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How Do You Track?

Lisa Eirene

About Lisa Eirene Lisa lost 110 pounds through calorie counting and exercise. She swims, bikes, runs, hikes and is enjoying life in Portland, Oregon. Her weight loss story has been featured in First Magazine, Yahoo Health, Woman's Day and Glamour.com.

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38 Comments

  1. Kiki

    I’m so old school. I like tracking on paper. I use the 3-month WW journals. It’s SO important!

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I love that you track “old school” that’s what I did for 2 years! It works. May not be be pretty or glamorous, but it works. 🙂

  2. RunEatRepeat

    I’ve been writing everything down old school style in a notebook for a week. Wow. You do not want to see it 🙂

    1. Lisa Eirene

      That’s cool! Are you tracking to see where you are at right now? I didn’t think you counted your calories/food but maybe I’m wrong.

  3. Lydia @ Inhabit the Beauty

    I use MyFitnessPal – both the website and the mobile app – to record my food intake. It’s user friendly, has a social aspect and a barcode scanner to enter packaged foods directly. I love that last feature!

    To track my workouts, I am currently keeping a lot of duplicate recordkeeping (I’m not sure why!). I use DailyMile for the social aspect. I monitor my calories burned with a HR chest strap that communicates with my Garmin watch, so I use Garmin Connect. I also have a plain ol’ spreadsheet to track my runs.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I love the scanner too! It is a brilliant idea and makes things so much easier!

      I never tried DailyMile but I see it online all the time. It seems very popular. And I also track my calories with my heart rate monitor (I have a Polar).

      1. Lydia @ Inhabit the Beauty

        I sometimes also use RunKeeper! See? I’m a fitness app addict!

        DailyMile is really nice to connect with other runners to discover new running routes, etc.

        1. Lisa Eirene

          It’s easy to get addicted to apps with an iPhone! That’s cool that DailyMile is more community based.

  4. Alex (@alexbridgeforth)

    Well, I’m quite an overachiever when it comes to tracking my workouts. For running I use Garmin Connect, Strava.com, Dailymile.com and my own spreadsheet. For Cycling, I use GC, Strava, and DM. For Crossfit and Lifting I just use DM. I don’t use anything to track my calories, yes you can technically still eat unhealthy on a vegan diet, I really don’t struggle with it at all.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Haha, I love it! Overachieve!

      I haven’t heard of Strava–will have to check that our. I use the Cyclemeter for my cycling–tracks mileage, pace, elevation etc.

  5. Roz@weightingfor50

    Hi Lisa. Some days, tracking is such a “chore” but it makes SUCH a difference to the weight loss effort, so is worth it. Have a great day.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Oh yes, some days it definitely IS a chore. But it works!

  6. Beth @ More Than True

    I’ve been a member of SparkPeople for several years now, though I wiped my old tracking data and started over this year. I use the site and mobile app to track food, exercise, and weigh-ins. I also use DailyMile to track exercise, and I sometimes remember to track on Fitocracy as well.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I’m loving all the responses to this post! It’s a pretty vast difference on how people track. I haven’t heard of Fitocracy–checking it out.

  7. Biz

    I’ve been slacking in the tracking department, but I’ve been tracking for yesterday and today – go me! I use http://www.fatsecret.com because I can also enter recipes in there to get the nutritional information.

    I need to add you to my blog roll for inspiration to get my ass in gear! 😀

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Calculating the calories in recipes was something I was so happy I learned how to do. It made me apt to try recipes at home instead of just eating processed food. I use this website: http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

  8. MelanieF

    I track all my food and fitness on Weight Watchers online. On Saturdays, I take the day off from counting. This has helped me keep my sanity, and I’ve lost 11.8 pounds so far (in 7 weeks) and I am happy with the results. I weigh-in on Wednesday, only once a week. Keeping track of what I eat is what has helped me lose weight, and it’s a big part of weight loss.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      It sounds like you have a good system going. I think taking a break from tracking once in awhile is a good mental reset.

  9. Deb

    I use an Excel spreadsheet I made that tracks each day’s food broken down into calories, fat grams, and WW old points. It totals up all my numbers for me, including telling me what percentage of what I ate was fat. It also has 2 slots for exercise each day, that takes into account calories burned and WW activity points, and under that finds my new totals for the day based on subtracting those numbers.

    Its more complex then it needs to be, but I love my system!

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Wow, did you build the spreadsheet yourself? Impressive!

      I forgot to add that I tracked my weight loss in an excel spreadsheet.

      1. Deb

        Yeah, and both my original version and my newer one that tracks fat calories as well are available to download of of my site. I have one page dedicated to just the nutritional values of foods. There are hundreds of things on there. Makes it easy because I can pretty much just copy and paste from there. 🙂

        Another thing I’ve found really helpful is this site. http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/list You can find the “official” values of almost any basic food here. I find myself ref’ing more and more often.

        1. Lisa Eirene

          Thanks for the link –that website is fantastic! I encourage everyone to check it out.

  10. Lisa

    The Y that I am a member of uses ActiveTrax, which calculates your calories needed for your goals and lets you enter what you’ve eaten and your workouts. I’ve been using it and am happy with it so far.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      How much have you lost so far?

  11. Carbzilla

    Great job everybody! I’ve been tracking with Weight Watchers forever – first on paper and then online. I do like Cronometer though I do think that’s a terrible name. I keep forgetting it. I’ve looked up “chronogram” like 5 times.

    I need to learn how to set my targets better. Right now it always says I’m over my transfats (hunh?) and way over my proteins, but we’ll see how I do this week. I’m also tracking in WW to make sure my calorie range and my PP+ range are similar (they are).

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I agree–the name is not good. It’s not catchy and it’s hard to remember. But the program works!

      I want to hear what you learn after comparing the two for awhile.

  12. Stacie @ Snaps and Bits

    I have never been good at tracking food. I generally eat healthy but wonder sometimes if I wrote stuff down if it might prevent me from eating that bag o chips or box o cookies…

    I did just download an iPhone app (free app last week from Starbucks) called Walk Tracker Pro (which also does running and cycling although I think people prefer garmins for running). I tracked my walk through the woods with my dog and then put it on Instagram!

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Well for me it definitely made a huge difference SEEING it written down with that number getting smaller and smaller as I ate throughout the day. It really did become a “math game” for me. If I eat “X” for lunch, how many calories do I have for dinner? Etc etc.

      That’s cool that the app tracks all of the activities–that’s what I want. I hate having to have four different apps I’m using.

  13. Beth

    I use the running log at the Runner’s World website to track all of my runs. They have some really nice features to help graph your stats to look at your progress and you can add in cross training activities, too. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I love it.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I love graphs! I will check it out.

  14. Jess

    Once upon a time I tracked in a little notebook. Now, I’m a bit more high tech 🙂 I track at sparkpeople.com. They have a really user friendly calorie counter, and a fitness tracker, too. I found that the fitness tracker tends to overestimate calories burned (I got a HRM to be more accurate). I like sparkpeople because there are articles, message board, you can have a personal page, make friends… The social aspect is nice and keeps me accountable.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      I had the same experience–the fitness tracker apps over estimate the calorie burn. My HRM is way more accurate.

  15. Simply Life

    looks like some great tools! I know I definitely eat more when eating out!

  16. tina

    I am pretty bad with tracking my food accurately (writing it down or using my fitness pal). I add up my calories while I eat, but because of that I usually end up a couple hundred over. I track my exercise by my heart rate monitor- monitoring how many calories I’m burning. My gym offers food coaching, which got me started on my weight loss but now I just book in once a month to get my measurements taken.
    I’ve been meaning to ask for a while; did you wear your heart rate monitor while you were losing weight? Did you notice drastic changes in how long it was taking you to burn those calories? I used to be able to burn 600-700 in a good 50 minute workout, now in 50 minutes i’m just making 500. And I can see by your posts the fitter I get the longer it will take me. I used to make ‘calorie goals’ when I was working out and didn’t want to…(get to 500 cal. for example) and I’m not sure now whether to take such notice of the calories or focus more on fitness levels and workouts. What did you find? You are probably the only blogger I follow that constantly wears a HRM and checks in calories burned.

    1. Lisa Eirene

      Is the good coaching like seeing a nutritionist?

      You have a great question! I may end up doing a post about it, so thanks for the idea. The short answer:

      I didn’t have my HRM until after I’d reached my goal weight. I honestly didn’t know they existed. My boyfriend got me one for my birthday and it definitely changed HOW I worked out–specifically for running.

      Yes, as I got fitter, the less calories I burned. I had to change things up and workout smarter, not necessarily longer to get the same burn.

      1. Tina

        Thanks, I actually got a HRM at Christmas because of you! It was so interesting to see which of the workouts is been doing got my heart rate right up.

        The food coaching is is basically for accountability, and motivation they have different calories plans you can follow but basically it’s 20 mins once a week with one of the food girls and you go through your food diary and talk about changes you could make and get weighed and then measured.

        1. Lisa Eirene

          That is so cool that you got one because of me. I hope you are happy with it because I love mine! What kind of changes has the food coach suggested so far?

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