But You Can't Figure Out How to Track Calories?

So we're here to gain weight, meaningful weight. For most people, this means mostly muscle with minimal fat gain. In order to accomplish this, it will be greatly beneficial to our goal, if we track both our ever-changing body weight, and the daily, dietary calories we need to sustain growth without gaining too quickly. If you can learn to implement these two skills, you've just realized over 90% of the mental hurdle in either gaining or losing weight. When you can track calories & weight with accuracy, you can more easily alter your physique. This is just a basic outline of what I do, what works for me, and how I approach it.

Is this necessary? No. Plenty of people are able to gain and lose weight intuitively, but the vast majority do not. Most people cannot determine when they've had enough to eat, and you cannot trust relative "hunger" to guide you. Calorie & Weight Tracking works because it is based on Scientific Method. The Scientific Method works because it deals with variables that are: 1. Observable. 2. Measurable. 3. Repeatable. If you can observe a phenomenon, and quantify it as a hard number, you'll be much more able and likely to reproduce it. This is the key to making small changes over time.

This is What Two Years & One Hundred Days of Daily Weight Tracking Across 3 Bulks & Cuts Looks Like!

Let's use an automotive illustration: You are tasked with filling your car with engine oil; the engine holds 4 quarts. Would you grab a jug of oil, and just start pouring? How would you know how much to add? How would you know how much was already in the car? And how would you know when you had added enough? (If you don't add enough oil, the engine will overheat and become damaged; yet if you add too much oil, the engine will also be damaged). Would you EVER just add oil "intuitively"? No, you would first check the dip-stick, right? And then you would add oil until it comes up to the "full" point, and then stop. Simple tracking.

More than any other variable, more than even protein, the most significant figure in weight manipulation will be the Calorie. Calories supersede damn near everything else. Macros, eating-windows, meal-timing, glycemic-index . . . all of this is in the backseat, while Calories are driving the vehicle. You can mention hormones, we can discuss genetics, but at the end of the Day, it's the total number of CALORIES that drive your bodyweight up or down. This simple fact is indisputable. So in order to gain muscle, we need more calories. In order to not gain fat too quickly, we need to ensure the calorie surplus is defined and not exaggerated. The best way to accomplish this is with a daily calorie target.

Basic Digital Bathroom Scale

With this in mind, we're going to track our daily calorie intake, and also track our daily weight as it responds to our daily calorie intake. Every morning, after bathroom / before breakfast, start by taking your fasted morning weight. You will obtain a more accurate number by weighing yourself at roughly the same time each morning. WRITE THIS NUMBER DOWN. (Some people use an app for this. I like to use a physical calendar just for this purpose, however).

At the end of every week, say, Saturday, add up the previous 7 days of weigh-ins, and divide by seven to find your AVERAGE WEEKLY WEIGHT. Write this number down as well. This number matters more than your daily weight, because day-by-day fluctuations will go up and down in response to hydration, activity, meal composition etc. Your "average weekly weight" is the snap-shot we will use to compare rate-of-change, week-by-week. That's how you know how much to adjust calories. All adjustments to calorie intake is based off of weekly changes.

Basic Digital FOOD Scale

The other tool in our kit is the food scale. I can not underscore the importance of accurate portions for food enough. I understand that weighing out food might sound a little obsessive, but you do this every time you follow a recipe, right? If you made cookies, you would precisely measure out butter, sugar, and flour, by the Cup and by the Tablespoon . . . the only difference being we're going to quantify the number of calories in everything, in order to obtain a sum total of our food energy. The total of all meals yields total daily calorie intake.

The bathroom scale & the food scale are our daily companions on the journey to gaining weight. They are as indispensible as a hammer & tape measure for a carpenter. If we track calories and weight, we can arrive at a much closer figure for Total Daily Energy Expenditure, rather than relying on a vague estimation. Even if we don't know the exact calories burned through exercise and activity, we can still determine if we're eating enough to support whatever training we do in a week. As long as our weight goes up incrementally every week, we know that we're in an established calorie surplus. You can find a digital food scale & digital bathroom scale online for around $25-30 total, including shipping, without looking too hard.

Okay, So Now What?

So what might meal tracking look like in practice? What kinds of things do we weigh and measure? I will take you through a typical day of calorie tracking several example meals. For many things, the information on a label is close enough. Let's say I make an omelet; I use four eggs at 70 calories each, and 1/2 Cup of Greek yogurt for 80 calories. The only thing I must weigh is the cheddar cheese, which at 2.5 ounces x 120 calories per ounce (according to the label) equals 300 calories even. So the total of 280 + 80 + 300 = 660. (The hot sauces I use have negligible calories). I record 660 somewhere, to be added with the other meals of the day.

Or maybe I'm making my standard oatmeal: 2/3 cup ground oats is 200 cals, two Tbsp brown sugar is 90 cals, two Tbsp butter is 200, and just for fun I'll grind an ounce of almonds, mostly for flavor, which contains 170 calories. I cook it in a pint of water, and add 1/2 cup of milk to help it cool so I can eat it faster, which adds another 75 calories. Oh, and to help me hit protein, I'll have a full cup of Greek yogurt on the side, which has 160 calories. (I keep a slip of scrap paper to math stuff up; I can usually total up everything in the time it takes for water to boil!) So this meal has 200 + 90 + 200 + 170 + 75 + 160. That equals 895, but heck, I'll just round up to 900. That's close enough. And it really didn't take any extra time to do this.

For lunch we'll keep it simple stupid. 13 ounces of chicken breast is 350. 3/4 Cup of steamed white rice is 540. Maybe a small head of broccoli on the side? Don't count that if you don't want to, but it's probably about 50. Don't weigh it or worry about it. I pan-grill the diced chicken with low-calorie cooking spray, and when it's done, I pour a couple Tablespoons of Olive oil and a generous amount of hot sauces over it, and salt, pepper etc. 350 + 540 + 260 + 50 = an even 1200! This is a true Gaining Meal, here. And the math isn't remotely difficult; it's just simple math, not rocket calculus. Don't overthink this; you'll get faster & better at tallying stuff up, especially if you prepare many of the same meals on a regular basis.

Stop Being Skinny Through Subliminal Programming

Where am I getting some of these calorie values from? My favorite site is nutritiondata.self.com. I have zero affiliation with them; it's just the one I like to use. Let's say I don't know the calories or macros for a single Kiwifruit; I just go to the site and search for "kiwi". Or maybe I'm eating a half-avocado, I can find it listed by the ounce, cup, per 100 grams; whatever. When you measure rice, USE DRY WEIGHT. Same for pasta. Rice packs into a measuring cup fairly tight, so I don't weigh that. But pasta is irregular, so I'll weigh that in grams. A "serving" is 56 grams, for 200 calories? Weigh that in a bowl, after "zero-ing" out the scale (re-calibrate to not include the weight of the bowl). Chicken, Beef, etc. is weighed RAW, not cooked.

I know the ease & convenience is why peanut butter protein shakes are so popular, but at some point you need to learn to make real food, and this is what that looks like. Sure, you can eat everything out of a box or a bag or a can, but you don't really want to do that. Find some recipes online, or figure out your own. Write them out on 3x5 cards so you can refer to them in the future. Meal-replacement shakes are just a tutor, to teach you how to fit a lot of calories in easily, but at some point the training wheels must come off, and you've got to sink your teeth into solid foods. Make a goal of writing up 5 meal-cards; with recipes for chili, mac & cheese, chicken & rice, steak & potatoes, anything. Keep adding to it over time.

Here's a Freebie. Now you only need four!

Working off of pre-drawn-up recipe cards will make meal-time much easier. Have a look at this card on the left. Simple-basic Macaroni & Cheese. Start the water, boil the noodles for 15-18 minutes, brown the beef while you wait for the noodles; drain the pasta, add the milk, butter, ranch, salt, pepper, chili. Mix in small handfulls of cheese at a time, melt evenly, add the browned ground beef, mix thoroughly. Home-made Mac & Cheese is great! I eat this several times per week, and it's delicious.

This will yield 2400 Calories, so you may want to break it down into thirds, and save two meals for a future date. Hello meal-prep! You get 3 meals for the time investment of making one meal. Super-convenient; it eliminates the guesswork of counting calories later. Do you see how easy this can be? Much tastier than stuff that comes in a box, and much better for you. If you add a cup of frozen peas to the noodles a minute before they're done, they heat up instantly, and now all of the food groups are represented. High protein, carbs, fats, fiber. It's got it all.

I almost forget, it's the end of the day now, so we gotta tally up these three huge meals! Oatmeal / Yogurt Breakfast, Chicken/Rice Lunch, and Mac & Cheese Dinner. (Honestly, I might swap the last two; re-heat the mac in a microwave for lunch, and save the chicken meal for a big dinner. But that's just how I wrote it out). So that's 900, 800, and 1200, for a DAILY TOTAL of 2900 Calories. Record this, somewhere. (I write my daily calories on the same calendar I use for weight tracking, so I have a hard copy). I also enter daily calories & morning weight into the TDEE 3.0 Calculator, as illustrated below. It is free online; just Google if you want it. Very simply to use, you just enter your morning weight, and total daily calories, and it does the rest!

What About the Weight-Tracking Stuff?

Screen-Capture of 5 weeks of Morning Weight & Daily Calories on TDEE 3.0. Thank You, nSuns!

Here is 5 weeks of my data entered into the TDEE 3.0 spreadsheet: I gained .57 pound the first week, and only .31 pound the second week. When it spikes to 1.6 lb in the third week, I bring calories down slightly for the fourth week, and it normalizes with zero weight change. I bring them up again, slightly, in week five, and gain another .77 pound. The total weight gain for these 5 weeks is 3.25 pounds, or 2.6 pounds per month. This is exactly what I was wanting to see: The steady gain of 2-3 lbs per month, for the duration of this massing phase. Assuming I'm putting forth the proper effort in the gym, this gradual gain ensures that most of the weight will be muscle rather than fat.

Note: EVEN IF you ate an iso-caloric diet (identical calories & macros every single day), AND burned the exact same calories every single day, your weight is going to fluctuate, so don't fret over a single weird day, or even a weird week. Just set a calorie target, try your best to hit it, and only make small calorie adjustments if your weekly average weight changes too fast (or too slow!) If your weight gain stalls, simply add about 150 calories to your daily calorie target, then see what the next week or two does. Sometimes you will increase calories, but your weight does not immediately go up, BUT THEN it still starts to go up after a week or two. Just be patient in this process. Gaining more than a pound per week will not force faster muscle gain!

To wrap it up, tracking calorie intake and daily weight changes doesn't have to be complicated or stressful. It's a fairly straight-forward process. Now, obviously you can't carry a food scale with you everywhere you go. When you can, prepare meals ahead of time and bring them with you in Tupperwhere or Pyrex containers with lids. Meal-prep "left-overs" ahead of time. If you can't track a meal, just estimate it. If you miss a daily weigh-in, just repeat the number from the day before; we're only looking at long trends over time. Like everything else, this gets easier the more you do it. You will have a much stronger influence over your personal physique when tracking, rather than not tracking.

TRACKING CALORIES ACCURATELY

~ Will Help You Not Be ~

TOO DAMN SKINNY!