If you're going to take the time to track calories, you want to make sure that you are
doing it as accurately as possible and you can really use any app honestly that you want
to use for tracking calories. But in this video I'm going to show you how to track calories
when using cronometer, which is the app that I prefer, and also the app that I recommend
to my clients. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dustin Williams, and for
the best health, nutrition and fitness advice, make sure to subscribe to my channel, hit
that little notification bell so that you're notified when I post a new video every single
week. Now, everything that I'm going to show you and go over today is going to be done
using the cronometer app, but ultimately you can really take the information that I
talked about today and apply it to pretty much any other calorie tracking weight loss
apps out there that you're using for this purpose.
Now, anytime that you have or consume any food that contains calories, you want to make
sure you track it. The small things, the big things, all of it. If it contains calories
and if you consume it, you want to make sure that you're tracking it and thankfully these
apps like cronometer are making it a lot easier and more efficient for us to get this
accomplished. Now, if it's your very first time using one of these apps, one of the first
thing that's going to happen is you're going to put your information in and it's going
to recommend calorie ranges for you. Now you can use this information. It's not typically
the one that I recommend. I've actually done a full video on this. If you need any help
figuring out a good starting point for your calorie ranges whenever you're focusing on
fat loss. As I said, I've done a video on this topic already.
I'll actually link below in the description if you need to be walked through that. It's
a pretty quick, simple, easy process. Check that video out, but I'm just going to kind
of skip over getting the calories and focus just on tracking the calories. Assuming you
already know what range you're trying to be in. Okay. So what I go over as I'm inputting
this information and showing you how to do this, I'm actually going to be recording it
on my phone. I'll put it up here on the screen so that you can kind of follow along with
what I'm doing. I'm going to start by kind of going over the basics of inputting food
whenever you're using this app at any point. And I'm actually going to prep my breakfast
for tomorrow. I have some eggs, cheese with a little bit of butter that I prep and I make
in my Sous Vide every single morning. Uh, it's one of my favorite breakfast. It's
super easy for me. I like to prep it the night before, so all I gotta do is just drop it
in the Sous Vide water and it cooks on its own. So I'm going to kind of walk through prepping
that so that I can show you as we go through this. So whenever we are in the app, uh, as
you can see through here, January 22nd, it's got the date on there. Um, it's got numbers
calculated out. So on average, you can see my energy right there at the top. I'm shooting
for around 2300 calories. I've got a minimum of 160 grams of protein, even though I typically
try to go over that. These are just numbers that I'm working on for myself. These can
be adjusted for any individual based on what your goals are, but whatever we're adding
the food, you just hit this big plus sign right down here on the bottom and it pops
up several different metrics that you can potentially use.
So you can add food, a different biometrics, like if you want to keep your weight tracking
in here, if you wanted to add exercise in it. Um, the two biggest ones that I'm going
to say that you want to focus on for the topic of this video is going to be the add food
button and the scan bar code button. And at any, if you have the ability to scan the barcode,
this is what you're going to want to do to make sure that you're being completely accurate
on whatever it is that you are eating, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and give you an example.
So we're going to go ahead and hit the a scan bar code button here. So it's going to bring
up my camera if you haven't already authorized it to give you that. You want to make sure
to authorize the camera. So I've got my eggs here. So these eggs are
just great. A large eggs and I use two of these whenever I make it. So if there's a
barcode on the back of this, all I'm going to do is hold my camera over the barcode,
get up to it so that it can scan it and it scans it and recognizes the eggs and knows that
they're Walmart stores, large white eggs. And it says one egg is the serving size. So
I can measure it by egg, by Allens, by grams. Um, and I know that I'm going to use two eggs
whenever I'm making this. So I hit two eggs and I'll hit save. So it's now added this
to my totals. You can see that two eggs are going to be about 140 calories. It's going
to be about 12 grams of protein and about 10 grams of fat.
It's coming from this, so this was easy. This was accurate. We know that we're using these
exact eggs because we use the barcode and we scan to that right now. The other thing
that I'm going to do is I'm using a finely shredded a Fiesta blend cheese. It's a reduced
fat. It's made with a skim milk or low fat milk, sorry, 2% milk instead of whole milk,
so it's got a little bit less calories in it. I typically will use this. I really like
it, so same thing. I'm going to hit the plus button. I'm going to hit the scan bar code
and I'm going to hold it directly over this barcode so it starts loading it up. I said
this word, the side. Now as I've said before, I've done a video specifically on weighing
and measuring your food. You want to make sure that something like the cheese, that
you've got a good food scale so that you're not eyeballing your food.
Eyeballing it is not going to be beneficial. If you want to track, you want to track accurately.
It doesn't take hardly any more time to weigh and measure stuff. So I'm actually going to
be using a scale. Now I know from my experience whenever I make this, I put 35 grams worth
of this cheese and to my food. So under the serving sizes here we got ounces, we've got
cups, we got grams. So I'm going to choose the grams cause that's how I'm going to weigh
it. And then under the amount I'm going to put in 35 and I'm going to hit save. So now
at this point it's put it towards got 140 calories from the eggs. It's got a hundred
calories coming from my cheese. We can see it right now on a 240 calories, 22 grams of
protein, 16 grams of fat for this meal. Again, super simple, just scanning it, inputting
the exact amounts that I'm eating. Exactly. Two eggs, exactly. 35 grams of the cheese
so that we know that we're being very accurate. And then the last thing that I do is I add
about two grams of butter and whenever I mix it together, so the butter that I'm using
right now is just a a, it's a Kerry gold, comes from grass fed cows. It's a little bit
softer butter so it melts a little easier. Same thing, I'm going to hit the plus button,
I'm going to hit scan barcode and I'm going to hold it right up over. This work then automatically
populates it for me. I'm going to weigh and measure out the butter here in a minute, and
that is going to also be two grams. That's how much I like to put in there. So two grams.
So I push the two under the serving size, make sure the grams is selected and hit save.
So now that's only adding 14.3 calories, which isn't a lot, but we want to make sure that
we are tracking everything that contains calories because if there's 15 calories here, 20 calories
there, another 10 or 15 calories here, and if this happens multiple times a day, and
if you're not tracking it, that adds up to 50 75 a hundred extra calories that you're
potentially getting that you weren't aware of. Now, I'm not going to waste your time
in the video of showing me actually mixing these things together, but now that I've got
everything weight and measure out, I take the cheese, the butter and the eggs, I stir
it all up. I beat it up and I put it into a little Mason jar and then I put that in
my Sous Vide and I cook it every morning. But if you need any assistance or need a little
bit more information on exactly how to weigh and measure things properly using a scale,
I've done a video on this as well. I'll link below to that video so you can check it out
if you want to make sure that you're doing that accurately as well. So from here I put
in my entire records. So this is what I'm going to have for breakfast. Sometimes I may
have a little bit of orange juice with it in which I would do the same thing. I would
scan the barcode on the orange juice. I would weigh and measure out exactly how much of
you wants shoes that I'm drinking and input that and add it. You'll follow this same process
through your lunch, through your dinner, through your snacks, whatever you're eating, every
single thing that you eat all day long in order to make sure that this is staying accurate
because you are scanning the barcodes and you're putting it directly on the scale.
Now, one of the questions that I get is what if the food doesn't have a barcode? That does
happen, especially if you're eating like fruits and vegetables. A lot of times those don't
have barcodes. So in those situations, whenever you push the plus sign here, and instead of,
uh, hitting scan bar code, you would hit add food. All right, so on here, since this is
actually got a, an Apple as the picture, so we're going to look up Apple. So you would
look up the Apple. So you've got Apple fresh was skin, you got Apple fried, you know, different
things to do here. So if you're just eating an Apple, you'd click the Apple fresh with
skin, and then you can click on that down arrow and you can see you've got quite a few
different options. So you've got a large Apple medium, Apple, small Apple, have you cut it
up, ounces by the slice, tablespoon, however you choosing to do it.
Uh, if you watch my video explaining with me, explaining how to weigh and measure food,
I typically just use ounces and grams. And whenever you are measuring an Apple, remember
you only want to measure and weigh the part that you're eating. So you're not going to
eat the core. So you don't want to measure the entire Apple cause you're not gonna eat
that. You want to cut the core out and then measure it. So in this situation, you know,
if I would go down, if I was going to measure it in grams, I would click grams. And then
once I it, how many grams does that come to? If it was 200 grams, that'd be 104 calories.
However you would want to input that. Um, but that's what you would do is just if you
don't have a barcode to scan, you would click on add food and go from that.
Now a couple of little tricks that I really like whenever I am using this app that save
a lot of time for me, I am a creature of habit. Most of us are, I tend to eat a lot of the
same foods. It's not uncommon for me to eat something on a Tuesday and then repeat it
almost exactly on a Wednesday. So one thing that makes this app really great is right
now I'm looking at what I input for breakfast on January 22nd if I scroll and let's say
it's January 23rd I can click the three right? The three dots up in the upper right hand
corner and then you can see copy previous day. So if I click copy previous day, it's
automatically going to take everything that I had tracked the day before and put it on
today's listing, which makes it so much easier than having to go back in and manually input
everything if you're planning on eating a lot of the same foods.
So that makes it a lot easier as you're tracking. Like I said, if you tend to be eating a lot
of the same things day in and day out, and that applies to any day, I could go back a
week, click on that day, copy that day, and then paste it into the day that I'm eating.
If there's something that I had, you know, four or five days ago that I want to basically
eat that exact same thing again. And then the other thing that I recommend that you
use if you're going to do this very often is the recipes function. So whenever you're
doing something like my eggs. So let's say if you don't want to manually scan the eggs,
scan the cheese and scan the butter, but you know that you eat this like I do pretty much
every single morning for breakfast. And you could create a recipe, which you'd only have
to do one time. You would name the recipe, whatever you wanted,
and then all you'd have to do would be type that recipe in each time you eat it instead
of entering in every single thing. So I'll show you some examples. So, uh, down here
on the bottom you see the Apple that says foods. If you click on that, you've got the
my recipes in my foods. So I'll click on the my recipes and I'm actually going to click
on this milk chocolate here. So a little while back, my wife and I were experimenting on
making some overall chocolate, adding a little protein and trying to keep the, uh, most of
the ingredients a little bit more whole. So we tested it out, we made a recipe out of
this. So you just go in and you name it, whatever you wanted to name it. So I made it named
it milk chocolate and the entire recipe, you put everything in there.
So it had 30 grams of cocoa powder, 17 grams of dry nonfat milk, 80 grams of coconut oil,
150 grams of honey, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, 35 grams of gelatin, uh, to add some
protein to it and 30 grams of the powder sugar. This was the entire thing. So if I scroll
over one and if you see I've got one serving and then I've got servings per recipe, which
is 10 so when we would make this, this on average would make for her and I about 10
servings. That was how we chose to break it out. You can make that eight servings, 12
servings, however many servings you wanted to make it. If you're making something big
that you know is going to be more than one meal. So then from there under serving size,
you can see the full recipe. So if we ate all of it at once, this is showing 1,545 calories,
that's a lot, right? Um, but since we set it up for 10 servings,
if I scroll down to serving size, that's, we set it at one serving was 155 calories.
So we could have something like this, which was 155 calories compared to a candy bar,
which can be 250 to 400 calories. But we kinda got our chocolate fix whenever we were feeling
we wanted something and it had a little bit better ingredient base too. Um, so this was
something that we used, but as we were making this more often, it gets tiresome. Um, going
back and entering in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different items and scanning
them all every single time I wanted to eat it. So if you create this recipe and put it
in that way, once it's in there once, you won't have to put it in again. And this way,
you know it's your recipe cause you don't want to try to find somebody else's milk chocolate
recipe that makes it completely different than what you do.
You want it to be your recipe so that you know that your numbers are completely accurate.
So now you should know how to accurately track your calories whenever you're using these
apps so that you can be as accurate as possible and really make sure that you're staying on
top of it. But there's more to it whenever it comes to creating an overall healthy lifestyle,
not just fat loss. And I've actually created a yo-yo diet guide. Yoyo dieting cure is what
I call it, and it's a completely free guide. It's 10 steps to push you in the right direction
of being able to create a lifestyle and eliminate yo-yo dieting. And I'm giving this to you
guys completely for free. All you need to do is click the link below in the description.
It'll take you to my website and you can download this guy completely for free and hopefully
it will help you out and put you on the right path to creating a lifestyle and not just
a short term diet. And of course, if you liked this video, I would really appreciate it if
you'd smash that light button, subscribe to the channel and uh, otherwise I will see you
guys in the next video.