Calorie Tracking vs. Nutrition Tracking: What’s the Difference & Why It Matters

You have probably heard of both of these terms, and possibly assumed that they are synonyms. While similar in process, there are significant differences in their purpose and philosophy. This is an important question that often confuses beginners, and sometimes also seasoned trackers so let us start from the beginning.

Calorie tracking focuses on tracking 4 major numbers:

• energy intake (calories)
• breakdown of macro-nutrients
  • protein
  • carbohydrates
  • fats

Energy-in vs energy-out is the main principle people follow to lose or gain weight, and therefore calorie tracking has earned a bit of a reputation among the weight watchers. Calorie tracking has become the standard for most tracking apps due to its simplicity and focus on the short-term goals. It is simpler in both acquiring the data, and tracking for the users, as it only focuses on a few numbers and lets users easily reach their targets with minimal planning.

On the other hand nutrition tracking focuses on the bigger picture of your health, going beyond energy intake. Nutrition tracking includes vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other more nuanced components with the goal to ensure that you follow common guidelines for a truly healthy diet, instead of just ensuring the adequate energy intake for your goals.

Calorie tracking vs Nutrition Tracking

Calorie tracking is just one piece of the puzzle; a piece that focuses on short-term goals and does not address deeper and sometimes more significant patterns of your nutrition. On the other hand, nutrition tracking can provide the full picture.

Why is calorie tracking so popular then?

The answer is simple: it's easy to track, gives quick results, and has been heavily marketed as the go-to method for weight management. But there is also a deeper thought process to this, something that has been almost rooted in the fitness industry.

There is this idea that if you eat a healthy and varied diet the micronutrients will fall into place. It sounds awesome right? But unfortunately it is much more complex than that, and in many cases false.

Most of us have pretty strong opinions on our diets - we believe we already eat healthy, or the complete opposite. But what makes us think that? What even is healthy eating? Most of us have never had any formal education about basics of nutrition, and the little information we do have is gathered from our life experiences, our parents and people around us.

It turns out that some people even subconsciously categorize foods as healthy or unhealthy based on how tasty they perceive these foods to be. In other words, they hold a belief that “unhealthy” foods tend to be more tasty than “healthy” foods, which in turn results in some strong emotions associated with foods in each category.

A study on food perception highlights this bias:

“Unhealthy = Tasty” belief correlates with positive emotions associated with unhealthy food (calmness, satisfaction, energy, and activity) and with negative emotions associated with healthy food (boredom, disgust).

So we as a society have these notions that influence our decisions, without us even noticing. In many ways this impacts the following popular statement - as long as you eat a varied diet and hit your macros you will be good on the micro-nutrient level.

The statement could be true if everyone had the same, refined understanding of what a healthy and varied diet actually is. But since we are all very different, we have different preferences, different backgrounds and different environments it is an oversimplified assumption.

Relying on something as abstract as varied diet can be very misleading. If I vary my diet between burgers, pizza and kebabs, does that mean it is healthy? If I reach all my macros on such a diet, would that mean that this diet is sustainable for my health in the long term? As you can see this notion might be misleading because it is extremely easy to skip-over a few important nutrients like vitamin A, vitamin D, iron or even fibre. Same is true for just the opposite - it is easy to go over the suggested limit for salt, saturated fats and added sugar. And given that our minds are largely skewed towards preferences for certain foods we are very likely to fall into a trap we don’t even see.

Another reason for calorie tracking being so popular could be that the effects of it are very visible - if you lose weight you see the first results within a few months, and within a few years you are completely transformed. Same with muscle building - you are likely to see the rewards within the first year. On the flip side, if you are eating too much of something, or neglecting important micro nutrients you likely won’t see any consequences for years. Perhaps this is why calorie tracking has such a prominent place - as always we are more interested in the now, and less about the hypothetical future.

However, it is a short-sighted view. Nutrition is one of the most crucial and modifiable risk factors for various diseases, including, cardiovascular.

If you're thinking about or already are tracking calories, why not take it one step further? Tracking your nutrition gives you all the same benefits—plus the long-term advantage of better health.

How to start tracking nutrition

Ok, now that you are convinced, how do you start?

In order to track nutrition you need a few things - the nutrition data for items you eat, and a place to take notes. You could of course just use a digital journal but that would take a lot of time and effort to maintain, and if you ever wanted to visualize or find patterns it would take even more time. Plus finding credible data, and then applying it to what you actually eat is not as simple as it sounds.

There are many applications that allow you to track nutrition, some of them are even free, or at least offer a free trial - which in some cases is enough to get your initial insights.

In any case, we suggest looking for apps that contain information about both macro and micro-nutrients. Be careful as some may oversell a bit by saying they include micro-nutrients but actually have only 4-5 additional components so do your due-diligence before purchasing, it might be just another calorie tracker.

Preferably look for apps that let you focus on more than just the short term goal - look for graphs, patterns and ability to drill into your data.

For instance, if you frequently eat oats and peanut butter for breakfast, a calorie tracker will tell you if you hit your energy goal, while a nutrition tracker will reveal if you're getting enough fiber, iron, or vitamins.

And remember, you don't need to track forever, just as long as you see value from the insights you learn.

Happy tracking!