298: Short On Time? How to Count Macros Faster

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 298.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode. 

Hey, hey, hey! Welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke. And today we are tackling a very important and very pertinent topic for a lot of people, the amount of time that it takes to count macros. This is one of the biggest things that I hear with people as they get started in this process. Yes, macro counting seems very alluring. It seems like, Oh my gosh, it's amazing to be able to not have to cut out food groups and to be able to eat sugar and to be able to still be able to hit my health and fitness goals even if I'm eating you know ice cream or brownies or things like that. So, the draw and the pull makes it sound really alluring, and then people get into it and they come to me and they say Amber, oh my gosh, it takes so much time. I don't know. I can't give it this much time. I can't give it this much energy. I can't like. It's just I. My life is so incredibly busy and I just don't see how this is going to be able to fit into my life and let me just start with if that's you, it is a completely valid concern most of us are super busy. And we have kids and families and jobs and personal development, and I don't know fun that we're trying to fit into our lives and yeah, trying to just layer on another thing on top of that can feel very overwhelming.  

My Goal For This Episode 02:08 

However, I find that people make a lot of mistakes when it comes to what macro counting is and what it isn't. What it has to be, what it can be. And so my goal with this episode is to really break it down and make macro counting feel accessible, like it doesn't have to take hours and hours and hours. It doesn't have to take a lot of time to be able to utilize this tool and be able to have it work to support you and the health and fitness goals that you have set for yourself. My goal is that by the end of this episode, you will be able to minimize the amount of time that you are actually spending counting macros and maximize the results that you're getting from that. So that sounds like it would be helpful to you, keep listening. 

Defining Macro Counting 02:57 

OK, before we dive into the actual tips themselves, we have to take a step back and define macro counting, which I mean it may seem like a really funny place to start, but I promise you it is incredibly pertinent and the reason that this is pertinent is because people come into quote “macro counting with some sort of idea of what it has to be”, that it has to look a certain way, that you have to weigh all your food, that you have to log everything, that you have to hit your numbers, that you have to, have to, have to, have to, have to and it's like all of this pressure to make it look an exactly perfect certain type of way and I really think it's important to approach macro counting from the context that this is a tool and it's a tool that's supposed to be helpful to you. It's supposed to help you in your life. It's supposed to be supportive of your life. It's not supposed to take over your life. It's not supposed to be your life and that that's what I find a lot of people doing and so they come into macro counting and they think it has to look a certain way and then they realize in order to make it look that certain way, it takes a whole lot of time, a whole lot of effort, and then what they do is they throw their hands up in the air and say this takes too much time and effort, screw this. I'm not going to do it. 

And it always makes me sad when I see that I well, first of all, I get why people do that. Here's why people do that. Because it's freaking people on the Internet that are telling you that that is the only way that it can be you know, for as much as the Internet has brought us wonderful things, there are a lot of influences on there who will tell you this is what macro counting is you must track everything. You must weigh your lettuce. You must hit your numbers. You may not go over like there are dogmatic people out there preaching these things. So, no wonder you come into macro counting. You don't know any better. And you think, oh, this influencer said that I have to track every single thing that I eat, and I have to weigh every single thing that I eat. So that's just how you do it, so we get it. But it is important to understand that just because that's what that influencer said macro counting is doesn't mean that that's actually what it is.  

Macro Counting is not a Monolith 04:58 

Macro counting is a tool and it can be utilized in a lot of different ways. I like to think about it like a paintbrush, right? Is there only one, right way to paint a painting?  No. You can use the paint brush in a whole lot of different ways and a whole lot of different contexts with a whole lot of different colors and create different things based off of new utilization of the paintbrush and it's the same way with macro counting. There is not just one way to count macros. And so it's really important that we start with this conversation that macro counting isn't a monolith. It's not just one thing. And if we can take this tool and figure out how to make it the most effective for you, how to make it work for you, how to make it fit within your lifestyle, make it fit within the time constraints that you have. You are much more likely to be successful. You're much more likely to stick with this process, and you're much more likely to get results, and so I just want to start with this idea that macro counting is not a certain thing, it's a tool. Tool and it's a tool that can be used in a lot of different ways. And so we're going to be talking about how to tweak and adapt and use this tool to minimize the amount of time that you're spending doing this. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be thinking about food all day, I don't want to be spending hours and hours on my phone. This is a complaint a lot of people say, like I don't want even all my day looking at my phone, my phone imprinting food when I'm like, trying to have a conversation or interact with my children and I get it, I don't want to be doing that either. So I have some simple tips. I have seven simple tips actually to give you today that will decrease the amount of time that you are spending counting macro. 

Tip #1: Don’t Track Everything, Only Track High Calorie Foods 06:40 

So let's dive into tip #1. Tip #1 is to actually not track everything. It is to focus your tracking on the high calorie foods and skip the low calorie foods. Now whenever I offer this as an idea to someone, people get really set in the mindset of like, what's the right way to track? is the right way to track, to track everything? is the right way to track to not track veggies like what's the right way to track?  And I actually hate that question. I don't like this idea of what's the right way to do it, because there isn't a right way for everybody. There's just the way that's going to fit your goals, your lifestyle. And the way that you want to utilize this tool so I always have clients move away from that question of what's the right or the wrong way to do it and instead ask yourself, myself the question, what's the most effective way to do it? What's the way that's going to work best for me? What's the way that's not going to make me throw my hands up in the air and quit? What's the way that's going to help me get the most amount of data with the least amount of work? And that's really this balance that we're always going for. So if you are strapped on time, if you are someone who is wanting to minimize the amount of time that you are spending tracking, this is a really good tip to stop tracking low calorie foods and focus your efforts on the high calorie foods. 

Example of tracking high calorie foods 08:02 

So, what's an example of what that would look like? If I was to make let's say a sandwich, and some people will, if you want to be as accurate as possible, and I get it. There's this balance between accuracy and like time spent doing it. If you want to be as accurate as possible, you're gonna track everything. You're gonna track the bread. You're gonna track the cheese and the meat and the Pickles and the lettuce and the mustard and the mayonnaise and you know the whatever avocado that you put on top of it, you're going to track every single thing. And so when you're going to create a sandwich, now you're packing sometimes 7 and 8-9 different items and that takes time. It takes time to weigh each of those items. It takes time to find each of those item. It takes time to log each of those items, and so if we're wanting to maintain as much accuracy as possible while at the same time minimizing the amount of time that we are spending. If you focus that time on tracking the high calorie foods, that is a good use. You'll save time and you're going to get most of the accuracy. So you know mustard. If I want to save time, I'm not tracking my mustard. It doesn't have that many calories. I'm not tracking my tomatoes. I'm not tracking my lettuce. I'm not tracking the red onions that I put on all of those things, well, yes, they do have carbs. The number of carbs that they have is very, very low.  

And so, yeah, I'm sacrificing a little bit of accuracy. What I'm doing is saving myself a whole bunch of time and energy, and so it's that trade off. It's like I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of accuracy to make things easier on myself and make it a whole lot easier to track my sandwich. So I'm tracking maybe the bread. I'm tracking, you know, if I put avocado on it. I'm tracking any cheese that I put on checking any meat I put on it and then any other of those, like condiments that are low calorie. I'm not tracking. I'm not tracking the pickles. I’m not tracking the lettuce, not tracking it mustard, you know, maybe we'll track my mayonnaise, but anything low calorie I'm not tracking. And again, I'm maximizing the amount of accuracy while minimizing the amount of time that I'm spending doing. 

Now if you want to just maximize the amount of accuracy and I would say this would be for someone who's like training to go on a fitness competition. Then maybe. Yeah, you do. You track every little thing because accuracy is the utmost important to you and you're willing to spend the time to do it. But for the general population where you're not looking to become stage lean, it's often, really it's often better to sacrifice a little but a little bit of accuracy in order to save yourself the time and headache of the time spent tracking everything. 

Tip #2: Repeat Meals 10:41 

Tip #2 to save time tracking macros is to repeat meals, listen I like variety as much as the other person, but if you want to save time, this is one of the biggest things that can save time is to repeat meals, have the same breakfast three days in a row, have the same lunch, 3 days in a row or five days in a row. But if you can repeat meals, it makes things so much easier on you. There's less thinking about it. You've already tracked it, and so you can use the copy and paste feature in most tracking apps where you can literally copy yesterday's lunch on to today. Boom. It's already tracked. This makes things so simple. 

Now I get it. Maybe variety is like the utmost value for you and you just cannot even imagine eating the same thing multiple days in a row. And if that's if that's you, great, variety is a higher value to you than the amount of time that you're spending. That's fantastic. For a lot of people though minimizing the amount of time that they're spending tracking is more important than variety and this is a really low hanging fruit that can make things a lot easier to track. You don't have to plan ahead, it's like I know I'm eating the same breakfast today that I ate yesterday. I don't have to think about it. I can just quickly put it together and I can literally copy and paste what I logged yesterday on today. It doesn't get much easier than that.  

How I Repeat Meals 12:08 

So, for me I usually will eat the same thing, usually like 3 days, three or four days in a row like I'll eat the same lunch four days in a row. And I'm finding something that I like. So I like this food I'm gonna eat it the next four days, I find a breakfast that I like I'm going to eat it the next four days and then I'm going to probably rotate on to another one. You know, for us, dinner is always different. And you know, I don't usually repeat dinners, but I will often use what I ate for dinner as my leftover for the next day, and that makes tracking my lunch a whole lot easier if I'm just using leftovers from dinner, so this is a huge one that can save you a ton of time. If you're willing to forgo a little bit of variety and keep eating the same thing multiple days in a row. 

Tip #3: Create Meals Out of Food That You Often Pair Together 12:54 

Tip #3 is to create meals out of food that you often pair together, so let me talk about this the difference really quick between a meal and a recipe. Because most tracking apps have both. They have meals and recipes, or at least the tracking app that I use, which is MacrosFirst, and I know MyFitnessPal has this and I assume a lot of other apps have it where they have an ability to be able to create a recipe and they have ability to be able to create a meal. A recipe is something that you put together once and you make, and now you're having a serving of that recipe. Whereas a meal is foods that you often will pair together, sometimes in different amounts, but you often eat those foods in conjunction with one another.  

Sample Pairing of Meal 13:38 

An example would be if you do, let's say, a morning coffee. If you're going to do a morning coffee, oftentimes you'll put the same thing in your morning coffee, and so if that's the case, you can create that as a meal where you have maybe your coffee, you have your creamer, you have any sweetener that you use or any flavorings that you use and you know you always put those things together, so you can make that as a meal and now instead of having to log all three of those things individually, you can just log them once and it logs all three components. I do this a lot of times because I will like to eat like yogurt, yogurt bowls or a cottage cheese bowl. And I'll often put the same, you know, combination of fruits in with the cottage cheese and yogurt. So I'll combine you know Vanilla Greek yogurt with some cottage cheese. Mix that together, and then I'll put maybe strawberries and blueberries and raspberries into the bowl. And so, you know, that's five different components. If I log each of those components individually, that takes a lot of time. But since I know that I often eat that yogurt bowl together, I can log it once, save it as a meal. And then any time I go to eat that yogurt bowl, I just log that meal, it populates all five items into my diary and the cool thing about a meal versus a recipe is that I can tweak the amounts of each of the components so let's say that I you know, I ran out of strawberries and I only had you know, usually I have 100 grams of strawberries in my bowl, and today I only had 50 because well, I just ran out of strawberries. Once you've logged that into your diary, it's really easy to just go and change the amount of the strawberries. So unlike a recipe where it's like once you log it, once you've cooked it and you log it, there's no adjusting that recipe a meal because it gets logged as one thing, whereas a meal gets logged as all of its components separately, and you can still tweak and toggle and adjust the amounts of each. So I really like using meals for things that I often pair together and you'll find that for most of us, that's what we're doing, is we're often eating the same foods together in conjunction with one another. 

Tip #4: Do Batch Cooking 15:41 

#4 is batch cooking or meal preparation. Now I get it when I say meal prep a lot of people are like I'll just take so much time. I don't have three hours on a Sunday to be able to prep all of my food and I get it. I don't really love doing that either. For some people that works really well and if you're someone who loves to meal prep and you love spending, you know, two to three hours on a weekend and you love planning. You know, prepping out all of your meals and putting them in little containers, and you're able to pull them out throughout the week. And that works really well for you. Fantastic. I love that that will save a lot of time during the week, so if you're someone you're like I have more time on the weekends or I have more time on this certain day of the week and less time the other times. That's a great way to be thinking ahead and to invest that time when you have a little bit more time. So that on the back end, you're saving a whole bunch of time love that however, a lot of people feel like meal planning or sorry meal prepping is really overwhelming and they don't want to dedicate the two to three hours or 4 hours that it will take on a weekend to be able to literally make all of their meals for the rest of the week. And that's where the camp that I kind of fall in, it's like the time is really overwhelming I don't really want to dedicate time on the weekends to be able to do that, but that doesn't mean that I can't utilize batch cooking and meal prepping to an extent or on a smaller basis to make my life easier through the week.  

How I Do Batch Cooking 17:04 

So one way that I kind of talked about this earlier is this idea of making more during the week when I'm making a meal. Say a dinner, you know, doubling that recipe or making extra of that recipe so that I can then utilize that in other meals. So that's a really simple way. If you're already making, say, you know, roasted veggies, make some extra so that you can have those roasted veggies that are already logged for lunch the next day or for dinner the next night or for, you know, lunches for the rest of the week. So take work that you're already doing and just up the amount that you're making and then you can utilize that for upcoming meals. 

I also do this when I think about making batch protein preparation, so sometimes I will, you know, if I'm making grilled chicken for a recipe, I will double or even triple that grilled chicken recipe so that the rest of the week I just have grilled chicken in my fridge and I can use it in a whole lot of different ways. I can chop it up and I can make it into a like a chicken salad, like a Greek yogurt, chicken salad or I can put it on a bun and make it into like a chicken sandwich or I can cut up that grilled chicken and put it on top of a salad. Or I can, you know, serve it alongside with a sweet potato or something like that. So I really like if I'm going to make some plain protein that's easy to reuse in a bunch of different ways, just making extra of it so that then I can reuse that all throughout the week. Again, it's already logged, it's the recipes already put in and it makes it very, very easy and it saves me a lot of time when it comes to, you know, trying to pull out food for lunch in the middle of the week. So I'd encourage you to not just think about meal prepping, as in I have to make all of the food that I'm going to eat this next week. Sometimes it's just about already taking the food that you're making and making extra amounts of it so that you can use that food and not have to think about it or not have to plan or make more food down the line during the week. 

Tip #5: Log Everything All At Once 19:14 

#5. OK, this may seem like a kind of a silly one, but I find that it actually saves me a lot of time and that is I try to batch my logging. So what I noticed that I used to do when I first was tracking macros is I would try to track everything in the moment. So let's say that I was building, let's say, a yogurt bowl, so I would put my bowl on the scale, I would push the Terra with the zero button to you know level to zero everything out and then I would scoop in my Greek yogurt and let's say it weighed 170 grams. I would then pick up my phone. I would find the Greek yogurt. I'd scan the label and then I would enter that 170 grams that I put down my phone. I pick up, you know tear the scale again zeroed out. Now I had the cottage cheese and I added a 100 grams of cottage cheese. I'd pick up my phone and I would go find the cottage cheese and I would log it and I would do this for you know, the entire recipe picking up and putting down my phone like five or six times as I was building out my lunch, and while it may not seem like it, every time I'm picking up and putting down my phone, I'm actually context switching and some of you may have heard of this idea of how much time is wasted when we switch from context to context. It's why productivity specialist will tell you that you want to be able to stay in flow. You want to be able to stay and with the same thing. And you don't want to switch from like looking at Instagram to then checking my e-mail to and then going and, you know, sending a text message. So then going back to Instagram. So then going like a lot of us do this where we context switch all the time. I'm like I'm one of them. I have to run really hard not to context switch, but every time we do that our brain like has it takes time for our brain to like catch up to the new context that we're switching to.  

Importance of Sticky Notes 21:02 

And so I've found that it's really helpful for me to log everything all at once. So instead of logging things separately as I'm building out my lunch, if I will log it all at one time and the way that I make this easy is I use sticky notes. So if I'm building out a yogurt parfait or whatever. I'm gonna have my sticky note next to me. So when I weigh out the 170 grams of Greek yogurt. I just write that down on my sticky note and then I tear and I put in the cottage cheese and I write that down in my sticky note, and then I write the strawberries and I write the blueberries and then I write the raspberries. And then once I'm done with it now, I will take all of that and I will log it into my tracking app all at once. It might not seem like it saves that much time, but I promise you, doing all of the logging at one time instead of breaking it up and trying to log everything separately actually makes a huge difference. And then sometimes if I'm short on time, I won't even log it right then I'll just I have that sticky note. I'll stick it somewhere and I can log it later because I know everything is all written down. All the weights are there. All I have to do is go into my tracking up and actually, do it. So this is something that saves me a lot of time, is I'm not picking up and putting down my phone a billion times. I just log the whole thing once and then move on. 

Taking a Photo will also do the trick 22:21 

Something on a similar vein, maybe a little less accurate if you're not like actually weighing everything out is taking a picture of your food. So if I have like zero time I'm racing and I just got to get through this, I don't have time to weigh my food. I don't have time to do anything. I'm just gonna eat this thing. Take a quick snapshot of what you're eating before you eat it, and that way later on. Yeah, you're going to go and estimate, but at least you can remember what was in that bowl you know, remember relative portion sizes, yeah, I put about 1/2 cup of cottage cheese into there. OK, cool. So taking a snapshot only takes, I mean, come on guys only takes like a couple of seconds and at least at the very least then you have at least a snapshot of what you are eating and it makes it easier when you go back to log it. 

Tip#6: Pre-log and Create A Plan For Your Day 23:05 

#6 is to start pre logging your food. Now this is the difference between being proactive with your nutrition or reactive, and last week, actually Jacob talked about this, we talked about the MacrosFirst app and he talked about how he initially had built the app for someone who was more proactive and he found out that a lot of people are actually reactive. So what does that even mean? Proactive is when you are creating a plan ahead of time of what you're going to eat. You make the plan and then you execute the plan versus reactive is you sit down and you make your make your food and then you track it. Now one of those isn't better than the other. They're just different ways of doing it. However, it is easier I find, especially when you're brand new to macro counting. I find that for most people, pre logging or being proactive about what you're going to eat is going to help you in hitting your macros a lot faster, help you get over that learning curve of what the heck do I need to eat in order to get 130 grams protein. How a lot of people are going about this is they are tracking throughout the day and then they get to 7:00 PM at night and they're like, holy cow, I still have 40 grams of protein. But I gotta eat. 

Instead of going into that day with a plan that's already put in place where you've played around with your tracking app, you figured out what you need to eat to hit your protein so that by the end of the day you don't have to think about it because you've done all that thinking ahead of time. I call this pre logging and I really encourage a lot of my clients, especially again, especially when you're new to macro counting. The more you do this, the less you'll have to pre log in order to hit your macros but when you're brand new, I really think it's highly unlikely you're gonna hit your macros if you're trying to retroactively or reactively log, so that means I encourage clients to sit down the night before and to enter everything into your tracking app that you want to eat tomorrow. What's your plan for what you're going to eat tomorrow?  

Macro Tetris 25:13 

And the reason that you do this is because it allows you then to put everything in and then to go look and say, Ohh man, I'm still short 40 grams of protein. Where am I going to get those 40 grams of protein? Then you can go back to your thing. You can go back to your tracking. You can maybe increase some serving sizes. You can add in another protein. Go back to your numbers and say OK there I got my 40 grams of protein. But now you know I'm a little bit low on maybe my calories so I need more calories. So then you can go back and add some more so this like ability to play macro Tetris is what we call it. This ability to play macro Tetris when you can play with the whole day. Instead of what most people do, where they like, track breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then they get to like their snack, their snack after dinner. And they're like, oh gosh, now I need 40 grams of protein. It's very hard to be able to maneuver and tweak and adjust when you only have one meal to do that in. Whereas when you pre log, you have the whole day staring ahead of you that you can tweak and adjust and toggle and increase and decrease. And be able to play that macro Tetris. And now you go into your day having a plan like I don't have to. It's not like how much do I want to eat? It's like I have a plan. I'm gonna eat this amount of apples. I'm gonna eat this amount of that chicken, I mean eating this amount of, you know, whatever it is. So you're going in with the plan and that means you have to think about it a whole lot less, and that saves you a whole lot of time during the day. 

Pre-logging is an Investment 26:36 

Now, I know that this is an investment. Pre logging takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of energy, but it is an investment. So it's like if I can invest those 10 to 15 minutes the night before or the morning of, that's going to save me way more than 10 to 15 minutes throughout the day. And so you just kind of have to play around with what's more important to you. Would you rather spend, you know, 15 minutes during at night? Maybe you have more time at night. Maybe you don't have more time at night. Again, this isn't a right or wrong. It's just giving you options and realizing that you can make this work for you. What's the most important thing here? Where do you have time. Where are you? Where do you not have time and how can we maximize the amount of time that you're saving? 

All About Meal Planning 27:18 

A version of this also we can talk about meal planning. So meal planning is different than meal prepping meal prepping is the actual making of the food whereas meal planning is creating a plan for the food and this is something that's really valuable and helpful to me. I definitely meal plan every single week where I sit down on Saturday or Sunday and I create a menu for the entire week for our dinners of what we're going to eat for dinner. You know, every night. And then I create my grocery shopping list. I you know that I use Walmart delivery, so I go and put in my Walmart order and I know you know, either having delivered on Sunday or Monday. I know that then I'm going to have all the food that I need in order to create the dinners that I want. Now I've done that this for like years and years and years and years recently. Recently however, I've taken to also, doing meal planning for breakfast and lunch and snacks for me. And I know a lot of women I talk to have the same struggle where it's like dinner. We have it planned out, we have a plan. We know what we're eating, because we got to figure that out for the whole family. But when it comes to breakfast, lunch and snacks, we're just trying to wing it, and if you're like me and you stay home all day. It may feel like, Oh yeah, I'm around food all day. Like I can just kind of wing it and figure something out and in reality, I found that that was a lot harder and it was. It's really stressful and I wasn't defaulting to really good options and so I've taken the extra step to coming up and again because I repeat meals, I come up with like 2 breakfasts for the week. I come up with like 2 lunches for the week and I come up with like two snacks for the week and I include them in my shopping list and now I have a plan for what I'm going to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. And again, I repeat those so it makes it really easy, so that added meal planning of not only just meal planning for dinners including the other meals have been really helpful for me and being able to stay on track and feel like I'm nourishing myself throughout the day and not just, you know, having a plan for everything not just dinner. 

Tip #7: Estimate and Practice That Skill 29:22 

And then my 7th tip and probably the most important tip of all is to freaking estimate. The number of people who stopped tracking because it takes too much time or because they can't be exactly accurate or they didn't weigh the thing or whatever it it makes me so sad that people just throw in the towel because they're missing out on a lot of information and data about their bodies just because they can't be 100% accurate. And I get it. I get that like a lot of people in this space, they preach the accuracy. You gotta weigh everything. You gotta. You gotta measure everything. You gotta log every little thing that enters your mouth. All the bites, looks and taste, right. Like we have to do all of it. And I just think that, if that works for you, fantastic. But y'all it's not working for a lot of people. And people keep feeling like they're failing, and then they when they feel like they're feeling, they just quit. And so again, making this something that works for you is so important and estimation and learning to estimate and not freaking out. If you can't weigh everything or measure everything is incredibly important. You need to learn how to estimate. It is OK to estimate. You're not always going to be able to weigh everything. You're not always going to be able to measure everything, you're not always going to be able to know what's in something.  

I don’t want to measure my food for most of my life 30:46 

People get so thrown off when they go out to a restaurant that doesn't have a menu with calories or somebody drops dinner off. And the reason that they get to not throw so thrown off track is because they have this idea that they have to be super accurate and super exact and it just doesn't work that way. In fact this skill of learning to estimate is one of the most important and valuable that you can build for your long term success. Because I don't know about you. But I don't want to weigh my food for the rest of my life. I don't want to measure my food for most of my life. I want to develop the skill of being able to eyeball portion sizes. And if you don't ever practice that, how are you going to develop that skill? So I always look at when I'm estimating for whatever reason as an opportunity to practice that skill of estimation of portion sizes because I know in the long run, I want to be able to have that skill. And so, I have to practice that, I have to develop it so I just want to give you permission to estimate. I want to give you permission for it not to be exact. I want to give you permission for having prioritizing limiting the amount of time that you're spending being the most important thing and maybe being less accurate because of it. That's OK, again this is all about what is the most important thing for you and for a lot of you, it’s saving time.  

So what can we do to again maximize the amount of results we're getting while minimize the amount of time that we're putting in? I'll give you another scenario where this like comes into play where it's something that if it's something that you are doing on a consistent basis I actually really push myself to not track and weigh every single thing. An example would be like the amount of butter that I put on my toast, I want to get good at being able to eyeball the amount of butter that I put on. So maybe I'll weigh it one day. But then from then on I don't really, weigh it. Because I'm maybe I'll like check on it every once in a while, but I want to be able to be good at figuring out how much butter I consistently put on my toast so that I can get good at estimating it so I intentionally don't track the butter that I put on my toast every single day, because that's part of me training and getting better at learning and understanding portion sizes. Because again, my eye sight is for the long run. I don't want to have to weigh my butter every single time I want to get practice at having the same amount about the same amount every single day. 

A Quick Recap 33:10 

So those are the seven tips that I have for you to do. A quick recap. Tip #1 is to only track the high calorie foods . Tip #2 is to repeat meals and use that copy and paste feature. Tip #3 is to create meals for things that you eat together. We talked about the between meals and recipes to #4 is to do batch cooking and you know, whatever meal prepping looks like for you. Tip #5 is to log everything all at once using either a sticky note or taking a photo so that you're minimizing the amount of time that you're picking up and putting down your phone. Step #6 is to pre-log and create a plan for your day and step #7 is to estimate and to practice that skill. 

Takeaway 33:53 

So there you have it, if you are someone who wants to minimize the amount of time that you're spending in counting macros, you want to utilize this tool, but you want to make it take the least amount of time possible. I just gave you 7 tangible tips that you hopefully will start to implement and hopefully see the amount of time that you're spending with this tool going down while still being able to maximize the results that you're getting. I hope this was helpful. Will you please let me know by damning me on Instagram or sharing this to your stories? That's one of the ways that I'm able to get feedback on what content really resonates and what content I should do more of on the podcast. If you have not yet left a rating and review, please please, please do that. It really makes a difference with the algorithms. It tells all of the algorithm gods that this type of content is stuff that's important that people should see, and it pushes it out to more people. So if you've listened to more than one episode on the podcast and haven't yet left a rating review, that would be an awesome, awesome next step and something that would be really helpful to me. That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber, now go on and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.  

Outro

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