Reducing frequency and strictness with calorie tracking!

Today we're talking about ways to move away from tracking all of our food! The pros, cons, ups, downs and thing we wanna think about when doing so 🤗

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The Eat Like Ruby podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature and should not be used to treat any medical conditions, health conditions, illnesses, injuries and/or any nutrition related conditions, deficiencies or similar.
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Please consult your health care professional before implementing any of the advice, information or protocols discussed in this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello fam, welcome back to the pod. I am back today doing kind of another client deep dive episode, but I'm not really gonna talk too much about this client, even though she's a legend, but I'm also want to look at like a particular little comment this client said to me, and I felt like it was part of a bigger conversation we've been having a lot recently on the podcast. So recently on the pod, we did an episode, I'd say about three, maybe even four weeks ago now, where we did another client deep dive episode. And in that episode, we spoke about a client who has been with me for a long time, and she's gone through phases of fat loss, muscle gain, maintenance, all the things, and was basically just at a point where she was chilling at maintenance and she could have a fair bit of flexibility there. And that was an awesome episode. Like that is the coolest thing in my opinion to watch women go through that process. And it's a very, very common thing we do in Eat Lack Ruby. I've said recently it's probably my favorite thing to do is help people go through those processes and really find out where all those numbers and all those phases are for them, and then just be able to fall into like a really chilled sweet spot with that. So that episode was awesome. It then segued into another episode we did about two weeks ago that I think was called like having control and flexibility at maintenance or something like that. And it was really just breaking down what I just said, like really breaking down what it looks like to get to a point where you're happy to chill at maintenance and keep enough control with your nutrition that it keeps you in a good position and you keep feeling good, but also have enough flexibility that it's actually really enjoyable, really sustainable for us to hang there long term. And so today we're almost going to look at like another option or another part of that whole process. And the coolest thing about these episodes is so many of my clients, so many of my clients listen to them and they're like, I thought you're talking about me for a second, Rubes, in that episode. Like so many clients thought it was about them, which is just awesome because it just shows how many of my clients have gone through that cool process. And also just when I do these episodes, I'm thinking about my clients. I'm thinking, I don't care if only 20 people listen to this episode, if it's these 20 clients, because I want them to hear it. I want them to understand this, I want them to really see what this can look like. So this is just a cool combo. And anytime clients have bought it up with me recently and just made little comments, sometimes people make the littlest comment, but I'm like, shit, there's so much in that. I've got 40 minutes in that. To you, that was three words, but to me, that's a 40-minute podcast episode. So that is really what we're looking at today, is just a comment someone literally made to me yesterday. And I'm just gonna pull it apart a little bit. And really what we're looking at is this client, I'll talk about this client for a second, and then we can get into it. But this client has been with me for a long time. I would say maybe 2021, maybe 2022, like four to five years. And when she came to me, she was not very experienced at all with like tracking nutrition, flexible dieting. She wasn't really experienced with training, and we're not going to talk about training much today, but just a little bit of a side note that's worth mentioning for this client. This client came to me for nutrition coaching at the start. Then she added training. When we added training, she literally messaged me after her first session and she was like, Rubes, I cried in the gym. I was just so overwhelmed. I just felt like a fish out of water, didn't know what I was doing, like so, so overwhelmed. And then I was like, oh my god, like that is the last thing we want. Like, what can we do? Kind of talked her through it. Fast forward like three years, literal gym queen. Literally just so consistent in the gym lifting for, like I said, about three years now. So, I mean, that in itself could be a 40-minute episode, but I'm gonna move on from that so we can talk about nutrition. This particular client has also worked with me through different phases of more so fat loss and maintenance. We've never really done like a big proper surplus. She's never really wanted to or needed to. She plays a lot of hockey, so she does hockey a lot of the time, and then we always factor training around that. So when she's in her season, we reduce our strength training a little bit just because she's doing hockey like every day. Obviously, we don't want too much soreness, etc. And then when she's out of the season, we crank strength training up a little bit because she's got more time and we can focus on that a bit more. And then, like I said, we kind of do the same thing with nutrition. Obviously, when she's in season, we want to be like fueling all of that training and all those games she's playing. And then sometimes hockey season usually wraps up around September, October. Sometimes she might do like a bit of a deficit or mini cut coming into summer. Sometimes we just don't want to, so we don't. So we're always just kind of watching nutrition and adjusting it to suit all of that. But because she's been with me for so long, she's been tracking her nutrition for a long time, and we've gone through different phases and we've had good success. We've had good success in the deficit, we've had good success at maintenance, and we've been quite strict at times, and then we've been quite chilled at other times. That's kind of what I want to talk about today. When I spoke to this client yesterday, so we are sitting here now, early June, and her hockey season started around Easter, like end of March, I think it was, and goes through to September. So we played around a little bit with her nutrition at the start of the year, just like coming out of Chrissy holidays, getting back into training, slowly getting back into hockey. We just sort of worked out where calories should be for the year. So we did that early on, and then we've just pretty much held them steady since, like I said, end of March when she got back into hockey. And so when I spoke to her yesterday, she's pretty much been chilling on the same cows for like three months. And she's been hanging around the same calories for years, give or take, adjusting it a little bit, depending on what's going on with all of her training and her sport. But this led her to make the comment to me yesterday where she said, I'm not always tracking things anymore. I'm not always weighing things, I'm not always logging them in my app. And I was just like, this is awesome. You don't need to be. You have done this for so long. And the goals that you have right now and the position that you want to be in right now, you don't need to be doing that. You don't need to be tracking everything really strictly and weighing it and logging it really strictly. And so that is what I want to look at today because obviously we've been having that conversation recently about finding maintenance, spending a bit of time at maintenance, learning what that actually looks like for you. And then I've said in some of those recent episodes, once we've done that, like if you go through the process of really working out where your maintenance intake is, we always want to remember that maintenance is essentially just how much energy my body needs. I'm giving my body the energy that it needs for all the shit that I ask it to do. I'm not gonna give it too much. I don't want it to store excess energy, I don't want to gain weight, but I also don't want to underfuel it because I don't want to lose weight, I don't want to be underfueling, and I want to make sure I'm giving my body the energy that it needs. So we don't want to have a restricted amount of energy coming in, right? So that is maintenance. And coming back to what I was saying, once we've gone through a process of learning what that looks like for ourselves, I've said in those recent episodes, and in that most recent episode we did about having that controlled flexibility at maintenance, I was saying in there, if you realize, let's say for example, that your maintenance intake is around 2,500 calories. And like always, guys, this will be a little bit different from person to person. But if you go through this process and you learn where your maintenance intake is, let's use the example of it being 2,500 calories. We know that our energy expenditure is going to be a little bit different from day to day, maybe from week to week. So we know this is always gonna be a bit of a range. We don't have to hit an exact number every day. And if you don't understand that or you want to know more about that, I would definitely go back about two or three weeks on the pod and look for that episode. It is called something like controlled flexibility at maintenance or something like that, because I really broke this down in that episode. But in short, if we know roughly where the maintenance intake is, then we can have a little bit of a buffer around that number and just let ourselves fall into that nice comfortable range. So if we've gone through that process and we've learned that our personal maintenance intake was 2,500 calz, you might let yourself just fall between like 2,300 and 2,700 every day. So you might have some days where you do a bit more or you're a bit hungrier and you want to aim for that slightly higher amount. You might have other days where the hunger's just not there, we don't do as much. Maybe we're just busy and we're like, shit, I forgot to have that snack, whatever it is, and you realize that you've come in around like two, three or two, four. Like I said in that last episode, if we're doing this all the time and just falling comfortably in that range, that leaves us with a nice average overall, and we're coming in nice and close to the overall position that we want to be in and that we need to be in to maintain and hang where we want to hang. So that is one way that we can navigate hanging at maintenance and spending a long time there. And I've said in some of these recent episodes, I kind of view this as like our home base or our foundation, like the place that we can just hang out at all the time. If we know where our maintenance intake is, we can just hang here whenever we want to. And then if we ever want to go back to a deficit, we can. If we ever want to go into a surplus, we can. If we want to focus on a particular sport or an event or a goal, we can. If we want to go off on a holiday and eat whatever the hell we want, we can. And then we can always come back here and know, like, this is roughly where my maintenance is, this is what it has to look like, this is where I hang. And that just keeps me in this position of feeling good. And it's also quite enjoyable, quite flexible, quite sustainable. So that is why I've been talking about this every second week for the last few months and also for the last few years, right? Because it's awesome. But I have said in those recent episodes as well, there are so many ways we can implement the maintenance intake. If we go through that process of being quite strict with it or just being quite on point with it to actually see how our body responds to different intakes and learn what our maintenance intake is. Once you know that, again, let's use the example of finding out that your maintenance intake is around 2,500. You've got the option to be quite strict with your tracking and say, I'm gonna eat pretty close to 2,500 cows every day. If I enjoy that, if I'm someone who eats the same thing most of the time and is pretty consistent and doesn't mix it up too much, that's actually pretty easy. So you might like to do it that way, and that might really appeal to you. We've then obviously got that other option, like I just said, of putting a bit of a buffer on that number. So letting yourself come in a little bit under it some days, a little bit over it some days, but knowing that your average intake is coming in really close to that number. We can also do a similar thing like that with having intentional higher and low days. So you might look at your week and say, I've got a few really big training sessions, so I'm gonna make those days a little bit higher, I'm gonna make my rest days a little bit lower. Some people like to make their weekends a bit higher and their weekdays a bit lower. You might just look at your week and go, I've got an event this week, so it's gonna be a higher day, and then I'm gonna have some slightly lower days around that. There are so many ways we can navigate that. And another way we can navigate it is exactly like this client said of just reducing the strictness and or the frequency of our tracking. So this particular client is in a great position to do this, and I can think of hundreds of girls that I'm either working with right now or have worked with over the years that are in a great position to do this as well. Because really what we want to think about here, and I think this almost can just start to happen at times where you've been tracking your food for a while, you understand calories, you do eat fairly consistent foods on a normal day, and you just kind of get to that point where you're like, I don't need to log this. I I just know it. Like, I just know it. And this can look so different. This can be someone like completely moving away from tracking their food. This can be someone just tracking some things just to like roughly keep an eye on it. Sometimes you might bring in new foods or new meals, so you want to track those and see how they add up. Another really cool thing people can do, this is something I often advise clients to do or talk to them about doing, is if you eat really similar things day to day, like it's really common for people to have one or two breakfasts that they rotate through, or maybe a couple more, but a few breakfasts that you rotate for you, a few lunches that you rotate through, and then maybe you mix up your dinners a little bit because you eat with your partner or your family or whatever. So a really cool thing people can do is track most of the day and essentially just leave like a bit of a gap for dinner. And if we think about that example I said before, where you might know that your maintenance intake is around 2,500. So you might plan all of your meals for the day besides dinner and have all of those other meals and foods come to a total of like 18 or 1900. And then you can essentially just know I've got like 600 calories to spend on dinner. And then if we even tie that back to having a bit of a buffer on your day, you don't even have to track that dinner too closely or think about that dinner too much at all. Because we could tie this back to allowing yourself to have the buffer. And it might mean that like you do that and you have a dinner that's around 400 cal, and then your day comes in at 2300 overall. And then on the flip side, you might sometimes have a dinner that is like six or seven hundred cals, so your day comes in at like 26 or 2700 cals. But again, over time, you're consistently doing this. So you're consistently falling in that range that you need to fall into to stay where you want to stay. And you're almost combining multiple ways and multiple habits of hitting the maintenance intake. And I cannot stress enough, guys, there is no right or wrong with these things. There is absolutely no right or wrong with these. It purely comes down to, in my opinion, what appeals to somebody and their lifestyle and also what we think is best for them and their lifestyle at the time, but then also their goals. And I've said this in so many different ways on the podcast before, but obviously if we think about somebody sitting there going, I have a very strict fat loss goal, I want to get a very clear result, I don't want to waste any time. Like I want to achieve fat loss as efficiently as possible. Well, then I would reverse from there and go, well, you want to structure your days and plan your foods and hit everything as efficiently as possible. You don't want to have buffers, you don't want to have a little bit of trial and error, you don't want to have untracked things and you're not sure how everything adds up. If we want a clear, definite particular result, it makes sense to have a clear, definite, particular plan in place. If we're in a phase like maintenance where it's like, I just want to hang here overall, I want to feel good, I want to fuel my training, but I'm not nitpicking day-to-day numbers or results or anything like that. Well then I don't need to nitpick day-to-day habits. Can we see the difference here and how, like I said, neither is right or wrong. It's just coming down to what suits me and my goals right now and what do I want to do right now. And I think it is the coolest thing ever when people understand that. And I can I can literally picture so many girls I know that either work with me right now or have worked with me in the past, and you're just sitting there going, Yeah, I get that. Like I absolutely get that. That is so cool. That is so awesome. And the coolest thing, and I said this to the client yesterday, I said, like, that's perfect for you right now. She's pretty much just tracking some things and like tracking her main meals, but she's like, you know, I might have an extra little snack, or I might just add something to a meal, and I'm just not like tracking it all perfectly. There's probably just a few hundred cals on some days that aren't tracked. And just for a little bit of context, this client, we have put an intake in place for her around like 21 to 2300 cals. And then when we look at her food tracking at the moment, it's sitting more so around like 1900. But she's saying to me, like Rubes, there's there's definitely a couple of hundred cals that I'm not tracking, but they're just things that I know how they add up. I have the same portion nearly every day. I just literally cannot be bothered logging it in my app. And again, that is just such a cool position to be. And the fact that she feels fine doing that, she communicates it to me. I look at everything as a whole, like all of her other data, and then the fact that she's saying that. And I'm like, awesome. That's just all adding up in a way that's leaving you where we want you to be right now. Because we want you to be coming in in those low 2000s, looking at all the stuff that you are tracking, and then the stuff that you've mentioned you're not tracking. It's all adding up exactly how we want it to, and you are maintaining, and this is a really important thing for people to clock. If we have certain habits and things in place that genuinely work for us and we are getting the result that we want, that is awesome. To me, that's like if it ain't broke, don't fix it. On the flip side, and this is something I definitely wanted to talk about today. If we're doing things a certain way and we've got certain habits in place, and we start to detect, like, hey, I might actually kind of be moving in a direction I don't want to go, guess what? You can change it. Funny that funny hell, if the things that you're doing aren't leading to the result that you want, you can start to do different things. And this is where I say, like, this is the coolest position to be in, because when you understand that, you're happy to kind of go through that process. And what I mean here is, let's say you do like loosen off your tracking a little bit and you're just being a bit more mindful, you're having a bit more flexibility, and you've got good consistency overall, but you're not monitoring things too closely. You might do this for a few months and be like, yeah, I'm feeling good, life's good, happy days. And then you might start to get to a point after a few months where you're like, maybe I have like gained a little bit of weight that I didn't want to gain, or maybe I'm just feeling a little bit fluffy or a little bit bloated or a little bit this or that or whatever. Usually it's just in our head, but also like it can be physically happening as well. Like we can have a bit of weight gain or something going on. And what I'm talking about here is like a couple of kilos, right? And if we do this and then we turn around and we go, oh yeah, like I have put on a couple of kilos. First of all, you might be like, yeah, I've put on a couple of kilos and I don't care. Happy days. I'll keep doing what I'm doing. Again, come back to what I was just saying. If the actions that I'm implementing are getting a certain result and I'm happy with that result, happy days. If I'm not, I can just look at that and go, okay, I've been a bit chilled for a few months, decided to put on a couple of kilos, not too keen on putting on any more. Maybe I want to get some of those off. So I'm just going to change things a little bit. I'm just going to tighten that tracking up a little bit. I'm going to have a little bit less flexibility or a little less buffers, a little less wiggle room for a while. We can be as chill as we want at certain times or as strict as we want at other times. And when we really understand this stuff and feel like we're in control of it, we can just step back and make those decisions. Instead of being like, oh my God, I've put on a few kilos. I don't know what to do about it. It's like, no, I actually do know what to do about it. And then I can ask myself, but do I actually want to do it? And that's what I was saying before. Like, when you really feel in control of this stuff and you're in just a good place with managing it, sometimes we do get to a point where you're like, oh, I've put on a couple of kilos, but also like, who cares? I might get them off one day, I might not. Can't be bothered getting them off right now. Don't want to be super strict right now. And then on the flip side, you might come around to a time where you're like, yep, okay, cool. I do want to tighten things up, want to be a bit more strict, want to lean up for summer, holiday, whatever it is. But my real point here, and the thing I really want to get across here is we can hang at maintenance in a lot of different ways, like what we've just spoken about today and over the last few weeks. And you can play around with those different ways at different times. And it's so funny because people can often have this thing in their head of like thinking that they need to hit that really particular number, really certain intake need to be really strict, which you absolutely can if you want to. But also when we start to talk about like give yourself a bit of wiggle room, have a bit of a buffer, look at the average overall, etc. People do this for a while and then they come back to me and they go, Oh my god, Rubes, you won't believe it, but like I maintained. And I'm like, no, I will believe it. Because I've been trying to explain this to you for years. You didn't believe it. And now you do because you've seen it for yourself. So that's awesome. And that's just a really cool thing to understand is like we don't have to strictly track everything and hit a certain number. It's not like the only way that we can maintain our weight is to perfectly hit a particular maintenance intake every day. Like I always say, we want to fall into that range consistently over time to keep us where we want to be. And then coming back to that other point, if you play around with different ways of doing that and you realize after a while, like, oh, maybe I haven't maintained, I have either lost weight or gained weight or whatever. Those are the two other options, really. Um, but if you find yourself in that position, first of all, a big thing to point out is you're not gonna put on eight kilos before you realize that, or you're not gonna lose eight kilos before you realize that. Like usually we put on two kilos, give or take, and then we're like, oh, okay, maybe I've started to move away from maintenance. And then all we have to do is look at our current habits and go, well, what do I need to change a little bit? What do I need to tighten up? What do I need to keep my eye on? Because right now, what I'm doing is just starting to result in that gradual bit of weight gain. If I don't want that, I just need to tweak that habit a little bit. And again, very cool to have the knowledge and understanding of all of this instead of, like I said before, we see other people that are like, oh my god, I've put on two kilos and I don't know what to do about it. Very, very different when someone's like, yeah, actually, I do know what to do about it. And then again, I feel like we're talking in circles now. You can just be like, So, do I actually want to do it? Yes, I do. Awesome. Let's tweak things, let's change things a little bit. Or if I don't, happy days, I'll walk around with an extra two kilos on me. So I feel like that's starting to get into a whole different topic. But just very cool if I bring it back to this client. Like I said, she has been doing this for a while, and we are seeing her maintain, and this is exactly what I said to her, you're in a real sweet spot right now where you're tracking things enough in a way that suits you, but then you're having a bit of flexibility and untrack things in a way that also suits you, and then that is leaving you in the position that you want to be in. So it is literally a case of it ain't broke, you don't need to fix it. And then I said to her, like always, you know, if we get to the end of the hockey season and you do want to do a bit of a deficit or something, well, guess what? We'll just tighten up that tracking a little bit, we'll move you back into the deficit and we'll get that moving. Happy days. And then if we were to do that for a couple of months or whatever, we decide, and then when we're done with that, we can come straight back here where we are right now because we know that this is a sweet spot for you and we know that you maintain here, which is awesome. And so I just think this is a cool thing to think about and to just have the awareness of. Because, like I keep saying, and I want to say it again right now, when we're in this position, we can choose. We can choose, am I tracking my food? Am I not? Am I tracking it really strictly? Am I not? Am I doing high days, low days? Am I doing that intentionally? Am I just letting that play out throughout the week? And we can always just think about those things and then also think about our actual goals and the things that we want to get out of our nutrition and our training at that time, and then just really settle into the sweet spot of going, well, I know I want to achieve XYZ. Maybe it's just maintenance and chilling. Maybe I want to increase my strength, increase my lifts, build my shape, etc. Maybe I do want to actually do the surplus. Maybe I want to get ready for an event. Like, possibilities are endless, but really looking at like, what do I want to achieve? What am I willing to do and what am I not willing to do right now? How does that line up with what I want to achieve? And how do I find the sweet spot between all of it that it's like gonna keep me in the position I want to be in or move me toward the position I want to be in? Is flexible, enjoyable, sustainable for the most part. And I feel like I'm in control of all of it. Anytime I want to change those goals or change those habits, I can. That is the real juice. That is the real sweet spot. Anytime I want to work towards a specific goal or change a specific habit, I can. I feel like I can, and I feel confident in the fact that I can. I think that's actually all for me today. A little bit of a shorter episode. I feel like everything we just said, we've already said a million times, but just cool to look at it for this client. And I just felt like with all the combos we've had recently, this was just like a little bit of a missing piece or like a final piece of that combo. But also, I'm sure I'll probably think of another one and we'll talk about it again soon. But in the meantime, that is all for me now. I will be back next week.