Tracking Calories Expectation Vs Reality
When people first invest in a coach and/or first track their calories, often they expect their initial 12 weeks to be a nice consistent change in calories where their coach drops their targets each week, potentially with a weeks re-feed somewhere in the middle, and they achieve their results in 12 weeks then ready to reverse diet.
It’s not surprising this is the expectation given social media these days and the impression that most people are on super low calories with poor body composition, but then suddenly start eating 2000+ plus and their body composition had miraculously transformed.
However 9 times out of 10 (actually make that 9.99 times), this is not the case, especially for those who have never tracked before or just new to tracking. And instead progress is messy, and to start with at least somewhat unpredictable.
Why? Well a number of reasons, but most commonly because:
To learn how to track accurately and reliably takes time, this is not something you learn over night
Hitting your targets is a work in progress, not many people learn the art of hitting their targets in the first week or so
Once consistent tracking occurs you then need a period of time to see what changes this makes to body comp / energy / performance / hunger before further changes can be made. And sometimes results keep coming simply because for the first time consistent tracking HAS occurred so there is no need to change anything anyway.
This means often in a 12 week period your targets don’t change at all - YET results do come.
This means that the first 12 weeks isn't about getting your desired results, wrapping it all up in a nice bow and then recomping or eating intuitively thereafter. The first 12 weeks are more often than not just the start of the journey - of finding your feet with all this stuff first. It's the NEXT 12 weeks after that things start to get more scientific and calculated:
It’s normal to want changes quickly, but if you try and make drastic cuts to make this happen and/or try and change things too quickly you will never know what worked and what didn’t. This in turn leads to an increased likelihood to rebound later on and less likely to be compliant to the targets too.
Yet when your approach is about trusting the process and staying consistent, you learn what variable provides what results as quickly as possible, it gives you the ability to change those variables when needed if you do start to plateau and you also gain knowledge to enable you to keep the results long term, it really is a win win!
Happy tracking!