Laura Schoenfeld: So the way that I typically have my clients track their food intake is using an app called MyFitnessPal. I don’t know if they send you a lot of emails. I honestly haven’t noticed if there’s lots of emails that get sent. I’m sure that there are settings with the app that you can turn off the emailing if you’re getting a lot of emails. But basically you would need to, if you want to be really accurate, you do need to weigh and measure stuff. So that’s like weighing the meat that you’re eating, measuring out if you’re eating potatoes or something you want to actually figure out either the weight or the cup measurement. I like weight because it’s actually the most accurate to get the number of grams or ounces that you’re eating of a certain food. But if you don’t want to weigh everything, then doing cups and measuring spoons and that kind of thing can give you more accuracy.
And then if there’s anything that you’re eating that’s packaged, then MyFitnessPal has a barcode component where it can actually figure out what you’re eating using the barcode and then you can just put in however many servings you had. So that would be the most accurate way to do it. A lot of my clients do kind of a mix-and-match strategy where they don’t necessarily weigh and measure everything, but they can just ballpark what they’re doing. If you suspect a client is having issues with undereating or overeating, then doing it more consistently and accurately is going to be better. I usually have my clients do it for at least a couple days if not a couple weeks just to get them re-calibrated for what they need to be eating. But I do also work with a lot of clients that are undereating. So it can be a learning process for them to start eating an amount of food that’s appropriate for them. So the most accurate way to do it is to weigh and measure, and then if you want to ballpark some measurements for the food you’re eating, that’s okay too. It’s not going to be quite as accurate, but it should be okay. And then you do need to plug each of the food choices into the MyFitnessPal app or website to track that.
So that’s the way that I do it. I don’t know if there’s an easier way. I don’t think there is. But it’s not as time consuming as you might think, especially if you do it on the app on the phone when you’re eating and just kind of get everything plugged in. But I don’t have people do that for a long period of time because it can be really annoying to have to do that for a long time. But it’s something that can help if somebody’s in the habit of undereating.