4 reasons why you aren't seeing progress when calorie tracking

If you’re tracking your calories and you aren’t seeing the weight loss progress you want, then there’s 4 things that may be causing this.

We’ve seen these happen countless times with our clients and we can assure you that if they apply to you – and you fix them – you’ll see some changes.

Our last blog took a look at the pros vs cons of tracking calories. You can have a read here.

BUT – if you’ve opened this page and you’re already stuck wondering what calories are or how many you need, then we advise you have a quick read of this here: “How many calories should I eat?”

Right, let’s get down to some of the reasons you may not be seeing progress.

1 – You aren’t tracking EVERYTHING

Ever sat down to track your food but forgotten what you ate? With the busy lives we all lead it’s so easy to forget that we ate a Mars Bar when rushing around at work.

The solution? Try and take a few moments at each meal to quickly track what you’ve ate, or get in to the habit of tracking your food before you eat it. This can help ensure we don’t have any missing calories.

2 – Vegetables and sauces, anyone?

Before we forget, don’t forget to track absolutely everything that you eat. This includes all fruit and vegetables (they contain calories too..)

But some of the biggest things missed out are milk or sugar in teas and coffees, sauces like ketchup and mayo, oils used in the frying pan or picking at food / snacks. They ALL add up.

Don’t think they make a difference? Let’s imagine we never track our little tablespoon of ketchup everyday. “It’s only 18 calories”. Over the course of a year that’s a staggering 6,570 calories. That’s nearly 2lbs of fat simply because you forgot to track or didn’t think it was important.

3 – You aren’t tracking accurately

Keeping with the topic of ketchup and oils, it’s very easy to ‘guesstimate’ the weights of food. Let’s take peanut butter for example. 1 tablespoon (15g) is roughly 100 calories. But if we spoon out a slightly heaped teaspoon, it could well be double the serving size = double the calories.

The same goes for cereals. When did you last have JUST the 30g serving size? It’s about 6 coco pops or 8 bran flakes. More than likely if you have a bowl of cereal you’re having 3-4 servings.

Whilst we don’t necessarily recommend weighing out EVERYTHING and to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY, we do recommend that you weigh your food for a short period to get used to weights. From there you can start to eye ball food more accurately.

4 – You aren’t consistent

First off, you may not tracking your calories every day of the week. This poses a huge problem. For example, if you don’t track your calories on the weekend but you go wild (and over your calories), you can’t get an accurate reading of where you’re currently at. Monday-Friday’s progress may have been ruined from your weekend of eating.

Secondly, if you only track some weeks and not others, you won’t be able to see the bigger picture. Ideally you need to be consistent with your tracking for a good 2-3 weeks before making assumptions or changes. If you haven’t managed this period, then you need to keep working on it until until you become consistent.

Still not seeing progress? Chances are you’re eating too many calories

If you know for certain you constantly track 100% of your calories, theres a chance that you need to reduce them. If you’ve never worked out your calorie requirements per day and you’re just guessing, going off of the ‘government guidelines’ or using the number MFP has given you, have a read of this.

If you’ve worked out your calories and you’re still not seeing progress, try reducing them by 50 per day or increasing your activity slightly. Repeat this until you start to see changes.