I Tracked Everything I Ate For 8 Weeks — Here’s What I learned
For the last 8 weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a low calorie diet in order to burn body fat and let’s be honest… get shredded for summer 💪.
After my first fat loss challenge (back in 2012) literally ended in tears on the first day, I was a little nervous to see whether I could pull this off.
In hindsight, I was doing it all wrong the first time.
I meal prepped a whole week of tasteless Chicken and Broccoli, crammed them in the freezer and the next day, chowed down on a mix of plain foods and condensation — yuck!
To be fair, the tears were more to do with other anxieties that I was feeling at the time and I wasn’t really up for the challenge of the diet back then.
This time however, I was armed with a better understanding of what was required and was in the perfect position (lifestyle-wise) to go on a calorie controlled diet.
In my upcoming video, I will talk more specifically about fat loss - including my motivations for losing weight, the journey over the 8 weeks and my post-diet reflections - but for this article, I will be talking about macronutrients, calories and what we might be surprised to learn about the food we eat on a daily basis.
Let’s start with my particular macro-nutrient goals for this diet.
My Macros
Losing weight may be difficult for some but the equation is simple.
Weight Loss = Total Calories burned - Total Calories Consumed
This means that my calorie goal needed to be lower than what I expend on a daily basis.
Using my scan results and my own estimation of my activity level, the gym scanner estimated my TEE (Total Energy Expenditure) to be around 2,700 calories per day.
Therefore, my goal for the challenge was to consume no more than 2,200 calories per day (a 500 calorie deficit).
The next step was to break this down into macro nutrients.
For this, there are a number of calculators online and various ratios that experts suggest but in the end, I used Bodybuilding.com’s Macro Calculator and came up with the following daily recommendations:
216g of Carbohydrates, 216g of Protein and 48g of Fat (per day)
This comes out to about 2,160 calories per day.
Over the next 8 weeks, I managed to stay under that number for 53 out of the 56 days, with the biggest blow-out being 2,299 calories (a blow out of just 139 calories).
Here’s what I learned…
1. It’s very easy to over-eat fat
Before this diet, sugar was my enemy #1 but when I focused on macro-nutrients, I realised a gram of sugar is just a gram of carbohydrate.
When it comes to calorie-controlled diets, the scariest macro-nutrients of all is fat and here’s why:
A gram of carbohydrate equates to 4 calories, as does a gram of protein.
A gram of fat however, equates to 9 calories! That’s more than double the amount per gram of the other two!
Not only is fat more calorie dense per gram but it’s comes in dense forms.
Take for instance this meme which shows the difference between two similarly sizes portions of peanut butter on toast.
As you can see, there’s not much of a visual difference between the two but the calorie difference is huge.
That’s why you need to be especially meticulous when counting the weight of any fatty ingredient.
Before this diet, I would always cook with oil and I wouldn’t even use a tablespoon to measure. Instead, I’d just turn the bottle over and pour what I thought looked like a good amount.
Doing this on a calorie-controlled diet however is super risky!
Instead, during the 8 weeks, I would use a measuring cup to measure out no more than 15ml at a time.
As you can see from the video above, there is a very slight difference between 10ml and 15ml but an extra 5ml adds an additional 51 calories to the dish.
2. Eating out is hard
Apart from being constantly hungry on this diet, the number 1 thing that made this 8 week diet unsustainable was just how little the amount of options were for eating out.
The reason for this is two fold
- Very few restaurants publish detailed nutritional info, and
- Out of the ones that do, the meals are usually high in fat
I remember when I had a meeting at work and my manager was ordering pizzas.
I went on the website for the pizza restaurant and checked the macros.
For the vast majority of the pizzas, the fat content for a single pizza was way higher than my measly 48g allowance.
Then I saw the ‘Cheese Lovers’ pizza…
Inside the pizza was 114g of fat (more than double my daily allowance) with a total caloric content of over 2,300! That’s more than my daily allowance of calories in one meal.
This is a perfect example of how the restaurants which are most likely to publish their nutritional information are also the ones with worst macros.
The exception to this was a restaurant I found called Nutrition Station.
Other than Nutrition Station - of which the kitchen closed at 4pm daily - the alternatives were all fast food restaurants.
And, like Pizza Hut, it was hard to find low-fat options when eating at these restaurants.
3. ‘Healthy’ and Low Calorie aren’t always the same
‘Healthy’ of course, is a somewhat subjective term.
Does ‘healthy’ mean high in vitamins and minerals? Does it mean high in protein?
I’ll let you decide.
Regardless, healthy and low calorie aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Take for example everyone’s beloved fruit, the Avocado.
An Avocado is said to be very nutritious but it’s also high in fat with an estimated 14g of fat content according to My Fitness Pal.
As fat is hard to avoid in a regular diet, I definitely shied away from any food that contained predominantly fat, making sure to limit my intake of avocado and nuts.
Both are full of ‘good fats’ but when you only have 48g a day to work with, it often wasn’t worth the risk.
4. Plant-based is carb-based
Earlier in the year, I experimented with Veganism and so, I was curious to see how some of my favourite ‘high protein’ vegan meals stacked up against my macros.
Unfortunately for me, despite these recipes being promoted as high-protein, the macros came out as quite carb-heavy.
I went to Google to search for high-protein plant-based ingredients and found foods like Lentils, Chickpeas and Hemp Seeds.
If you check the macros of these however, you’ll find that Hemp Seeds have more fat than protein, Lentils contain more carbs than they do protein and Chickpeas also contain way more carbohydrates than they do protein.
These plant-based foods may be higher in protein than other plants but unlike lean meat or fish, they come with a higher proportion of the other macronutrients.
5. That which gets measured gets managed
I’m not sure where this quote comes from but I think it’s the best way to sum up my final point which is that knowledge is power when it comes to calories and macro nutrients.
Studies have shown that most humans are poor at estimating their calorie consumption and expenditure and with only 8 weeks to achieve my body composition goal, I did not want to take any chances.
As you saw from the example with the peanut butter on toast, it very easy to accidentally allow additional calories to sneak into your diet and when this is compounded over multiple meals, it becomes almost impossible to track your calories.
The exception is if you’ve tracked in the past and are recreating meals you have already calculated.
For normal people like myself (and probably you as well), it’s simply impossible to accurately measure calorie consumption without counting.
That’s why I did not consume anything (besides limes in my soda water) that I couldn’t measure and add to my food diary.
Everything I consumed in the 8 weeks was either a raw ingredient that I measured to the gram or a meal / snack that was packaged with the nutritional info on the label.
Seriously — Even in social situations, I refused to eat at restaurants and did not drink a sip of alcohol for 8 weeks.
Is this sustainable?
At this point, you’re probably thinking:
“That’s ridiculous! How is that sustainable?”
And my answer is that it isn’t.
Tracking absolutely everything is a major inconvenience and I had to give up a lot of my favourite foods to do so but the lessons I learned (I felt) were valuable and I would recommend anyone to take a short period - whether it be for a whole week or intermittently over the course of a month - to take a closer look at the macro nutrient content of the food they consume.
Unlike me, you don’t have to track everything for 56 days straight but how about you read the label the next time you pick up a packaged food or eat at McDonalds?
You might be surprised by what you find.
Until next time,
Chris
