Here is a dirty little secret. It's not diet or exercise that will lead you to success. You're probably thinking I'm going to trick you by saying...it's both! You're wrong. Ask yourself what every diet has program has in common. Most all diets work. You see people who have success with everything whether it's Weight Watchers, Adkins, Keto, NutriSystems or whatever plan is out there today. Here's what they all have in common...tracking!
Tracking is the #1 tool for success. Here is your McGraw's Law, "If you bite it, you write it." We need to get conscious of the calories and macros in everything we eat. With that, we can make much better choices.
Tracking has never been easier. Currently, I use MyFitnessPal and I love it. Something better may come out down the road but for now, it works just fine. My current streak is 478 straight days of logging everything I've eaten. Think that's impressive? There are many people over 1,000 days and the longest I've seen so far is 2,967 days. If you set out to match that goal you'd never do it, but if you set out to log daily and start a streak who knows how many days you'd get in a row. That's for a future McGraw's Law, "Become a streaker."
I don't care how you track but please if you want to win the game you have to know the score. Paper and pencil are fine. Spreadsheets. Apps. Whatever. Just start looking everything up BEFORE you eat it. Even if you eat it anyway, at least you know. In no time at all, you will start building up a mental database of how many calories food contains.
TACTIC- Take a trip to your local Whole Foods. They have an amazing hot bar of food that is (mostly) labeled with the calorie count. You will be amazed at what you see. You can find mushrooms for almost zero calories and marinated mushrooms at 560 calories for 4 oz. It's eye-opening! An alternative exercise is going to your grocery store to the spaghetti sauce aisle. Go through every brand and look for the calories per serving and find the most caloric sauce and the least caloric sauce and compare. The difference could be 10X as many calories between the two. I promise, promise, promise one doesn't taste 10X as good!
Tracking is the #1 tool for success. Here is your McGraw's Law, "If you bite it, you write it." We need to get conscious of the calories and macros in everything we eat. With that, we can make much better choices.
Tracking has never been easier. Currently, I use MyFitnessPal and I love it. Something better may come out down the road but for now, it works just fine. My current streak is 478 straight days of logging everything I've eaten. Think that's impressive? There are many people over 1,000 days and the longest I've seen so far is 2,967 days. If you set out to match that goal you'd never do it, but if you set out to log daily and start a streak who knows how many days you'd get in a row. That's for a future McGraw's Law, "Become a streaker."
I don't care how you track but please if you want to win the game you have to know the score. Paper and pencil are fine. Spreadsheets. Apps. Whatever. Just start looking everything up BEFORE you eat it. Even if you eat it anyway, at least you know. In no time at all, you will start building up a mental database of how many calories food contains.
TACTIC- Take a trip to your local Whole Foods. They have an amazing hot bar of food that is (mostly) labeled with the calorie count. You will be amazed at what you see. You can find mushrooms for almost zero calories and marinated mushrooms at 560 calories for 4 oz. It's eye-opening! An alternative exercise is going to your grocery store to the spaghetti sauce aisle. Go through every brand and look for the calories per serving and find the most caloric sauce and the least caloric sauce and compare. The difference could be 10X as many calories between the two. I promise, promise, promise one doesn't taste 10X as good!
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