Hello lovely people. This question “How do you actually calculate and log the percentages of calories in your day?” has haunted and prevented me from doing anything similar to an athlete diet for years. But after some serious thinking, planning, and wasting many many sheets of scratch paper I have a simple how to for you.
Please remember this is simply how I do it, there isn’t a right way, there is definitely a wrong way in if your doing something detrimental to your health or wellness, but how you log your food or calories or whatever is your perfect way so please don’t take this as a condescending post. I would actually love to hear how you do it if your way is different from mine. So please comment it to me!
The Notebook
This is how I log everything! I purchase one of the smaller notebooks that fits easily into my purse or satchel. I’ve used this method before just to count calories so I knew this was the first place to start.
This notebook is the 4”x6” size and you can find them everywhere. This one was bought at the drugstore that’s 2 miles from my house. Now, buying the notebook was the easy part, but how do you track the percentages of calories you consume like they want you to do in the 50-25-25 Runner’s Diet that I’m trying to follow?
Answering this question took a lot of thinking and I’m sad to say wasted pieces of scratched up paper :oops:… but all in search of fitness. This is what I came up with.
First I knew I needed a Carb, Protein, and Fat slot for every line of food, that way I could put the calories in that food under the right category. As you can see I split them up sometimes if I know that there is a lot of two of the different categories in a food. Like cheese for example, I know that cheese is a good source of protein but also has a lot of fat in it. This isn’t precise but I split it on what I think is right sometimes 50-50 sometimes 70-30 etc… Surprisingly I was pretty close to my calorie goals in all the categories (you can see how to do this on my Run Maren Run page, click the icon on the right or the menu link under the Simply Maren banner). This was my first full day! I over ate on my calories… my goal is 1650 and I ate 1710 but thats okay because I ran 1.5 miles which equals a 150 calorie cushion.
This is how a new day looks…
I hope you found this post helpful. It will have a link on my Run Maren Run page, just incase you want to find it again quickly.
