5 Reasons to TRACK with MyMenu Concierge

Nancy Snyder, MS, RDN

Healthy Dining has partnered with Cronometer to provide you with the most advanced and accurate food tracking technology, called TRACK. This TRACK feature on MyMenu Concierge gives you an in-depth look at not just your macros – but your micronutrient intake, too.

There are many life-changing benefits to tracking what you eat every day through TRACK. Even tracking your food for just a few days can give you deep insights into your nutritional health and wellbeing to ultimately help you to EAT to be your BEST. Below are just a few of our favorite reasons of why we use TRACK:

1. To Identify Your Current Eating Habits

Spending a few days tracking can help determine your baseline. Are you getting enough calories, carbs and healthy fats? Too many? Are you consuming enough protein to fit your active lifestyle? What areas need some tweaking? And how about micronutrients--are you getting enough Vitamin D, B12, iron, and other important nutrients in your day?

Which brings us to our next reason...

2. To Determine What Areas Need Tweaking

Once you've established your baseline with TRACK, you can identify which foods are currently supporting your goals and which food choices are deterring you from reaching your goals – and then adjust accordingly. Maybe you incorrectly assumed you were getting enough protein? Or perhaps that morning breakfast that you've eaten every day for the past five years isn't as balanced as you thought?

3. To Help You Reach Your Goals

Making high nutrient choices – and making them consistently – is the magic recipe for success. Let's take a look at how TRACK helps with both!

Consistency

We all know that consistency is key when it comes to training or showing up for your workouts. The same holds true for consistently following an eating plan that aligns with your goals. Being dedicated to your workouts as well as to how you fuel your body will bring you closer and closer to your goals.

Making More Informed Decisions

TRACKing allows you to shine a light on what foods are supporting or hindering your progress. TRACKing what you eat as you eat it, helps make you aware of how your choices fit into the big picture of your goals so you can make more informed decisions about how you fuel your body.

Also, because TRACKing requires us to measure foods, at least at first, we get a better sense of what a portion or serving size looks like, and how we might be underestimating or overestimating our intake.

TRACK also helps us determine how our needs change on a daily basis and how to adjust our intake accordingly. By inputting your daily activity – whether a leisurely morning walk or a heavy training session – you will see how your caloric, macro and micronutrient needs update to accommodate for fuel and recovery.

4. Most important: To Help You Stay On Track

Set a goal to use TRACK – either every day or at least one week to start. We know you will receive unparalleled, life-enhancing benefits by TRACKing.

Making a daily habit out of TRACKing your food will not only help you meet your goals, but it will keep you on focused as you continue to maintain and accelerate your goals and performance. .

While TRACKing might take some practice and encouragement at first, soon it will be a part of your daily routine – and you won't want to miss the data and personal insights TRACK provides.

5. To Help Identify Digestive and Other Food Intolerances

Keeping a daily log of your foods will also allow you to connect the dots between digestive issues or low energy levels and potentially triggering foods or intolerances.

As the saying goes, "you are what you eat!" If something isn't sitting right with you, this will allow you to identify some patterns so that you can eliminate the potential culprits.

While TRACKing your food can might seem daunting at first, hopefully now you'll see that the benefit far outweighs the effort. And what you do today and tomorrow will begin to create a habit for successful lifelong change!