#63 The One About Tracking

Our goal with calorie Tracking ??  Tracking smarter not forever ....

In this episode Larry and Daniel dive into tracking, and how you can get the most from it , but also move away from it , and not relying on it as a crutch for ever.

Remain proactive in your approach and stay ahead of the game.

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

Larry IG https://www.instagram.com/larry_doyle_coaching
Daniel IG https://www.instagram.com/danieldalycoaching
Website https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie
Coaching with us https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie/1-1-premium/
Email : info@larrydoylecoaching.ie

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

Larry IG https://www.instagram.com/larry_doyle_coaching
Daniel IG https://www.instagram.com/danieldalycoaching
Website https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie
Coaching with us https://www.larrydoylecoaching.ie/1-1-premium/
Email : info@larrydoylecoaching.ie

Transcript

Why Track At All?

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, you're listening to the Gen Pop Podcast with me, your host, Larry Doyle. Each week, I'm gonna bring in friends, guests, and experts to help enhance your health, fitness, and wellness journeys. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversations. You are welcome back to another episode of the Gen Pop Podcast, where this week, myself and co-host Daniel, we're gonna be digging into all things tracking calories. It'll seem like it's from a beginner standpoint, but trust me, everyone could get better at this and could do with a little bit more understanding. Daniel, tracking calories, let's go.

Tools, Personalities, And App Dependence

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Tracking calories, everyone seems to think it's the be-all and end-all of reaching results. But I guess by the end of the episode, you kind of realize that you don't need to be using apps or you don't need to use any special techniques to kind of stay on top of your nutrition. I think the one thing I always say to people before they start tracking is just to clarify why are you tracking in the first place. Like because a lot of people will use it to just gain an understanding of what they're having, but then other people use it as a way of kind of controlling everything, and sometimes that can kind of backfire on them because that's when they run into issues when they can't eat anything that they're not tracking, that they can't eat meals out of whatnot. So hopefully by the end of this episode, you kind of understand a bit more about how to track without tracking and how to actually track as well.

Baseline Intake As “Calorie Accounting”

Early Lessons: Hidden Calories

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah, it's huge because okay, like everyone entering into the fat loss space because that's what most people are gonna be listening to this for. They kind of assume that they're married to this thing, that they have to do it. This is like lifelong commitment to my fitness pal. And you know, let's I'll see this all the time, right? It shouldn't be that way. You're gonna have certain personality types that are gonna lean into it a bit more. Even if you're type A, who loves to track everything, the U versus type B me, who I've only ever used my fitness pal five days in my entire life, uh, because I needed to get used to it and familiar with it in terms of how to uh discuss it with clients and like how to understand what they were actually using within the app. So it was more so to actually get used to the app. I'm gonna give my age away here, but I've actually been tracking calories since before my fitness pal was actually a thing. But people think that they have to get married to this, and we'll see it this all the time. And I'm sure you've seen it, like where people have this like badge of honor. It's like I've got a 10-year streak on my fitness pal, and I've like tracked for like 4,758 days and never missed a day, but they haven't a fucking clue what calories are actually in the food they consume, and like that's that's a major problem because they're not aware and they're actually stopping themselves from ever being able to move away from it by lacking awareness. Um, I think it's a fantastic tool to create awareness, but it shouldn't be a crutch that's there for lifelong. And listen, if it if it soothes your soul and it makes you sleep better at night from having all your calories tracked in, cool, but please make an effort to actually understand what's going in your mouth as opposed to just scanning a barcode all the time, where you can actually improve your food freedom and actually move away from it that little bit more. Okay, so when we look at tracking from uh the baseline point of view, something I'll always kind of say, okay, to someone who's coming in, I'll assess where they're at. I'll figure out if they actually need to track so intensely or not. But I'll give them the analogy. I'm kind of like your financial advisor, I'm your calorie advisor. I need to know your ingoings and your outgoings. So, what's your incoming calories and what's your outgoing calories? So, what are you consuming with food and what are you expending with energy and exercise and activity? Therefore, we can actually figure out what's going on. The sooner we know that, the sooner we can actually move you away from tracking because we'll know where your baseline is, we'll know what your demands and needs are. And that's obviously going to fluctuate as time goes along and change, right? You might lose more body weight, you might need less calories over time, you might increase your expenditure, whatever. But as a baseline, we need to know exactly where you're at or a very good idea of where you're at. So getting to grips with tracking relatively tightly initially, getting a bit of upskilling, getting a better understanding of what you're doing with your food and your intake, and all of a sudden now it's uh it leads itself to very good outcomes, right? So, what would you see initially? You get someone in the door, they start tracking what kind of I guess learnings or lessons to define straight away.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

I guess they kind of miss out on certain small things like the milk they add into the tea or the sugar they add to their coffee or the dressings they use or the oils they use to cook or the little tastes and bites and finishing off their kids' meals and stuff that you know that doesn't count because that's not a meal, but it's not until you kind of start tracking that you realize, oh shit, I'm actually eating a lot more than I realize because uh more often than not we'd be dealing with like a lot of busy professionals that they wake up in the morning and it's just go, go, go, go, that they don't really sit down to eat a breakfast and they're constantly eating stuff on the go and they're never really registering it that I'm eating something. It's not until you kind of make them actively track what they're eating and they have to take that time out of the day just you know to spend a minute logging the stuff into the nap that they realize, oh, I'm actually eating a lot more than I realize, but it's because they're eating so many little things throughout the day that they never feel kind of satiated from what they're eating. So I think it's the the first biggest component is just kind of gaining awareness of, like as you said, of what you're actually eating at the given time. So, more often than not, you can actually just run with tracking at the beginning and not have an actual set target. It's like we just want to gain an understanding of where you are now. So I wouldn't at the start for some people just wouldn't even set a target. I just say, look, eat what you're eating now, we'll see where that is, and then we can make changes afterwards, depending on what kind of changes we see in terms of your body weight or whatnot. And I guess we've always like seen that person who is you know 120 kilos, and it's like, right, what are you eating current days? It's like I usually have like a chicken salad for lunch, and I have like yeah, where it's like again, it's not until you start tracking it so you realize, like, yeah, but you're drinking four liters of coke a day and you're adding salad dressings to everything. It's like you're actually eating a lot more than you realize.

Data Quality And App Errors

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Yeah, and it's that we'll we'll see it again, and like we have to we're we're bullshit detectives ultimately when it comes down to it at the end of the day, in terms of like figuring out where people are at with their calories. Uh, because again, we'll get them to track and say, listen, don't change your food intake too much, like do what you're currently doing. And next thing they're down like three kilos in the first week, and they've tracked everything that they consumed. But now all of a sudden they were just more mindful and aware because well, they had to log it in and they had to create an awareness, they had to, I guess, kind of fess up to their intake to a want of a better term with it all. And it's not that we're trying to create shame around it, but it's just to create awareness, and all of a sudden they're kind of like register, well, actually, I was consuming way more calories than I thought. So you kind of have two camps when it comes to this. You've got the calorie deniers who are like they're grossly overweight and they're completely oblivious to what they're consuming, and then you've got the calorie overestimators who are grossly underweight, or maybe like struggling to put on some muscle mass or struggling to actually put up their body weight, or maybe having uh issues around their menstrual cycle, energy availability, whatever it might be, and they're you know entering some things just to make double sure, but they're double entering the calories that are there. So something might be 500 calories or enter that is a thousand, and they're chronically underfueled all the time. So, again, as a tool, it's not just purely for weight loss, it's to create calorie awareness around what people are consuming. And then for us as the detectives to kind of sift through it and say, okay, well, actually, is that accurate? Because the big thing we'll see is just massive inaccuracy in people's ability to actually log their calories or to make data entries, because it ultimately just is data entry, but a lot of it is guesstimating, and people will guesstimate with emotions or kind of maybe previous misunderstandings that they had, and now all of a sudden their calories are grossly out of line. Again, like people are assuming that very healthy foods are very low calorie when it's more often the opposite in the case, or that they're just gonna be, you know, making some data entries, and and it's not necessarily their fault as well. Uh, I had a client trying to uh double check something with me, and they kind of it sparked a little bit of a thing, like they realized it wasn't really accurate. They sent across a screenshot to me of an app they were logging through to see if the macronutrients were correct in a chicken fillet, and this was just a plain chicken fillet that they had entered in. It had 25 grams of carbs in it, which is 100 calories. And the last time I checked a chicken fillet, there isn't a whole lot of carbohydrates in it. But they weren't aware, but then we were able to create awareness around it. That okay, like my fitness palette data and the various different tracking, it's like Wikipedia, you can kind of enter your own entries into it, and this can really throw people off at times because some stuff can just be wildly out of line that someone else has entered into. So there is a massive discrepancy between the data that's entered and then a lack of understanding of the actual data that's there as well, too. So, you know, I obviously see a lot of that. So, you know, what else have you seen there with people kind of I guess some mistakes and pitfalls that they're experiencing when it comes to tracking calories?

Eating Out: Generic Entries Mislead

SPEAKER_01 8:43

I think one of the biggest things I've seen as well outside of that is people when they're eating out that, like they might say get a chicken sandwich, for example, but they log chicken sandwich, but the chicken sandwich that they're logging or the chicken sandwich that they got is wildly different than what they're getting because again, we're kind of looking at by breaking things down into the granular level just to begin with, just so again you can gain a bit of understanding. It's like one chicken sandwich isn't the same as another chicken sandwich, because you could have one chicken sandwich just loaded with butter and the mayonnaise and avocado and bacon, whereas the other chicken sandwich could literally just be buttered chicken, and that's it. They're two wildly different things. So you could say you're eating a chicken sandwich, but like what you're actually eating is a lot more than just a chicken sandwich. So that's where some of the discrepancies can kind of come up again because people could just literally just like track a lasagna as opposed to tracking like all right, but what ingredients were in that lasagna compared to a different lasagna uh recipe.

Detective Work: Photos And Validation

Research On Misreporting Intake And Activity

Master Your 20 Foods For Freedom

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yeah, they're just generic entries as well too. And again, like listen, that's for us really to create a better understanding. And it's like it's not for like if the person could nail it and they really understood the whole thing, they wouldn't need us to really look through it all, right? As well too. So this is like where our detective hats come on, and we're kind of saying, okay, based off the information we have, you're doing X amount of activity, you're tracking X amount of calories. We know that there should be outcome Y happening here based off if it's true. And it's not that we're okay, sometimes we have to call people out for bullshit and say, I don't think this is correct. Are you not omitting all the entries here? Are you keeping something from me? We need to dig in a bit further. Or we say, I'm not calling you a liar. I think there might be some uh miscalculations here within this. And this is where we have to just sift through with that a little bit more. And it does take a little bit more work from our side because obviously we're saying, okay, maybe send me a picture of that food. Let's get an idea of how you're logging it and how you're tracking it to get a comprehension of okay, well, that's what's on the plate, and this is what's in your MyFitness panel. And we can kind of draw a comparison there to that and create a better understanding for the individual. Now they can log it in their own internal MyFitness panel and don't really need to log it or ask us those questions much more with it all. But again, it's like to create that awareness around um what their intake is, it's to educate people as well, too. Because again, it's like anything, they just assume that they're supposed to know because everyone tracks calories and everyone eats food, but like again, the awareness is is really not there. So there's a lot of studies and like a couple that were like quite famous over the years about like, okay, there was weight loss non-responders. I thought that I think the group was called uh where people were assuming that they were on like between you know 1400 sixteen hundred calories and that they were uh logging their food again, just doing all the right things but couldn't lose weight. When they were put into a setting where they're actually in a I think it was in like a metabolic uh ward or whatever that they were doing this study through, right, and tracked all their calories. When it came down to it, they were actually overconsuming their calories by 50% or 40, 48%, I think it was when their study came out. Another thing that was quite interesting, the same people, their activity that they were reporting back was misreported by up to 52%. So they were oblivious to the food that they were really eating or tracking or consuming uh by up to 42%. Their activity was down by 52%. So this creates this massive hole and void that they were just unaware of from their lack of good practice or lack of education or maybe just prior ignorance or maybe just like denial about the actual things they were doing as well, too. But then on the other side of it, yes, people who are not in the space won't be able to understand it straight away. A similar study was done with uh dieticians and nutritionists, where their uh tracking and awareness around their food and activity was out by about 20 to 30 percent, also. So, again, like everyone across the board, it's not just those who are like just in the gen pop category, uh, as you know, trainers, as nutritionists, as dietitians, whatever, their awareness also or their lack of tracking ability is quite profound at times. So it's like once we can create that awareness and get a little bit more education there, we can narrow the gap down, and now all of a sudden you'll see that you know we see vast improvements from people when we create that awareness around what they're actually consuming. Because like the big thing is like it seems like a lot, okay? You have to go into Lidl or Aldi or Tesco or dunce, wherever it is you do your shopping, and you have to get to know every single item that's in there. It's not the case. You're like, people consume like 10 to 15 foods and they eat out in like three to four places. That's it. And on those three to four places they eat out, they eat two things off each menu, and that's it. So now you've got like 20 things you actually need to understand that's going to compose of about 90% of your food. You're gonna be massively down the track and like really seeing huge improvements if you get to grips with those 20 to 25 things. Um, and now all of a sudden, the more awareness you create about tracking those 20 to 25 things, the more independence and freedom you create from ever really needing to track it again. Because you're gonna see the portion sizes, and if you pay attention to it, it's like, okay, well, I know that that's about a palm size portion of protein. I know there's about 20 grams in that. I know that based off that visual, and not that you're going into the matrix when you look at a plate and just see numbers and graphs and charts popping up, but you'll just look at it and say, that's about 800 calories. I know that it's not all of a sudden 300 or 1200 because you're miscalculating it so much. So once you create that awareness around the foods you regularly consume, now all of a sudden you create this massive freedom as well that you really don't need to track so intensely all the time. But it takes a little bit of work at the start and now it creates a lot of freedom on the back end of it all.

Consistency Beats Precision

Weekends, Honesty, And Energy Balance

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Yeah, and I think like the the main thing is with everything is consistency at the end of the day. Because like I had a client yesterday um asking about if they should weigh an egg in the shell or if they should weigh the egg cooked, which might sound ridiculous to some people, but at the same time, it is a very val, it's a very valid question. And I said it doesn't matter, it generally doesn't matter, like just literally just track it as an egg. But what I mean by that is if you track every single egg you eat the same, you're keeping that consistency in there. So, like if you track every chicken breast as a chicken breast, even if it is out in terms of the calories, it's still being tracked as the same thing, so you can easily make manipulations around that because you don't have to track every single thing to like the greatest detail. Because I always say to people, if you can kind of keep certain foods somewhat consistent within your your meals, like and have like the foundations, so like most people are probably gonna have like poro jose, most people are gonna have rice. It's like you can easily make manipulations to them. You can easily say, right, usually I'm having like two cup ten loads of rice. It's like right, unless maybe we have like a cup, one and a half cup tanfuls, and you're already making those manipulations, you don't need to weigh it out, but like you're probably using the same bowl or the same plate all the time, you're probably using the same brand of rice. So you don't have to weigh things out, you don't have to put into the the app to track it. Um, as long as you're kind of keeping things consistent, it's gonna be a lot easier to make those changes. And like I think comparing calorie tracking and stuff to like your finances, I think is always the best comparison to make because look at the mother things we would buy on a daily or weekly basis, like a cup of coffee in the shop, or could be a protein bar or something when you're on the go that you don't really register how much that is until you kind of comes to like Christmas time or comes to like buying presents for a birthday or something. It's like, oh, how much money do I have to buy this thing? Check your account, it's like, Jesus Christ, what am I spending all my money on? Because like I don't really feel like I'm spending much, but then you realize I'm spending like eight euro a day on coffee and I'm spending 25 euro a week on protein bars. It's like, oh, maybe I need to cut back on that, and that's the same reason why you would track your calories is to kind of create that awareness that you don't have to do it every single day. At the start, you probably do just so again you have a kind of understanding where you are, but eventually over time, if you're staying kind of relatively consistent with things, you just have to kind of dip in every now and then to kind of see like where are things kind of lying now, do I need to make changes? And that's when you can kind of pull things back. But even just looking back in my history of like tracking things, I would have ate the exact same foods every single day. But I was still going through my fitness panel and like copying from day A to day B, even though I was having the exact same foods, I didn't have to open the app to know what weights I needed, but it was just keeping that consistency there. Um, and that allowed me then to make manipulations on the go, which more often than not never happened because I was just so rigid with my approach. But it took me years to kind of realize you don't need to keep doing that because, like, you're doing the same thing every single day, you can literally just look at the plate and you know what's there, which you can easily make manipulations, and I think that's where sometimes people can get too far down the rabbit hole and they get very obsessive about the numbers. But as we said in a previous podcast, even if you are tracking down to the milligram, the labels and all the products can still be off by 10 to 15 percent. So even if you are eyeballing all your meals, you could still be just as close to it as if you were to actually weigh it out.

Short Bursts Of Tracking, Not Forever

Control, Binge Fears, And Reality Checks

Relationship With Food: Awareness Over Anxiety

SPEAKER_00 17:29

But if it's 10 to 15% higher all the time, or 10 to 15% lower all the time, it's still going to be 10 to 15% out all the time. So now if we make a manipulation to your calories or your energy expenditure, whatever, it's going to be influenced by a consistent amount. So it's consistently inconsistent. To another point with that, like, okay, I I know some people and they know once they enter it into my fitness panel, that's kind of like it's real. That like, you know, if the tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound kind of thing? And that keeps them accountable because they know there's an element of I've made it real, I've made a note of this, so now it's out there in the ether and it's it's real, um, as opposed to some people are like, Well, I'm not gonna log this, so then it doesn't exist. So it does keep some people accountable to that degree. You know, we'll talk about that kind of stuff, and and this is like one of those, like again, it we don't say okay, there's never a silly question, but people will say, Okay, should I like track my spinach? Should I track my egg in the shell? Should I track the chicken fillet? You know, whatever it is. My question is always like, is that really like irrelevant thing relevant to the act? Is that holding you back? Is the egg been tracked holding that person back? And more often than not, it's not, you know, it's not the you know, the really irrelevant, small, minuscule thing, it's overlooking the weekend, you know. So could we actually track that in a little bit, create some caloric awareness around the weekend or put some structure in it? And that's like really what's going to pull the favor back. Um, because again, like weighing your vegetables. Like, I again, I haven't had anyone who's overeating or over-consuming too many vegetables, even the vegetarian and vegan clients that I have, like they don't over-consume those foods. Yes, we need to create an awareness around it, but at the same point, more highly processed foods that are more calorically dense that kind of slip in every now and then, they're the foods that really need to get a little bit more attention because those whole single ingredient foods that are like, you know, very generally calorically low in their values, but very high in volume. I've yet to see anyone overeating or overconsuming them for the most part. Yeah, for sure, you can get fat eating broccoli, but at the same point, it's never really like a main focus of mind for anyone to say, do you know what? I think it was the broccoli that did it over the weekend. We need to peel that back that little bit more. It's never a case on the Monday morning when it comes to check-in time. So, like, it's looking at what is the actual thing, and like you said at the start, it's like, what's the purpose? What are we actually looking for with the tracking? What is the outcome we're looking for? You know, how can we apply it to say, okay, I need to understand my energy balance better, therefore, I need to track what I consume, and therefore I will get a better outcome and a better understanding of the energy intake I have so I can make positive uh changes to my body composition. But it's like having an actual purpose, don't just do it because you think you need to do it. Some people just need to, you know, cut back on eating a bit of shit and like just reduce their intake. You don't need to track your calories, like we all know the difference between an apple and a donut. If you're having two takeaways on the weekend, maybe have one, or maybe like home cook a meal where you can actually pull the calories back in your favor. Now you've made positive changes without actually needing to track the food. You know, so again, short term, I think it's a really good tool. Long term, I don't think it's remotely necessary if we're paying attention to what we're actually doing with it all. So, again, like in that short term, two to four weeks, you're gonna pretty much track everything you're most likely gonna consume for like 90 to 95% of your intake. Again, if you're paying attention to it, you're gonna learn an awful lot about your uh caloric consumption, your energy balance, and all those things. Even on the weekends, like track everything in that the good, the bad in the different like a lot of people I'll have us like, oh yeah, there's all my calories. And it's like, what about the rest of it? Because I know based off what's happened here that you didn't track in the pizza and the takeaway and the fries and the large coke and all that as well. People kind of omit these things because they're feel embarrassed or guilty about it, but that obviously impacts energy balance, and we still need to know it. And like you were not looking to come down and like condemn people for eating shit, but it's like the more we can know, the better. Because again, peel it back to the finances. That financial advisor is gonna say, Okay, there's a gap here, we're we're leaking money somewhere, we need to plug that gap because we're not gonna be able to get the mortgage or whatever the goal is for people. So, once we can actually plug the gap, we're never gonna come down on people calling dickheads for eating certain amounts of food, whatever it might be. But it's like let's actually give you that advice and actually steer you in the right direction. So, again, I guess to peel it back, like overall caloric tracking, very useful tool. I don't want people to think that they need to track forever. If it keeps you happy and sane and in a good position with your food and accountable, do it. But at the same point, you don't need to do that 365 days a year. You're not entering into a long-term relationship with MyFitness Pal. This should be an on and off kind of fling every now and then, if you're looking at that, if you're to use that analogy, because you're going to have periods that need more intensity and you're going to have periods that need less intensity. So if you've got a holiday coming up, think of it again like the event you're trying to save some money for. We need to be more financially aware, we need to be more calorically aware. So let's actually do that for eight to ten weeks, twelve weeks, whatever the goal is, the amount of weight we need to drop, let's put it in relative line with that. But now all of a sudden you don't have this track and fatigue because all of a sudden I could just track for eight to ten weeks of the year and kind of pay mindful attention and awareness around the rest of it. Now it's not that big a burden because people are kind of the biggest issue we'll see is like people are half arse and they're tracking and they think they're doing it all the time when they're doing it like 60% of the time, but they're not getting the result. So they think it's a pain in the arse. The biggest pain of the arse is like not paying attention and entering the extra 40% and actually getting the result. So it's like it's not the tracking that's the problem, it's just like obviously putting in full adherence, being more accountable, and whatever it might be. So think of it like a tool that's short term, not long term, and it's going to make it way easier to actually do the thing when you're doing the thing, and you'll actually get the results, so therefore you can see the return on efforts from tracking. Yeah, that makes sense in terms of that. Like what else would you add there to that, Daniel?

Final Takeaways And How To Apply

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah, I think it all makes sense. And I think the one biggest fear people have when it comes to tracking and not tracking is the kind of again that element of control that, like, if I'm tracking it, it exists, I had it. But if I don't track, then for some reason I will not be able to resist eating a full box of donuts or a full pizza or whatever because I don't have the ability to track it, or if I don't know exactly what's in this food, that hampers my ability to track it. And what I always say to clients, and you kind of touched on it there when it comes to like the weekends, it's like we want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. We want to see like if you do for whatever reason, if you on one side of it go out for dinner and you kind of track something, it's like I wasn't too sure how to track it, but again, they can maybe snap a picture of it, they can kind of send it to us, we can kind of educate them. This is how I would break it down if I was looking to track something, if I was eating out, and on the other side of it, if they went off the rails completely and they did go on a binge, I still said try your best, it's going to be very difficult for you to do it because at that stage you are just give you up control completely. But if you track it, there's two ways you can look at it. You can say, right, you're kind of raising awareness of what you're having, and you actually might eat a bit less, but at the same time, you're probably not eating as much as you believe you are. So, like a lot of people will kind of guilt themselves after you know going a bit overboard at the weekend or whatever. But more often than not, they're actually not eating as much as they think. Like when they actually track it, it's like you ate a thousand calories more than what you plan to do. It's like that is not the end of the world when we actually want to look at things on in on the the the longer time frame. So it's like again, if you actually just track everything to begin with, again, it's about creating that awareness, it's about creating more awareness about what you're actually eating, and again, how little effect like all these little things have, because that is a part of life at the end of the day that like you will overeat occasionally is a part of life. That's why like there's celebrations there with like birthday parties and Christmas and holidays and all this kind of stuff, not that like you're promoting it and saying you should go on an all-inclusive holiday and just like eat yourself to debt, but like you are going to like have a croissant with your coffee or something and breakfast in the morning, you're not going to be wake up saying I need to find somewhere where I can get a high protein breakfast, and it's like you have to learn to be okay with these things as well. Um, but that kind of comes from tracking and just raising that awareness as well in the first place, I think, as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

And it's you like you know, something else we'll find a lot of it is that people will absorb other people's bullshit and negativity at times, and they'll say, you know, ex-influencer who was speaking really loud about it, you know, that they ruined a relationship with food because they tracked it so much. It's like that's not gonna happen to you because you start to track the food. Maybe there was other issues that going on in the background or whatever, or someone went to like absolute extremes, or maybe they were given poor guidance or poor education. Like you can harbor a really positive relationship with food from creating a better awareness. You know, just because you track your money doesn't mean you're gonna create a bad relationship with it. Just because you track uh your run doesn't mean you're creating a bad uh relationship with your strata and your fitness and your health. It's just a tool to create awareness around this. We can use it for really good and it can also be used for really poor things. But at the same point, once we create that awareness, once we're harboring a positive relationship with it, you can really get some fantastic value from it, but ultimately again set yourself up for the long term with it. So I would, you know, approach with caution, obviously, when you're getting into tracking, uh, I would look at making sure you've got purpose and a goal as opposed to blindly just tracking for the sake of tracking because you think you need to, because X person said so. It's to have actual meaning and reason behind it. And then, but also have a timeline around when you're gonna do it, why you're gonna do it, how you're gonna do it, how long you're gonna do it for. Uh again, it's not something you're getting married to long term. So, final notes on the wrap-up in terms of tracking, Daniel. What do we want people to take away from this?

SPEAKER_01 27:08

I think the main thing to take away from it is just to realise that tracking is just a tool at the end of the day, that it is just about raising awareness that it isn't something that once you're doing it, that becomes your whole lifestyle and your whole approach to nutrition. That it's just again, like as you said, that you're not going to the the store and trying to like look at every single product inside there to see like what's the carbs in this brand of rice compared to the carbs in this brand of rice, and should I buy a microwave rice compared to like uh a bag uh rice that I have to boil myself? It's like you're just tracking just to kind of raise awareness and just get a ballpark understanding of like what is a carb source, what is a protein source, what's a flat source, and then you can kind of make your own decisions based off that. Um, so I definitely wouldn't look at like tracking as like as you said, like a long-term tool. Just look at it as something that you might do in the short term, two to four weeks at the start, gain an understanding from it, and then maybe return back to it again after four, six, eight weeks, whatever it is, if you feel like you just need to kind of regain an understanding of where you are at the current time.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Huge. And I think people are going to get so much value from this as well, too, because like it is something that people are unaware of. They've been, you know, maybe absorbing different people's exposures to it, you know, creating good or bad and different relationships or whatever, but they'll they'll be entering into it with, I guess, an area of negativity. It doesn't have to be a very negative experience, it can be really positive and you can harbor fantastic return and relationships from it all as well, too. If you've got more questions about this topic, if you want us to cover it over more in detail, if you've got more uh topics you'd like us to cover within the podcast, just reach out, DM. If there was something that again sparked a bit of interest or thought or something you'd like more uh knowledge about, just shoot us a line anytime. We're always here to help. Daniel, until the next one. We're out.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Chao chill in the