Despite the endless debates over the tracking of calories among the nutrition community, you might be surprised that doing so can help you better understand yourself.
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Understanding Your Emotions
Many people might be guilty of emotional eating (eating while angry, sad, bored or stressed without REALLY being hungry) without even realising it. This kind of behaviour can indeed insidiously add up the calories intake and sabotage their health goals.
In this case, tracking calories can help them to better understand their emotion and seek solutions to change their behaviour.
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Understanding Your Eating Habits
Tracking calories enables people to learn more about their eating patterns and the reality of their current diet. For instance, they may actually think they are doing great, while in fact they are only eating junk food, or skipping certain meals.
By learning this, they can enhance their food awareness which is usually the first step in adopting healthier food choices (e.g. swapping of high calorie food for lower calorie one).
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Increasing Your Nutritional Awareness
Keeping your calories tracked can make you realise whether you’re chronically deficient or excess in certain macronutrients or minerals. This facilitates necessary tweaks and improvements to your diet.
Such as, if you notice that you’re frequently lacking calcium in your breakfast, you would then start including calcium fortified milk or bread for your morning treats.
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But...
Despite the above, it's important to know that tracking calories is just a piece of a puzzle to healthy living. One should focus on the quality (nutrients) rather than the quantity (calories) in regards to the food being consumed. This means incorporating wholesome ingredients (e.g. unprocessed products, fruits and vegetables to name a few) in daily meals.