Do you have to track your macros forever in order to be lean and healthy and keep your results? No. That's long story short. That was the episode. See you next time. No, all joking aside, look, tracking macros can be life-changing, and I'm going to explain why. Okay, I want you to be a little open-minded here. I know there's a lot of pushback on tracking, and I'll tell you this. The many, many transformations and amazing client stories and testimonials you will see on my Instagram feed and have been, these are all people who reach their goals through macro tracking largely. With sometimes we build a meal plan, they kind of follow that for a little bit, but it becomes my goal to ultimately put you in control, okay? In case you're watching, yes, we are in a different setting right now. I started working from a co-working space and recording this on Thursday evening today. It's going to go up right away. And then what we're going to do is next week we will have a podcast on Wednesday, and then we go back to our normal schedule, okay, for every Monday as usual. But I promise you weekly episodes, so here we are. Okay, so tracking macros. And, look, I want you to understand tracking. Coaching is not tracking, okay? Tracking macros is a tool. Coaching is the conversation. It's the human connection. It's the support, the accountability. It's the tough love when you need it. It's the support if you need that shoulder, okay? It's proactively working through something together. Communication is so, so key, okay? So if you coach with me, now you're not just going to get a meal plan or just a set of macros and maybe a workout program and there's some recipes, that is not coaching. That is a program you can create yourself with AI these days, and it would work totally fine if you are already consistent with your habits. You understand nutrition at a fundamental level, and that is what I wanted to start with. A lot of people come in not knowing what to eat or how much you eat. And the same thing might go for you. You might have tried to lose the same 5, 10, 15 kilos over the last 5, 10, 20 years. Look, I've had clients in their late 50s, moving in the 60s who told me, look, I've basically been trying to diet for like 20, 30 years. It's a very common thing. If you're listening to this in your 30s, well, you're lucky. We got lots of time. If you're listening in your 40s, it's likely been a decade journey already, if not longer, okay? If currently right now you don't understand nutrition, you don't know what to eat, you don't really have a grip on your food, I understand you want to start with the flexibility. I understand that you want to have all the freedom in life, and I understand that you just want to do this without thinking about it too much, and I totally understand that you don't want to be obsessed about numbers and all that, 100%. But if right now you don't understand nutrition, tracking macros can be an incredible tool. I was talking about this earlier with a client on a coaching call, and she said, well, if I would have done this maybe years and years and years ago, my mindset would have been different, and I feel like maybe my perfectionist mindset would have gotten me in a place where I took it too far. And then I told her, hey, look, even then, I would have caught it because I listen to my clients, I read what they say, and I can pick it up really well. And if that's the case, I'm going to push my clients not to track. And this is not kind of like, oh, you're going too far now. No, we already do this. This is part of the Odyssey. This is part of my program. We will have extended periods of time with tracking. Okay, I'm going to teach you. And this is a cool thing. You can be put off by something just because it's called macro tracking or tracking your food, or because you have this self-limiting belief that it's too obsessive. This is not. Gambling isn't bad. Inherently, it's people taking gambling too far. Okay. I use this example too for my client. I said, hey, this is a silly example. It's one of those where, hey, a screwdriver can be used to repair something, but also to kill someone. It's maybe an extreme example, but you get the point. Okay. Tracking isn't obsessive. Tracking is just a tool. Look, if you have financial issues, maybe you're in debt or maybe you have a spending problem and you're always chasing bills, would it be obsessive to look at your bank statement and just put things on paper, kind of say, hey, what's coming in? What's going out? Where could we maybe budget? Boom. Hey, where can we change our spending habits? It's the exact same with food, with tracking macros, what you understand, the data, you can use it. Not only to lose the 5, 10, 20 plus kilos that you've been chasing for over a decade now, right, but also to finally keep it. And most importantly, to learn how much your body truly needs because that's something that my clients tell me all the time. They say, wow, like, I had no idea that I needed this much food. And look, when I say this much, it's really just enough food. But they are so conditioned from years and years of magazines that tell you to be skinny, from years and years of dieting, you're so conditioned that you should be on this diet all the time. All you know is eating less and less and less while you ramp up your cardio, you're trying to lift weights, you're already at the gym working hard, but you're not progressing. Like, guess why that is? It's because of the food, okay? That's why we start with tracking. Initially, it's not even, hey, we're going to start fat loss right away in day one. No, look, first, we're going to start with what I call the food diary. Why do I do a food diary with my clients instead of just jumping in, hey, day one, let's fucking go? Well, me seeing how you currently eat before you really start to make changes, it's a very valuable lesson for me. Look, understand too, coaching is not just signing up and getting some cookie cutter meal plan, whatever everyone else gets, the same recipes. Coaching is me understanding you as a human being, as an individual. Coaching is going through the initial weeks and months to really get to know each other, okay? You think, and this is funny too, you think I'm the same coach to each and every one of my clients. Now, I'm still me, obviously, I'm still going to be me, I'm still going to be true to who I am, I'm not going to start acting. But as a coach, you need to be a chameleon of some sorts, okay? Different people will respond to different kind of feedback, will struggle with different things. Some need a lot more support and someone to talk to. Other people do really well with tough love and everything in between, okay? And if there's one thing that does go for every single one of my clients is that stuff is imperfect, we make mistakes, we learn, and we work through it. But we start with our food diary so I can see, okay, so your first week, hey, look, don't make any changes yet. What I want you to do is just eat normal first and then we will take it from there. Oh, so it looks like you're eating very little protein, fiber is pretty much non-existent because you're doing the protein products all the time when you do get some and there's no fruits and veggies. Okay, now we can change that. Let's now start with what you've been doing and I'll start to make some changes. This also tells me a lot about your week versus weekend. Plus, it tells me, hey, do you come in under eating? Do you come in inconsistent, a combination of? And then we start from there. I set your first targets. We figure out, hey, what's expected to be enough for what your body truly needs right now. And look, you just told me on the call that you had a history of 10, 15 years of trying to diet. You've been doing all these different diets, low carb, keto, and you name it, fasting. You've done the supplements. You've done all of that, which, by the way, that was me in 2012, so I get it, right? But you've done all this stuff. You just told me that all you've been trying to do is a diet. Now, that means that I'm not going to dive into a diet with you. I first want to see how the body responds to what we're going to do. Where have you been at? What does your body truly need right now? Are you pretty close? We're going to jump right there. Expect the maintenance. Bump up your protein. Bring fiber in. Get consistent. Get your body feeling really good. Balanced meals, so your blood sugar stays stable, protein, carbs, and fats in every meal with your colors, right? Fruits and vegetables. Let's start there. Then we can start to tweak, okay? Then, over the first couple weeks, we're going to see how the body responds, okay? We're going to make these gradual changes so that it's doable for you. You can start to build habits. And look, for some people, it might be protein. For others, it might be, hey, you're not eating a single fruit or vegetable or neither. Then, let's just focus on some basics there. Hey, I see that you actually do pretty well, but that weekend, that's where really, like, you know, no protein, a lot more fats, and okay, let's fix that. That's why we start with this. It's objective data, just how you would look at your bank statement. Oh, wow, I've been really spending a lot on whatever, right? And I had to call myself out, too. I was going to cafes a lot, and I still like to go to cafes, but I would spend quite a bit of money on coffee. And then, sometimes, I'll get, like, a cinnamon roll and all that. And that's my weekly treat. I'll still have one cinnamon bun every week. And that's something that I can include because my diet is whole food-based. It's pretty much 90% of my calories are whole food-based, which allows me to, hey, I'll have some flexible stuff every now and then. And it's totally cool, okay? But we start there, we start tracking, we see, hey, your food diary, what do we expect your body to need? Boom, let's go there. Now, let's imagine you come in with a food diary that's 1,200 calories that you truly need because you're doing your cardio, you're doing your weight sessions, you're active, you hit 10,000 steps. Well, if that's the case, and we're supposed to be at 2,200 calories, which is a very normal maintenance calorie-ish range for most active women, we're not going to jump there. That's almost, like, twice as much food. So, let's go halfway, see how the body responds. Oh, actually, you start to lose some weight. You know what? Let's bring food up a little bit more. You know what? Let's bring it up a little bit more. Oh, hang on. All of a sudden, we feel like we're eating more than ever. Now, we're losing weight. There's two ways we can go here, okay? Depending on the client, and again, this depends on the person. I can't even promise people this as we start. I need to see how the body responds, okay? And I also need to see how honest they have been with me because I'm going to find really quickly, whether it's just an inconsistency thing, whether you've truly been under-eating and your metabolism has adapted to a point where we got to bring it up first or both. Usually, it's inconsistency, and we can fix that really quickly. If it's a truly adapted metabolism, which is normal by the way, you don't just have a slow metabolism. We can fix that. But then we need to do some other work. Now, also, and this is why, look, there's not one way we do things. In my RESTORE Method, we start where we do because I want to first see where we're currently at, okay? We reveal where you're currently at, the R. We establish a foundation of maintenance calories, or at least close to, and I'm going to monitor how your body responds. We're going to establish a foundation of habits, routines you can stick with, and then, okay, we solve any internal issues potentially. So, for example, if there's gut issues, thyroid, hormonal, we got to work on that first. Your internal health needs to be taken care of first before we go into fat loss. I have a client with ulcerative colitis, and he drastically lowered his calprotectin numbers to a point where the doctors literally told him, like, yo, what are you doing? This is great. Keep going what you're doing. They could not believe him, and they tested it again. It was even lower. It was over, like, 500. He's now, like, a 52, which is a normal level. We're talking a chronic condition, IBD, and he's good now, and he can start coming off of medications. He came in with a fat loss goal, though. So, I explained, hey, look, like, we got to solve these internal issues first so that the food you're eating is actually going to the right place, too. Right? Your gut's inflamed. There's a lot of bloating. He was going to the bathroom, like, 10 times a day sometimes. So, sometimes, look, here's the thing, too. With my phase Solve, it's not all just gut, hormones, thyroid. For many people, that's solely great. But then maybe we got to solve that poor relationship with food. Maybe we got to solve the weekend, you know, cycle to start over on Monday. Maybe we got to solve some mindset issues that we've been struggling with. Okay? Maybe we got to solve stress eating, emotional eating. Boom. When that's taken care of, we transform. That's a T. So, now we're in the first initial part of my RESTORE Method. Now we go into fat loss. Now, guess what? We've learned so much already from tracking because tracking macro shows you what's in the food. Oh, this food is really high in fats. Maybe I've got to moderate that. Oh, this has protein. I understand now. This has carbs but also a really good amount of fiber. These fruits and vegetables give me, right, volume, fiber, micronutrients. We start to understand nutrition at a fundamental level. You will not get that from just trying to start flexible guessing and, like, you need some structure. And that's another point here, okay? Tracking the way we do it is very different compared to other programs because I don't want you to stand in the kitchen scratching your head in front of the fridge thinking about, oh, yeah, I got to hit this protein. You're too late already. What we want to do instead is we plan, and I call this a perfect day, and we also make backup plans these days. But what I want to do here is I want to look at, okay, what do we want to eat? Let's pre-decide, hey, right now, look, we're a little bit inconsistent. That's okay. Most people are when we start. But let's just get consistent first, meaning let's just pick one breakfast, one lunch, one snack. If you are just by yourself or maybe a partner, pick one dinner for now. Or if you have kids and your partner do want to change it up, obviously, because most of my clients are moms, hey, let's set up a more, like, a flexible, hey, like, repeat your go-to breakfast, lunch, and snack. Dinner, I'm going to show you how to easily macro that without feeling like a weirdo at the kitchen table, okay? But we put these things into rotation. We say, hey, your breakfast, boom, repeat. Literally, all you got to do. There's great functions in the app that we use, Cronometer, which syncs with our own coaching app. But we can either use, like, the repeat items function, save recipes, copy complete days of tracking, copy certain meals and foods. So we make it so, hey, that meal is taken care of, boom, just repeat that for a little bit, just copy and paste. Lunch, same thing. Snack, same thing. And all of a sudden, three quarters of your day is taken care of. You do not even have to think about it anymore. You're like, oh, I kind of know now. And now, once you're consistent, now we start layering different foods and options. Now I'm going to show you, hey, actually, you know what? Here, you've been having chicken. We can also swap it with a salmon, with a cod. We can swap it with a ground beef. Hey, you know, for this carb here, you're doing, currently, you're doing white rice. Let's swap that for quinoa so you have more fiber because your fiber is low. Let's maybe do sweet potatoes, regular potatoes. So you really pick whatever because we have these food lists that now teach you, hey, I know now what toggles I want to pull. Protein needs to go up. I understand these foods get my protein higher. Okay, actually, you know what? I want to change it up. I like more variety. Perfect. We can change up and rotate our fruits and vegetables. We can have all these different healthy fats, different kinds of nuts, different kinds of seeds, avocado, extra virgin olive oil. Okay? And all of a sudden, nutrition starts to click. We understand the building blocks. And you can still do fancy recipes and make it more complicated, okay, with a whole bunch of different ingredients. But once you start to understand what a protein is, what a carb is, what a fat is, and obviously your fruits and vegetables, why we should have that. It's going to keep you full. Now we have a balanced meal, which, by the way, also keeps your blood sugar stable. The cravings are gone. Boom. Oh, all of a sudden, my energy is better. My brain fog is gone. I'm not hungry all the time anymore. I don't binge in the evening every single time I come back from home, from work. My digestion is better. I'm not bloated anymore. Oh, actually, you know, my PMS symptoms are not too bad anymore. That's what I get all the time from my clients. Oh, shit. Now we start to feel how good this, you know, this healthy eating is for my body. Perfect. Now, let's say we're going to transform. We go for fat loss, okay? We're going to do it on as many calories as possible so that I can have you eat as much food as possible while still losing the body fat at the rate that I want to see as your coach. So we control that phase. And hey, look, if there's going to be a wedding, Christmas coming up, right? Obviously, when people come in now and they start, we might still do some fat loss, but we're going to have a diet break over Christmas for sure. No one is dieting through Christmas. You're not going to track your food due to Christmas, okay? That's a different season. But it's the same for evening out with the girls. It's the same for a birthday, a little trip, right? A client of mine just went on a trip to London and did just fine. No tracking whatsoever. And that was a decision we made. So even throughout this whole process, going back to, do I have to track everything? Weigh in my... Like, yeah, when you're at home, weigh your food, track it, and learn from it. This is not going to build you the habits that will translate into you doing it without tracking. That's one of the reasons why we do this. At least understanding what's in certain foods. Now, ideally, we keep tracking for the most part during fat loss. Now, we go into our reverse dieting process. Similar to how in the beginning, we figured out how much your body truly needs. Now, we're going to bring you up, okay? We're going to basically jump halfway between where we ended our fat loss phase into, you know, like between that and your maintenance, or expected at least. Halfway, maybe a little bit on the higher end, and we're going to just sneak your food up so you can get used to it, okay? Your body can get used to it. And you still have a little bit of accountability to where you're not like this mindset of, well, I'm done now, you know? Nay, we're going to take it slow. We're going to say, hey, you know, step by step, bring food up. I want you to be as consistent as possible because, look, my clients usually don't come in with a weight loss problem. They've never kept it off. And that's why we do the reverse diet, and it fucking works the absolute best with tracking. I would even argue that without it, it's going to be a really big mess. Now, here's the cool part. Now, we've achieved our fat loss goal. You've lost 5 kilos. You've lost 10 kilos. You've lost 15 kilos. But you want to keep it off. That's what you told me initially that you had a hard time with. Okay, cool. Then now you're going to have to do the work to keep the body fat off as much as sometimes we're like, oh, you know, I'm done. No, we're not done yet. I tell my clients, look, this was just us getting to this point. Now we get to the real work. So that accountability is huge. The eating more part is scary. I talk about it all the time. We'll talk about it again soon, okay? But we go through that reverse diet, go back to maintenance, similar to how we did that at the beginning. Now we can establish your current maintenance. Now I'm going to walk you off of tracking. We're going to usually do the step-by-step, 7, 5, 4, whatever. Or maybe we go from 7 days to 4, to 2, 3, to no tracking, kind of depends on the person. And then we just monitor. Because once you've achieved maintenance calories with tracking, now you're at this lower body weight. Let's call it minus 10 kilos, whatever. You're at this lower body weight. We bring you back up. Now we understand, okay, now we can stay here. And this is where I'm going to walk you off of tracking. Because now you have a certain amount of food on your plate. You're already consistent. You understand fundamentally how nutrition works. So you can even make swaps. And by the way, no, we don't stick with one option for breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner. We say, start there. Get consistent first. Now layer in different options. Come up with your second options, your third, however many you would like. But consistency comes first. That builds the habits. Now once we're consistent, we're good, okay? We're at maintenance. I see that you're doing well. We're nice and stable. We're going to stop tracking. And that tracking becomes a tool you can go back to if you would like to for a fat loss phase, for reverse diet, for a muscle building season where the tracking is equally important because with muscle gain, which we'll do another episode on, with muscle gain, you also don't want to go too fast, if that makes sense, okay? Because then you're going to gain additional body fat, which we don't want. But now we are at maintenance. Now we have a visual. We actually see on our plates what our serving sizes look like, which now means that you have more familiarity with what you actually should be eating right now. Now what we're going to do is just pay attention to that. Keep your consistent meals. Keep your go-to meals and then make sure to be aware of, hey, what's on my plate? Hey, I actually can pretty much do this with just my plate method because I understand my portions now. I've learned from tracking. I got the results. I maintain the results. I now have a tool for life that I can apply when I want to. It's not obsessive, my definition, because you can choose not to do it sometimes. You can choose the eyeball. The weighing your food part gets you more familiar with, hey, how much is 100 grams of chicken? How much is 150 grams of sweet potatoes or 200? Boom. Okay, now it's a lot easier. Okay? That is why we track. It is not obsessive unless you make it obsessive. It is a tool that is absolutely required, in my opinion. If you're currently struggling with, I don't know what to eat, how much, et cetera. It is cool to do your recipes. It is great to do a meal plan. But a meal plan is never going to teach you fully how to build it yourself. Recipes never allow you to fully understand what's in this food and why. And hey, there's this recipe, but I just know the recipe. Hey, there's this meal plan, but I just know the meal plan. I don't know how to make tweaks. I don't know what other meals I could have. Am I allowed to have this food? Am I allowed to have this food? What about this? What about if I can't follow the meal plan? Those are those issues. And especially if you think that just the plate method is going to do it for you, for your fat loss goals, or even like intuitive eating, which could be a whole other side rant, because intuitive eating is not a tool for fat loss, okay? It's what we work towards. But is it truly intuitive, or have we just learned and built the habits from our tracking? That is the end goal. You need to go through this whole process if you coach with me, and I'm going to show you how to track your food within five minutes. And once something takes only five minutes out of your day, and it gives you more freedom, because my clients tell me this, they say, I like the tracking because it allows me to fill in it. You have all the freedom in the world. I'm still going to review your food log. I'm still going to give you feedback. I'm still going to have you structure your day. I'm still going to tweak it with you. But once you have the tool and understand how to make the changes, you are not stuck to a select few recipes in whatever, in quotes, nutrition coaching app. You're not stuck to a meal plan. You can build a meal plan yourself, and that is the ultimate goal. Plus, you have the best tool for fat loss, for muscle gain, for reverse dieting, for establishing maintenance, if you're unsure about that. And that is that. Obviously, if you ever coach with me, Cronometer, we know it. My clients, and I'm currently actually expanding on this. I'm currently adding more and more tutorials on like, hey, getting familiar with Cronometer, because there's so many functions in there. Some people don't even know you can use the AI scan function when, for example, you go to a restaurant. Hey, just a quick AI. Just boom, right? That's it. Takes two seconds. Okay. Is it perfect? No. Does it still give you some data to maybe at least look at? Yeah, cool. And of course, most of the time with restaurant meals and all that, it kind of depends on the season. But I'm going to tell them, hey, this Saturday, take Saturday off of tracking. See how we do. And then there, there's a great learning moment because for some people, it's just great. It's awesome. They make good choices. They still make progress or maintain, which that's the goal. And then we're like, hey, you know what? Let's do more of this. Other times, it's like, well, we didn't track, but we kind of went off. Okay. We went off the rails. Okay. So let's dive deeper there. That's where the coaching comes in. Hey, let's have this conversation. What was the first domino here? Was it the environment, peer pressure, something else? You didn't want to say no, even though you actually didn't want the food. Okay. And then we have a conversation around this. We reflect. We then make a new plan for the next weekend, because usually every weekend would do stuff, right? So you're learning there. And that is my last point here. I talked about this with a client. I don't like making Christmas a bigger deal than it deserves to be, because it really isn't. We're talking a few days. All throughout the year, you're going to weddings, birthdays, you name it. And also there, we're going to have a different setting where you're not cooking the meal. You're not deciding every single meal or food that you're eating. Okay. So how do we handle those situations? How can we build habits that translate there? And how can we be flexible and just be okay with it, but also without it being all or nothing to where you go so off the rails every time there's a social setting that your whole week of work has been undone? Because you think that, well, it's Saturday and now I can have the candy and all that. And then you blow up three, 4,000 calories. I've seen it, right? And then you're frustrated with yourself. You're frustrated with the scale. And then you tell me, well, my scale's not moving. Yeah. Okay. You overdid it over the weekend, even though you said you wanted to be in a fat loss phase. Let's talk about this. And then we work through it and then we fix it. And then we get you to a place to where you can do both. And now all of a sudden people are like, hey, I can actually eat this stuff and it's fine. But it requires planning, right? It requires a little bit of, hey, we got to practice moderation in certain settings. We also got to understand that sometimes, right? We have to say no a little bit more, but it all just depends on the phase we're in. And especially with tracking, there's going to be times where we do it a lot more. There's going to be times where I tell you, hey, we're not going to track it all. And if you tell me that you've been trying to lose the same weight for five years, for 10 years, for 15, 20 years, you have no idea what to eat. You don't know how much to eat. Your workouts are not progressing. You have no energy. You have no sex drive. You have brain fog. You always have cravings. You're always hungry. You always crash every afternoon. If that's been going on for five, 10 plus years, would it be worth it for you to track your food for, let's call it six months? Would six months of learning a tool be worth you finally understanding how to fuel your body properly, get the results, and keep them? I'll leave that one up to you to answer. I'll talk to you soon.