7 Common Food Tracking Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

samuandmelfitness
Aug 18
5 min read

Before we start this blog, I have a disclaimer: Tracking your food is time consuming. It’s tedious. And for some, it can harm their relationship with food.

But for some people, tracking calories it is an absolute gamechanger. When done right, it creates a clear road to weightloss. Figure out your calorie budget. Stick to that budget. And you will lose weight.

But here’s the problem. Most people who track, don’t track accurately. If you’ve ever tracked calories, consistently stayed below your budget, and still can’t lose weight, this is for you.

You probably aren’t tracking accurately. But there’s good news — most errors are easy to fix once you’re aware of them. We’ve helped loads of people correct these at our North Shore gym, The Pride.

Whether you’re using a notebook, MyFitnessPal, Noom, or another app, here are the 7 most common food tracking mistakes we see (and how to fix them).

A group of five people sitting at a wooden table, smiling with thumbs up. All sharing morning tea after a personal training pod session at The Pride.

1. Guessing Portion Sizes

A large part of the benefit of tracking is tracking your portion sizes. If you’re eyeballing your portions, you losing most of the benefit.

A small handful of almond nuts (30g) is 174 cals. A medium handful (70g) is 405 cals. The other week, I weighed my average portion of nutrigrain. It was literally 3 times the size of the standard serving size.

Trust us on this one - Don’t eye ball your portion sizes. This is the fastest way to ruin your tracking.

Fix: Use digital kitchen scales and weigh everything. Even for things like peanut butter, cooking oils and salad dressings. Small errors add up fast.

2. Logging After You Eat

Trying to remember what you ate at the end of the day is like trying to recall every red light you stopped at — you’ll miss some. Even if you think you haven’t, you will.

In fact, research has shown that even dieticians tend to significantly under report their caloric intake when tracking this way.

Fix: Log as you go, or even better, log before you eat so you can make adjustments.

Tablet showing daily calories, surrounded by fresh veggies, a croissant, juice, and a notebook on a white table. Vibrant, healthy setup.

3. Relying on User-Generated Entries

Most tracking apps have a search function. Here you can search for foods to log. This means you don’t have to scan or manually log your calories.

Avoid relying on this function. Here's' why:

The data within these apps typically come from user input. This means if I log an apple as 100 Calories, and my Sister logs an apple as 250 Calories, both our inputs are saved. Now if you search for apples, both results might appear in your search, and it’s luck whether you choose the correct one.

A few of the apps (myfitnesspal for example) have verified green ticks to show the items that are correct. However we’ve checked some of these and they are still widely inaccurate. It’s best not to use their search bar.

Fix: Scan barcodes where you can. If you can’t find the calories from a credible source (or ask us).

4. Eating Back Exercise Calories

Let’s say you have a target of 1,800 calories. If you go for a walk or go to the gym, your target is still 1,800 calories. Don’t try and eat back your workouts. Some apps (like my fitness pal) will automatically deduct exercise calories from your budget - IGNORE THIS. For 2 reasons.

Reason one: Smart watches, phones and heart rate monitors are great. They can measure heart rate, step count and many other things. But they are VERY INACCURATE at measuring calories burnt. Research has shown that even the most accurate devices over estimate calories burnt.

Reason two: Working out will get you fitter and stronger. It’ll give you energy and stop you from getting diseases. It’ll help you live the life you want to live, for longer. Exercise should be (somewhat) enjoyable.

Exercising solely to lose weight can lead to obsessive tendencies and over exercising. In reality, food is the biggest driver for weight loss, not exercise. Trying to “burn off” a Kit Kat rarely works — you’re better off adjusting your next meal instead.

Fix: If you work out, don’t add the calories you have burnt to your budget. Treat it as a bonus.

Two people in The Pride T shirts using ski machines during a personal training pod session at The Pride. Light walls, visible whiteboard with text. Water bottles on the floor.

5. Using Cooked Weights for Raw Foods

Let’s say we both decide to cook 100g of raw rice. This is about 359 Calories. You cook your rice with lots of water. I cook my rice with barely any water. Remember, we've both cooked 359 Calories of rice.

If we weigh the cooked rice, yours will weigh a lot more than mine. This is because yours has absorbed more water while cooking.

This is the same with meats, fish, chicken etc. The weight can fluctuate a lot depending on how you cook it.

As well as this, most of the nutritional info you see online or on the back of packages refer to the raw product.

Fix: Track most foods raw.

6. Only Tracking on “Good” Days

We used to train a lady named Sally (we’ve changed her name for privacy). Sally's maintenance calories was about 2,100 Calories and her target was 1,800 Calories.

Sally was sticking to her 1,800Cal target, but she wasn’t losing weight. Something didn’t add up. Then we looked at her tracking and realized that every week she was missing Saturday and Sunday.

So we asked Sally to track Saturdays and Sundays. It turns out, Sally was eating about 3,000 calories on Saturday & 3,000 on Sunday. (Which is a lot easier to do than you'd think by the way).

This meant her average daily intake was 2,142 Calories. So instead, we decided to look at calories as a weekly total. Sally had to stay below 12,600 calories for the week (her daily target of 1,800 x 7).

Now she would eat 1400 calories from Mon- Fri so that she could enjoy her weekends and still lose weight. What a win!

Only tracking good days is a very common mistake. Doing this is leaving your weight loss results down to luck.

Fix: Track every day — even when it’s ugly. Awareness is the first step to change.

7. Following the App’s Calorie Target Blindly

The tracking apps these days are great… For tracking. But they aren’t great at giving nutrition advice, calorie targets or macro splits. Not yet anyway.

These apps take a few pieces of info (weight, gender, weightloss goals, exercise) and spits out a generic calorie target. They don’t take in to account psychology, your history of dieting, what you’ve done in the past, what’s realistic. All these things are VERY important when coming up with a plan of attack.

Ideally, get in touch with a nutritionist. They can help you figure out where to start. At The Pride, North Shore best gym for beginners, every personal training pod member gets 1 on 1 help from our nutritionist for this exact reason.

Fix: Get a personalized calorie target from a qualified nutritionist (like we do at The Pride) that fits your goals, training, and lifestyle.

Bonus: If You Use MyFitnessPal or Noom

We like both apps, but they’re not perfect. Here are a few app-specific quirks to watch out for:

“Healthy” or “Green” Badges — These are just marketing tools. A food can be “healthy” but still push you over your calorie target.
Inconsistent Food Data: Double-check that the nutrition info matches your packet or source — especially for packaged foods in NZ.
Subscription Nudges: Don’t feel pressured to pay for features you don’t actually need to be successful.

The Bottom Line on Food Tracking Mistakes

Tracking works — but only if you do it accurately. Get the basics right, and you’ll finally see the results you’ve been chasing.

If you’re not sure where to start, our 6 Week Transformation Challenge includes personalized nutrition support, small-group training, and accountability — everything you need to succeed at a North Shore gym that actually cares.

To learn more: