Tracking what you eat can be a useful tool for building awareness around nutrition, identifying habits, and making sustainable changes. However, not all diet tracking methods work for everyone.

Some approaches are simple and flexible, while others require more time and effort. Understanding the advantages and limitations of each can help you find the best fit for your lifestyle.

Here’s a look at some of the most common diet tracking methods, along with their pros and cons.

Food diary

Keeping a written record of meals and snacks is one of the oldest and simplest ways to track food intake.

Pros:

• Encourages mindfulness around eating habits.
• Easy to personalise and doesn’t require technology.
• Helps identify emotional eating patterns.

Cons:

• Can be time-consuming to maintain.
• Lacks detailed nutritional breakdowns.
• Requires honesty and consistency for accuracy.

A food diary can be a great short term option to build awareness of your eating habits and figure out what you need to work on most, but can get tedious doing it beyond a week or two.

If you choose to do this, try a three to five day diary including both typical weekdays and at least one weekend day, and make sure you’re recording both the food and quantity eaten (including drinks and if you just have a bite of food) for better accuracy.

Calorie counting apps

Apps like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer make calorie counting more convenient by providing extensive food databases and automated calculations.

Pros:

• Offers detailed insights into calorie and nutrient intake.
• Can be customised to specific goals like weight loss or muscle gain.
• Makes portion control more measurable.

Cons:

• Can be overwhelming or obsessive for some users.
• Requires effort to log foods accurately.
• Database inaccuracies can lead to miscalculations.

While calorie tracking apps can seem next level, they’re only as good as the database and your accuracy of logging foods into them. It can be easy to forget to add a single bite of food, or to log food incorrectly (i.e. if you ate an apple, what type of apple is it? What size in grams? Logging simply as ‘1x serve of apple’ won’t give you the most accurate tracking).

It can also be problematic if you tend to hyper fixate on numbers. A healthy relationship with food shouldn’t have us constantly tracking or weighing every bite of food we eat forever. Ideally, we want to eventually shift away from closely tracking our food. However, calorie apps can be a great way to build awareness of the energy/calories in the foods we commonly eat and how they can affect our intake across the day.

Macro tracking

This method focuses on tracking macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, rather than just calories.

Pros:

• Ideal for those with specific fitness or body composition goals.
• Encourages balanced eating by ensuring adequate protein and healthy fats.
• More flexible than strict calorie counting.

Cons:

• Can be complex to calculate without an app.
• Still requires consistent food logging.
• May lead to an overemphasis on numbers rather than food quality.

This method may be a bit more of a learning curve to understand, but macros can encourage you to get a good balance of foods across your day (you may be under your calories per day budget at 1700, but if all those calories are coming from ice cream you won’t be getting the nutrients your body needs to function optimally!).

At Grace, Grit & Gratitude, we encourage tracking vegetables as a fourth category to ensure you’re getting vitamins, minerals and dietary fibre for gut health as well.

Portion control

Instead of counting calories or macros, portion control methods use visual cues, measuring cups, or hand-size comparisons to estimate serving sizes.

Pros:

• Easier to maintain long-term than precise tracking.
• Reduces the need for digital tools or apps.
• Encourages a more intuitive approach to eating.

Cons:

• Less precise than calorie or macro tracking.
• Requires knowledge of appropriate portion sizes.
• May not be suitable for those needing strict dietary control.

Portion control is one of the most useful things to learn and really should be done in conjunction with any of the other methods on this list. Modern eating habits have pulled us away from what used to be standard portions, in pursuit of ‘value’. The more we get, the better the deal! But that isn’t a great approach for our health.

Think about it with regards to cafés and restaurants. There are rarely options for small vs. large serves these days, and the options for upsizing combos at fast food restaurants makes it seem almost nonsensical to choose the smallest options for drinks and fries when it’s only a small price jump to maximise them! But generally speaking, we should be eating different portions if we are petite vs. larger, male vs. female, very active vs. sedentary, and when we all eat the same sized meals this is where we can start to get into issues with weight management and normalised overeating.

Learn what portion sizes are right for your body, and learn to eyeball them so you can pull away from tracking numbers.

Intuitive eating

This approach focuses on listening to hunger and fullness cues rather than tracking specific foods or numbers.

Pros:

• Promotes a healthier relationship with food.
• Reduces reliance on tracking tools and numbers.
• Encourages mindful eating and body awareness.

Cons:

• Can be challenging for those used to structured plans.
• Requires practice and patience to master.
• May not work well for those with specific fitness or health goals.

Intuitive eating is ideally where we all want to end up. However, this can be extremely difficult if you’re constantly busy/on the go or have limited awareness of how your body responds to food. If you try intuitive eating and it doesn't work for you, have a go at one of the other methods and choose an element of intuitive eating to begin working on alongside it (for example, eating until you’re 90% full, or eating without distractions).

Handwritten meal planning

Planning meals in advance by writing them down can help with organisation and consistency without the need for daily tracking.

Pros:

• Saves time by reducing daily decision-making.
• Helps with grocery shopping and meal prep.
• Can still provide structure without intensive tracking.

Cons:

• Requires commitment to sticking to the plan.
• Less flexibility for spontaneous meals.
• Doesn’t provide real-time feedback on intake.

The fitness and nutrition industries LOVE to sell us meal plans. However, if you’ve ended up with one that’s all completely new recipes, ingredients you’ve never really used or a different style of eating than what you’re used to, you’ll likely find the changes are too big to stick long term.

It’s also almost impossible to follow a meal plan indefinitely because sometimes you might eat at a restaurant, go on holiday, have someone else cook, or get sick of following the same plan over and over again.

Instead of a cookie-cutter meal plan that’s the same as everyone else is following, find a professional who will help you adapt your usual way of eating to be healthier with a few new recipes thrown into the mix.

To sum up

Different diet tracking methods suit different lifestyles and goals. Whether you prefer detailed tracking, a more flexible approach, or focusing on mindful eating, finding a method that feels sustainable is key. Experimenting with different techniques can help you determine what works best for your needs and relationship with food.

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