I remember being exposed to the concept of counting macros in early 2015. This new way to track food intake built on previous methods such as keeping a food log or journal and counting points, blocks, or calories. The difference was that macro counting offered a more precise and meaningful way to track for those interested in changing their body composition and improving energy, instead of just influencing the number on the scale.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of counting macros, it means that you count the grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates that you get from food. Protein, fat, and carbohydrates are “macronutrients” because the human body needs a lot of them. In contrast “micronutrients”, which are things like vitamins and minerals, are needed in smaller proportions.

The combination of protein, fat, and carbohydrates that you ingest each day influences the number of calories you eat or the energy you consume. This is because each gram of each macronutrient has a specific caloric value:

• 1 gram of protein = 4 calories

• 1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 calories

• 1 gram of fat = 9 calories

When it comes to influencing body composition, protein helps specifically with the growth and maintenance of muscle. Fat and carbohydrates are energy sources. Each macronutrient has a host of other vital roles within the body beyond just promoting muscle and supplying energy, but I’ll keep it simple for the purpose of this email.

From a body composition perspective, eat too much of a combination of any or all of the macronutrients and you will store the excess energy consumed as fat. Eat less than your body requires, and you will lose fat.

Changes in your weight or body composition will always be influenced by the equation featuring the total calories you eat against the energy you burn in a day. Depending on your current body composition, your activity levels, your unique metabolism, and your goals, you’ll require your own macronutrient calculation, which will influence your overall energy/caloric intake.

Tracking macros matters because it’s the most specific way to collect meaningful information about how you utilize and burn energy, which allows you to figure out what and how much to eat for the BEST, most EFFICIENT results.

That being said, while tracking macros can be incredibly useful, tracking consistently is easier said than done. And because of this, people often feel frustrated when they track because the “magic of the macros” doesn’t work for them.

Here are seven common pitfalls which may explain why macro counting may not be working for you:

1. You’re not being honest

Whether you log the food in your macro tracking app or not, everything you put into your mouth goes towards your total caloric/macro intake. One of my old clients referred to this concept as “The BLT”, meaning every Bite, Lick, and Taste of food stacks up—and she was right.

If you have a handful of your kid’s fishy crackers, an extra slice of cheese while you’re making a sandwich or toss a couple of nuts into your mouth while you’re portioning out your snack—IT ALL COUNTS. The oil that you cooked your chicken in? The sauce you doused it in? Those count!

I’ve done the math when it comes to my own sneaky behaviours, and it’s pretty easy to quickly accumulate an extra 500 calories a day through BLTs or unaccounted for extras. That 500 calories a day, every day, is the general equivalent to a pound of weight lost or gained in a week.

2. You only track on the days you’re being “good”

Similar to above, you aren’t being 100% honest with yourself, your app, or your coach if you only track the days—or the meals—where you feel like you nailed your goals. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients report only eating around 1000 calories most of the days of the week, with no data or only partial data on other days, and yet the scale is NOT moving and their body composition is NOT changing. The math does not add up. For 99.99% of the adult population, if you’re consistently eating 1000 calories a day, you will lose weight.

[Note: Eating 1000 calories a day is NOT recommended. Your body requires more than this to function properly.]

3. You tell yourself you’re too busy

I get it—everyone is busy! Tracking macros is just one more drain on your time. And that’s okay. You can be busy and tell yourself that you don’t have time to track, but you’re also unlikely to nail your goals. The reality is that tracking takes less than 10 minutes a day, especially if you eat the same meals on repeat and can just swipe them across days.

There’s a fun saying that goes like this: “Choose your hard. It can be hard now or it can be hard later.” Will your hard be the tediousness of tracking or the pain of frustration as you stay stuck in your status quo?

4. You don’t know how to track properly

Sometimes errors with logging macros can come down to not understanding how to do it correctly. One common problem is choosing the right match in your macro tracking app. For example, if you’re logging chicken breast, do you log it as raw or cooked? What about oatmeal, rice, or pasta? What about veggies?

The simplest answer is to log it in the form that it’s currently in. If you’re tracking chicken breast, unless you weighed it when it was raw, you’ll have to find a match for chicken breast cooked the way you cook it—baked, bbq’d, deep fried, etc.

The same principle applies to all foods.

5. You’re not precise

When you do track, if you’re estimating portion sizes and not actually weighing or measuring them, things can go sideways fast. My favourite example is a serving size of peanut butter. If the container says 1 tbsp, which equals 16g, and you don’t measure this or weigh it out, what you’ll likely scoop out is closer to 1.5 or 2 tbsps. The difference could add 100 calories extra to your day. Nuts are particularly calorie dense and often trip people up in their serving size estimations, adding hundreds of unexpected calories week to week.

6. You track as you eat (making it impossible to hit your targets)

I always recommend to my clients that they do their best to pre-track their planned food intake the night before or first thing in the morning. If you eat impulsively throughout the day, it makes it VERY difficult to land on the macro targets you had set. Being intentional about your food intake by putting some thought into what you’ll eat each day, in what proportion, and at what interval, will do wonders for your overall success.

7. You track retrospectively (end of day or next day)

The human memory is typically VERY inaccurate when it comes to tracking after the fact. Doing so is a terrible way to account for what you ate and will result in a skewed sense of your food intake.

All in all, if you’re tracking and you feel like you must be in a calorie deficit, but the scale hasn’t changed over a couple of weeks, you may not truly be in a deficit. Dig deep and ask yourself if ANY of the scenarios above apply to you. It may be that week to week, you’re hitting your calorie deficit regularly on certain days, but on others you’re eating in a surplus.

The result? It’s all balancing out and keeping you right in a maintenance range.