I know that you know it’s important to track calories, protein, gym performance, sleep, blah blah blah to change your body composition… but you still don’t do it, do you? Why? Don’t give me this are-you-crazy-Egis-fat-loss-is-hard-as-it-is look. If you are not making progress, it’s because you are not monitoring your progress. And if you are not monitoring your progress, fat loss is a mystery to you.
Listen, research has shown over and over again that people who monitor their progress have a higher chance of succeeding at reaching their fitness goals — more frequent self-monitoring is consistently and significantly associated with weight loss/maintenance compared to less frequent self-monitoring.
So why don’t you document data in your fat loss endeavor? Why do you leave your efforts to chance? Is it because you don’t know what to measure? Is it because you don’t know how to interpret all the readings?
Whatever the damn reason, so long as you possess anything resembling a human brain, I’m about to tell you what data my clients track and how we make sense of it to ensure continuous progress.
Once you learn what data to monitor and how to interpret numbers, you will stop guessing and start understanding. This will give you the necessary feedback to make adjustments (if needed) to keep progressing because data tells the truth. Your emotions don’t.
So here’s the data my clients monitor (and so should you) to change their body composition.
If you are up for calorie/macro tracking…
I coach my clients based on the amount of effort they are willing to put in. If a client wants slightly faster results, is okay with putting extra work into learning how to track food intake, and has no history of disordered eating, we track calories and macros. The goal is to individualize a plan for a client.
So this is data that this client typically tracks:
- Weight
Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, after using the toilet. Calculate the average at the end of the week and look at multiple weeks of data to see if averages are trending down. If for some reason you can’t weigh yourself every day, aim to average a minimum of four weigh-ins per week.
If you have noticed that you are obsessed with the scale weight and it negatively affects your body image, eating habits, etc., the scale weight is not the only feedback. Skip it.
- Body circumference measurements
DO NOT make scale weight your only tool to identify progress. This is because scale weight doesn’t differentiate between muscle and fat mass change. For example, if you are a so-called ‘skinny-fat’ and a beginner in the gym, you may lose little to no scale weight simply because of muscle growth happening in the background.
Circumference measurements detect these changes and give you a ‘proof of progress.’ If your waist is going down, you can be near damn sure that your body fat level is going down. I recommend measuring waist and/or hips every 4–6 weeks because most people find these areas the most ‘problematic.’
- Daily calorie and protein intake
Meeting your calorie and protein goals at least 80% of the time is crucial. As I said before, while calorie and macro tracking is not necessary for most people, it can make fat loss progress faster (assuming a high degree of accuracy) because there’s less guessing.
It keeps you responsible for what goes into your mouth. It teaches you proper portion sizes and shows just how much progress can be thrown off by a few extra bites and sips.
If you have a history of disordered eating or if food tracking has a negative impact on your mental health — increased obsession and neurosis with food — shift your strategy towards the right health behaviors.
- Daily step count
To say that getting an adequate amount of steps each day is important for weight loss/maintenance and health is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
For weight loss purposes, staying active outside the gym will burn more calories than any workout would.
As for health benefits, a recent meta-analysis looked at the relationship between step count and all-cause mortality risk and found that the optimal range for most health benefits was 7,000 to 9,000 steps/day. Which is what I recommend to my clients — try to get at least 7,000 steps/day.
If you struggle to get that many steps, aim to increase your steps slightly more than whatever you are doing now. Each 1,000-step increment resulted in a 9% reduction in the risk of death according to this study. Some improvement will always be better than none at all.
- Meals per day
If you don’t have a consistent day-to-day meal pattern — meal frequency and timing — what are you doing?
Look at your schedule, lifestyle, and preferences. Choose the number of meals per day you want to have. Eat them at around the same time each day. This will ensure you are not doing daffy shit with your eating, such as snacking in between the main meals.
- Meals out/restaurant eating
Restaurant ‘healthy’ salads can range from a few hundred calories to a few thousand, depending on the quantity, ingredients, and chef’s mood. If you eat out daily, you will struggle to control calorie intake. There is a movie called “Mission Impossible.” That is also the name of trying to lose weight while also eating out too frequently.
Most lean people control their food intake by making most of their meals at home. Do that and keep restaurant eating to 1–2x/week.
What if your sphincter clenches tighter every time you hear ‘calorie/macro tracking’?
As I mentioned before, calorie/macro tracking can exacerbate eating disorders and body image in people who have a history of eating disorders or poor body image. For clients like that or those who simply go ‘Calorie tracking can feck off right out of the solar system, I’m not gonna do it,’ it’s better to focus on the right health behaviors.
Here’s a nutrition log of a client who identified three big things she wanted to focus on:
- Having at least 30 grams of protein with each meal;
- Veggies and/or fruit with each meal;
- No snacking in between the main meals.
Everything else — weigh-ins, measurements, etc., stay the same:
In this scenario, you rate compliance with the plan in a YES/NO fashion. The goal is to reach at least 80% consistency. If you are not consistent 80% of the time, you have no right to be frustrated with your progress.
So if you prefer focusing on behaviors and habits rather than numbers, identify 3 to 5 things you struggle with the most and track them.
- Progress photos
Daily weigh-ins + circumference measurements + progress photos = more objective view of the direction you are heading:
Progress photos are especially important if you resistance train because they show just how much your body composition — fat-to-muscle ratio — can change without massive changes in your body weight. Cuz muscle creates the shape of your body.
I tried taking photos every 1–2 weeks with clients but eventually, I found that every 4–6 weeks works best. Taking photos more frequently than that tends to be counter-productive because visual changes are usually too small to be visible.
- Gym performance
If you are training like a jackass — doing random exercises every workout with no logic behind what you are doing in the gym — then you are jeopardizing your progress. Start documenting your training performance in the gym.
My clients track exercises, warm-up and working sets, reps, reps in reserve and weight used:
Unless you have a photographic memory, which you don’t because people have short memories, there’s no way you can remember all the sets, reps, and weights you used in the last few weeks.
My clients also record their training technique and send it to me to make sure they are training effectively (and safely). Cuz you don’t wanna do a shoulder press and feel it in your toe or something.
So if you want to maximize your progress in the gym, track your workouts. Record your sets. If you don’t have a coach in your corner making sure you are not training with profoundly awful technique, be your own coach — compare your training footage to the videos on YouTube.
~
Progress improves when progress is measured. So monitor your weight, your measurements, your habits, your lifts… Anything that gives you feedback.
Data keeps you grounded. It keeps you from doing stupid things with your diet and training just because you ‘feel’ like ‘you are not making progress.’
P.S. I need to make money to make a living, so if you want to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, apply for my 1-on-1 Coaching. I tend to get cool results. Check my approach and results on Instagram. Or…
If you want something free, sign up for my Weight Loss Formula that’s designed to help you create the foundation of good habits & sustainable strategies that set you up for long-term weight loss success (it comes with “5 pillars of weight loss”).
Originally published by me on Medium on the 5th of June, 2025
