#82 - The Real-World Guide To Tracking For Fat Loss

Tracking can feel like a minefield: calories, steps, weigh-ins, sleep scores, heart rate, VO2 max, and a dozen apps all asking for your attention. Daniel and I cut through that noise and get honest about what actually helps real people make progress, especially if fat loss is the goal. We talk about the “bare minimum” metrics worth tracking, why trying to measure everything can backfire, and how to keep the process simple enough that you actually stick with it.

We dig into the fundamentals: calories consumed and calories expended. Stress, sleep, and hormones matter, but they usually show up through those two levers, and if you never measure the basics, you’re left guessing. We also explain why tracking often feels uncomfortable, because it acts like a lie detector. The data can highlight overeating, low daily movement, or inconsistent habits, and that truth can be hard to face, but it’s also what gives you control and speeds up results.

Then we get practical. If “I don’t have time” is your biggest barrier, we share simple strategies like saving repeat meals, building custom recipes, and pre-logging your day to remove decision fatigue. We also talk about when trackers help and when they hurt, especially if readiness scores make you second-guess training. Our main takeaway is clear: match the severity of your tracking to the severity of your goal, and only add more metrics when you need them to answer a question.

If this helps, subscribe, share it with a mate who’s sick of spinning their wheels, and leave a review. What’s the one thing you track now, and what do you want to stop tracking?

Got questions? simply email or dm us with those questions

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Transcript

Welcome To Gen Pop Podcast

SPEAKER_01 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.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

You are welcome back to another episode of the Jedpop Podcast, where this week co-hosts Daniel and I were gonna talk about tracking. Tracking is one of those things people get really confused, frustrated about we're not just talking calories, we're talking all metrics when it comes to it. Daniel, let's jump into it. What's needed, what's not needed, what's the reality of actually tracking and what's uh gonna be useful for people moving towards their goals?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

I think it's gonna be very dependent on the individual, like their goals, their background, what they're looking to get, and everything. But like I think the things we always like to track, um, obviously, is like weight is probably one of the first ones, calories is probably one of the second ones. And then I think for the vast majority of people, everyone has a fitness tracker these days, and that's going to automatically be tracking your steps, your heart rate, your sleep, and everything. So it's gonna be very, very easy for us to kind of keep track of that as well. So, like, I think in the grand scheme of things, that's like the bare minimum of what you probably should be tracking. Like everything else outside that is going to be something that you're gonna have to just kind of figure out yourself to a degree. Like, you can't really rely on a fitness tracker to tell you like how stressed you are or how prepared you are for your training. That's kind of up to you, just be like, right, I feel okay to train. I don't need my tracker to kind of tell me that I should go to train. But I think you should always kind of just start with the basics and see how you go with that, and then over time you'll kind of like see, you know, like, oh, I want to kind of see like where my fucking VO2 max is because I'm into that kind of thing, and then you go down the rabbit hole of that. But I think if you start off and it's like, right, I'm gonna track all of the metrics, you're just gonna like end up stressing yourself out so much that you're just gonna end up tracking nothing. Um, because like even like if we're working with someone like, say, that's a runner, for example, you might even be tracking like how much like their their weight is before they run, after they run based on like how often they urinate and everything, because you want to kind of get on top of their hydration for like longer runs and stuff like this. But like if you just told you know the a middle-aged person who's getting into the gym, it's like, right, we're gonna have to weigh yourself multiple times a day before you exercise, after exercise, so you can so we can actually kind of monitor your hydration status and all that kind of stuff to come like, well, fuck that, because like I have a friend that like just goes to Weight Watchers and distract our weight, like, what the crisis am I doing? Basically, measuring my piss. So I think you should always just start off with like the bare minimum and ask yourself, like, what is it I'm actually really looking to achieve from you know tracking these variables, like what is my goal? Kind of just track what's needed to and what's gonna be like relevant towards your goal, really.

Calories In Versus Calories Out

Why People Avoid Tracking

SPEAKER_02 2:41

Yeah. Like technically, technically, you don't need to track anything, right? Because if you can get yourself into a deficit, you're gonna lose body fat. You don't need to actually track it to tell us where it is. But the thing is that you will get to bottlenecks at some point, and we may need to know what to adjust and change based off that. Or you may want to know how do I actually increase my fat loss? Because you will get to a point where there's a point of diminishing returns, etc. So we don't really know what to adjust or change because we don't really know what the metrics are, their values are, we don't know what your output and expenditure is, we don't know what your income and calories are. Because let's talk about fat loss here, because that's gonna be the thing most people are gonna be looking for. There is two major underpinning factors. It's your calories consumed and your calories expended. That's what it all boils down to. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we can talk about hormones and stress and sleep and blah, blah, blah. They're gonna ultimately influence the calories expended and the calories consumed. So if we don't know the bottom line, think of it like your finances. If you don't know what's going out and what's coming in and you're wanting to save X amount of money, well, you don't know where you are in relation to your goal. You don't know how much you need to turn one up and turn the other down. So now it's much, much harder because there's going to be more guesswork. So if you want to increase the accuracy and decrease the frustration, chances are you should actually pay attention to tracking some of those metrics, some of those variables, some of those values. Um, yes, absolutely. Uh, tracking calories, it's a tool, it's not a life sentence. And this is what we'll always say to people that yes, some people really love it. And, you know, some people really love other weird shit as well, too. And they're into that, and that's what they want to do forever, and that's cool. But the majority of people don't want to live, you know, through my fitness pal. They don't want to have to scan every single meal, they don't want to have to weigh all their meals. But if you can pay attention to that initially and get a really good baseline of what a similar or regular day looks like for you, well, now we know more about that baseline. But you also, if you pay attention to it, don't need to track as tightly going forward with all that as well, too. If you can track your steps for a week, well, now you have a really good baseline of a typical week in the life of uh person X that they do 50,000, 60,000, 100,000 steps, whatever it might be. So now we know that that's your typical output for a normal week. Again, we now know your typical incoming calories, your typical outgoing calories, and now we'll have a response based off that. We can adjust and modulate that to ensure that you're actually hitting your goal. I think a lot of people don't actually want to track calories and their steps and output because it's going to tell them the truth. It's like a little lie detector. It's like they don't want to face the reality of, well, yeah, I am actually overeating, even though we know it because I'm gaining body fat or I'm under moving, whatever it might be. You know it, but they don't really want to face the truth of it as well, too, because it's telling them you need to fucking eat more or you need to eat less calories or you need to move more. And people don't really like been told that, right? And you'll see a little bit of resistance from people with that as well, too, uh, because we want to kind of have a bit of an out to say, well, I'm eating really healthy, or I am actually moving more, I am, oh, you know, I'm only eating three times a day, or whatever it might be. But the reality of it is if you are experiencing outcomes that are undesirable with your body composition, chances are there's a misalignment there somewhere, and we need to get a baseline on that where we can have a far more consistent and accurate input. But then ultimately give us more control and put the ball back in our court where we can just speed up the goddamn process and not be spinning our wheels for longer. Because if we're more accurate, now you're dieting for less time. If you're inaccurate, if you're loosey-goosey, if you don't know what's actually going on, maybe don't know what to change, and you're just showing shit, and hopefully something sticks. And that's the reality a lot of people are facing into. Um, what friction do you find when it comes to let's say tracking calories for people, Daniel, that they just don't want to do it? Like, what's the the main barriers and hurdles you'll see?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

I think apart from like people kind of saying that that they just don't have the knowledge of like how to track, I think it's like time. Like a lot of people say they just don't have the time to track calories. But like I always say to people, and like I actually done this with a client the other day, that they are tracking their calories and everything, but they kind of find that they don't just don't have the time to track their calories at the moment, that like they track it later on in the day and they kind of look back over what they had and then track it. So I actually went back over a month of their track nutrition. I said, Right, you're literally eating the exact same breakfast every single day. So, like, that's not something that you need to kind of worry about. You could even actually save that as a meal in my fitness belt and just load the meal in as opposed to tracking everything individually. And like you eat the same five to six protein sources, you eat the same five to six carb sources, so like you already should have a good awareness of like the portion size that you have with each of these things. So, like, you could even go down the route of like creating your own custom recipes, custom meals, so that you just default to that that you're having the same kind of servings all the time, so you know roughly what's in it, and that's gonna save you a ton of time. Because if you're thinking every single day, it's like, right, what'll I have today? What's in the fridge? I don't know like how much of this I'm gonna have. Whereas if you actually have like I'm gonna have X amount of this, X amount of that, you already know what's going to what's going into that, and it's gonna save you so much time. And I think at the start, the same as anything new, it's gonna take a period of time, it's gonna take some adjustment, and like over time you're just gonna develop such a skill at tracking that it's gonna become second nature, and then you're gonna get to a point where you're doing it so for so long, you don't need to track as you know closely. You might need to track something that's you never had before, something you're not too sure of, or maybe you kind of are gonna track, like say, my peanut butter, for example, because you know that that's something that's gonna be like wildly different if I just have like half a tablespoon or a full tablespoon. Um, as we talked about before, like there can be huge variances in stuff, it's gonna be higher and fat. So maybe you track those a bit closer. But like, say things like chicken breasts, for example, you probably don't need to be as meticulous with tracking that because you roughly will know, right? A chicken breast is going to be roughly around that 150-200 gram mark, wherever you know what size it's gonna be. Um, so I think like time is probably the biggest roadblock that most people will kind of like speak about, but I think most people, much like kind of meal prep, they just haven't invested the time into it yet. Like I always say to people like that don't have much time. If you have the option to actually meal prep, it's like meal prep is saving you time. I know that you're gonna have to set aside maybe an hour on Sunday, but that might save you four, five, six hours during the week that you now have gained back. And now you actually can go to the gym, you maybe can do cardio, you can set aside time for a hobby, you can do whatever it is. So, like you actually save yourself time. It might require like an initial period of time where you actually spend a bit more time just doing one thing, a bit more, but it's actually saving you time in the long run.

Pre-Log Meals And Save Time

SPEAKER_02 9:18

I looked up a stat there today that was quite interesting that the average Irish adult is spending two hours per day on social media, it's 14 hours a week. Pretty sure that you could probably eliminate one or two of those hours over the whole week. And I know it's gonna be in little snack size bites every time you're dipping in and out of your feeds and stuff like that, but chances are you could start to get a little bit of food prep done. Maybe you could stick on your favorite podcast, your favorite YouTube, whatever that you're gonna be watching anyway, and do a bit of habit stacking that now you're multitasking, but you're ultimately buying yourself back way more time. Like it's our most valuable thing that we have, it's our time because we don't get it back. So if we can multiply that just that little bit more in terms of what we do within that time spent anyway, well, now we get significant more return. Now we actually get to results we're looking for, we get to get that bit of freedom around it all because you're getting a better understanding and you're getting more control, you're gonna have more energy. Like, there's it's just such a wild investment of your time that you get such a big ROI. Um, you know, I just see it as a no-brainer for people to be able to dig into that. Something that's other like really, really handy is to like to pre-log your meals. It takes out a lot of that decision paralysis because a lot of people are like, Well, I don't really know, and I'm gonna have to get a new protein recipe every single day. And it's like, no, stop that. Like, if you've got your repetition, your normal Monday to Friday for a lot of people is gonna be very similar. Pre-log in your meals, you know what you need to have out the day before. It's like super, super easy. It takes out a lot of that frustration, and you don't really need or want as much flexibility for most people Monday to Friday. So now it takes a lot of that control back into your hands because well, I've pre-entered my meals, that's what I'm gonna have for the day. There's none of this additional frustration or confusion or like what am I gonna have, kind of a concept. But then it allows a little bit more flexibility and freedom around the weekends as well, too, that ultimately is gonna get more back for you. Um, yeah, so like the the barriers I find when it comes to it again, a lot of it is time. Uh, I find retrospectively tracking can be really dangerous for people because they'll get this thing called carbnesia, where they just fucking forget the foods that they've had throughout the day and will blatantly omit the ones that are higher in calories and they'll stress about the waiter spinach earlier on in the day, but they'll really forget about like the pack of club milks that they had at lunchtime. So again, it's like it's making sure that uh if you are going to retrospectively track that you're accurate with that. And I don't really recommend it, you know, being a little bit more proactive around a pre-entering your food is gonna be really, really key. The thing that people will find if they don't have the time, they'll say that majority of people you will find that their phone is not too far from their reach when they're actually eating their foods as well. Too phone is there, you're fucking around on social media, you're doing whatever, just make a note of your food that you had or just log it into your uh data tracker because ultimately it's gonna have um you one staying accountable, and then two, uh, having more useful information that's there that you can actually, you know, make more informed choices based off that, then as well. Two, if they need to be tweaked or adjusted around all that, uh, and it ultimately creates a ton of freedom. Outside of that, it's like, do you need to track everything else as well when it comes to your training? No. You know, are you consistently showing up? That's a more important factor. Are you actually getting to the gym the amount of times per week that you said when you have that logged in and locked in? Now you can start to worry about getting more into your progressive overload. Because like there's a lot of sound bites that you'll see is like you have to track all your food, you have to track all your lifts, you have to track your sleep, you have to track your steps. And now that's fucking just more things that people who are genuinely busy don't have won the desire or really to give a fuckness about it. But it just it comes from a lot of people within social media that are like really into that thing, and that's like part of their identity that they're all just tracking everything, and that's fine, that's what gets them off. But it probably doesn't appeal to most of the others. But they feel that if you want to be successful within that, you need to track every single variable that's there. Some people just want to go to the gym and fucking lift weights and get out of it and feel a bit sweaty and warm and lift some heavy things and do all that, that's cool. Um, yes, if you really want to like the more, the more I don't want to say extreme the goal, but if we probably use the yeah, the more extreme the goal. If I want to lose a large amount of body fat, if I want to gain a large amount of muscle tissue, the more detailed the level of tracking will be needed for that as well, too. If you're very time-bound towards a goal, if you're getting married in 10 weeks, uh, but you don't really want to track, well, you're gonna have trouble with that, or you're just gonna have to go so low with your calories so high with your output and activity to remove all the guesswork and just annihilate yourself into the ground. But the severity of the goal should be aligned with the severity of the inputs. If you're just wanting to feel a bit better, if you're just wanting to move a bit better, if you're just wanting to feel like you're getting some benefit from some exercise, you don't really need to track everything that tightly. But if you're one of those who are getting massively frustrated with your results or lack thereof, or you've got a very time-bound result that you're chasing, you will need to track, you will need to be more aware of what's going on because there will become a bottleneck at some point, and you will need to have more accuracy with your inputs from that point of view. So, again, have a look at the actions you're taking with your tracking and your data collection. Is it in line with what I'm actually looking to do? And that's like again a really, really key factor that people will generally overlook. So you don't need to be like weighing and measuring absolutely everything, you know, just look at the main components of that that are going to be um the big rocks that we need to move. And I think that's gonna get you far more profound outcomes with it all. Um we have a ton actually covered within this, and hopefully it's gonna like make a little bit more sense for people. But is there any other bits Janile feel we're missing out on here in this in terms of the conversation that'll be worthwhile throwing into the ring now?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, I think it's good to kind of understand a bit more as to like why you're tracking stuff in the first place, and it's just to kind of answer questions. So, like if somebody came to us and they were like tracking their calories and everything, it's because we want to see like how many calories are they eating currently so that we can actually dictate what change to make. And then, for example, like again, if we don't see the scales going down, but they're claiming that they're you know eating all their calories or whatever, or they're eating within a deficit, and then we decide, right, we're gonna track your steps. Then we can see, right, your steps are actually starting to come down, so your output is actually lower than what it was at the start. So maybe we start tracking that a bit closer. Then maybe we see that like their weight starts to trend upwards or something, and then we have a look at right, how's your sleep currently? It's like, I'm not too sure. Right, let's start tracking your sleep, maybe, and like tell me a bit more about like how stress is. So then you're just kind of layering on stuff that you're you're trying to figure out what's causing you know a problem somewhere else. So sometimes you don't necessarily have to track something until like an issue comes up that maybe it's gonna help answering questions elsewhere, because you will get people that like if you're tracking so many different variables, it causes more stress than anything. And like we've talked about before, that like if you have like say different fitness trackers and you wake up in the morning and it tells you the run to sleep, straight away. You're gonna think, like, oh, I didn't sleep too well last night, is telling me like my readiness score is whatever it is. I don't know, maybe should I go to the gym? And even if you do decide to go to the gym, it's probably still gonna be the back of your head, like, oh well, I didn't sleep too well last night. My Fitbit, my aura ring, my garment told me like I wasn't really ready to train. So, like, you're probably going to approach the set, kind of second guessing your ability, and you're not going to really make progress then, and then you're going to start feeling you know worse actually furthering that because you're not making progress. So sometimes you always have to kind of like check in with yourself before you know, looking at these metrics and say, like, is this something that's actually important for me right now? Is this something I really need to kind of pay attention to? And it's again only kind of piling on this kind of information when you need to do it rather than just feeling you need to do it.

Keep The Basics And Reach Out

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Yeah, and that's huge because again, is it relevant to the goal? Is it moving the needle closer, or is it relevant down the line that I may need this information and data to make the appropriate changes? Right now, you mightn't see the value in tracking your steps in calories because they are staying consistent. Um, but there may be some variables there that you're not factoring in, and there will be a bottleneck there down the line that if we or you need to adjust your calories or your output, your activity, that now we can continue in that path because people will kind of make a burst for it, they'll won't be tracking any data, they'll see some great results, then things will start to slow down, things will stop, then they'll get really frustrated because they don't know what to do as that next step. But ultimately it's allowing you to create that next step when you have more information there. So think of it in terms of again tracking your finances as something that people will come back to because it's something they're more used to. That if you've got a goal financially that you want to have uh and you want to tick off by certain times, well, you're gonna again look at the inputs, you're gonna look at the outputs, and you're gonna assess that and you're gonna align the actions then based off that goal with what the baseline is. So, again, it's very easy for us to start um accumulating some data that's relevant to that goal and then applying it with a little bit of common sense along the line with that as well. Too. Um, hopefully this has cleared up a little bit for you guys in terms of okay, I actually need to start tracking a bit more, or maybe I actually need to start tracking a little bit less because I'm getting frustrated with it and I'm not really uh using it, it's not a tangible metric that's actually worthwhile for me to have in there. Uh, but if the goal is fat loss and the goal is more time bound, chances are you will need to look at your steps, your activity, and your output and your incoming calories that little bit more, yes, weighing yourself that little bit more often to have a better baseline. Everything else is somewhat irrelevant outside of that. If it's not really useful and not really uh complementing the goal, or if it's creating another burden for you to do, because you're already a busy, busy person, look at the bare bones basics. What do I really need to know to hit this goal? What do I really need to have if I need to make a change down the line? That's going to tell you exactly what you need to have. You don't need to have all the additional frills and trills on top. Some people like it, have at it. If you get off on that, that's cool. But when it comes to the necessary, just keep the necessary there and you can crack on and really accomplish those goals. Uh Daniel, it's been a really worthwhile and useful episode. Hopefully, people have got a ton of information from it. They're able to use it and apply it immediately. But if you've got questions or more curiosities that have popped up throughout subjects that we've talked about here or in previous episodes, make sure you reach out, touch base, drop us an email, drop us a DM on socials. We're always here to help you guys out. And if you need a little bit more of a steer, we're always here to provide some coaching as well to you alongside all of that. Daniel, it's been a really worthwhile episode.