Three years. Chicken and rice, every day. Every gram weighed. Compliance around 98%, and the missing 2% was mostly cheat meals I skipped rather than ones I took.
It worked. Completely. I want to say that clearly up front, because what follows is not "tracking doesn't work" — that's the lazy version of this argument and it's wrong.
Tracking works better than anything else. I stopped for a different reason.
What Tracking Actually Buys You
It solves the single hardest problem in nutrition: you do not know what you're eating.
People underestimate their intake substantially and consistently, and it's not dishonesty — portion sizes are genuinely hard to eyeball, calorie density is unintuitive, and the cooking oil, the handful of nuts, the finishing of a kid's plate all go unrecorded.
Weighing food removes the guessing. You stop having opinions about your intake and start having data. Once you have data, the problem becomes arithmetic rather than mystery, and arithmetic is solvable.
Anyone who has never tracked should track, for at least a few months. Not forever — long enough to calibrate. You'll learn what 150g of rice looks like, that olive oil is 120 calories a tablespoon, and that the thing you thought was a snack was a third of your day.
That calibration is permanent and it's worth the cost of getting it.
What It Costs, And Where The Cost Lands
Here's the part I didn't understand until I stopped.
Tracking consumes decision bandwidth, and it does it continuously. Every meal is a weighing, a lookup, a logging, and a small running calculation about the rest of the day. Individually trivial. In aggregate it's a background process that never fully closes.
For three years I ran that process while my job was mostly physical routine and my goal was a number on a scale. The bandwidth was available. The trade was obviously correct.
It's a different trade now. The thing I'm optimizing for is cognitive output — how much useful thinking I can do at 9pm after a full day. Everything gets evaluated against that, and a persistent low-grade computational task running through every meal is competing directly with the thing I'm trying to protect.
That's the actual reason. Not that tracking stopped working. That what I was spending to run it became the scarce resource.
The Compliance Trap
There's a second, subtler cost and it's the one that made the decision easy.
At 98% compliance for three years, tracking wasn't a tool I was using. It was an identity I was maintaining. Skipping a day felt like failure. Eating something unweighed felt like a breach.
That's enormously effective — that's exactly why the three years worked — and it's also fragile in a specific way. A system that depends on near-perfect adherence has no graceful degradation. You're either at 98% or you've "fallen off," and there's no stable state in between.
So people run it hard for a period, hit an interruption that makes precision impossible, and lose the whole structure at once — because the structure never had a lower gear.
I'd rather run something at 80% forever than something at 98% until it breaks. Same logic as the round-number emergency fund: a slightly worse system you'll actually sustain beats an optimal one you'll abandon.
What I Track Instead
Four things, none of which require a scale.
Protein, roughly. The one nutrition variable worth deliberate attention. Around 0.7g per pound of target bodyweight. I don't weigh it — I count servings. A palm of meat, a scoop of powder, a can of fish. Four to five of those lands me in range without arithmetic.
Bodyweight trend, weekly. Not daily — daily weight is mostly water and noise, and reading noise as signal is how people talk themselves into bad adjustments. Weekly average, moving in the direction I want or not. It's the feedback loop, and it's one data point per week.
Training performance. Are the lifts going up or at least holding? This is a better proxy for whether nutrition is adequate than any log. Strength falling off while weight drops means I'm underfed, and I'll know from the bar before I'd know from a spreadsheet.
Whether I'm hungry all day. Genuinely useful and completely unquantified. Persistent hunger means intake is too low or protein and fiber are too low. The signal works once you stop overriding it with a target number.
That's it. Zero apps. Zero weighing. Maybe thirty seconds of attention per day total.
Less Precise, And That's The Point
This system is objectively worse at estimating intake. I'm probably off by a few hundred calories on any given day, and if I wanted to cut to single-digit body fat it wouldn't be nearly good enough.
I don't want that. I want to be strong, lean enough, and to have a functioning brain at 9pm for the next forty years. For that target, "roughly right, permanently" beats "precisely right, until it breaks."
Precision has a cost, and the correct amount of precision depends on what you're optimizing for. Three years ago the answer was maximum precision and I was right. Now it isn't, and the same tool that got me here would be taking from the thing I actually need.
When You Should Track
I'd still tell most people to do it, with conditions:
- You've never done it — track for two or three months. The calibration alone is worth it and it's permanent.
- You're stuck — weight hasn't moved in six weeks despite believing you're in a deficit. You aren't. Track for four weeks and find out where.
- You have a specific, dated goal — a competition, a weight class, a photoshoot. Precision is warranted when the target is.
Otherwise, after calibration: protein servings, weekly weight, whether the lifts move, whether you're hungry.
You already learned what the food looks like. That was the whole point of learning it.
Stop paying for the measurement once you've got the number.