnight helps provide some perspective to the magical number on the scale everyone is obsessed about and how variable it can be on a daily basis.
It’s good to have a rough idea of how much water is consumed every day, even though many hydration guidelines simply suggest drinking when you’re thirsty, until you aren’t. While I did have to run to the bathroom all the time, the skin around my fingernails hasn't been cracking as much, so I’ll keep this level of water intake up during the winter months.
Intermittent fasting isn’t for me. I eat too fast and often found myself with a stomach ache. I much prefer to spread the meals throughout the day and as long as I ate solid food instead of shakes I never got too hungry.
My parting advice: Try tracking either sleep, water or food, for one week, and see how you feel. Maybe track what times you eat, and write a note about whether or not you felt hungry or, like me, if you got a stomach ache. Don't track forever but give it a go during a full week so you can get an idea where little bites, drinks, treats, snacks, and missed hours of sleep are finding their way into your life so you can make informed decisions about where to focus your lifestyle improvement efforts.