What I learned from tracking my food intake for a month

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

Over the summer, I had six weeks off from work. I filled it with camping trips, festivals, mini-breaks and lots of climbing, as well as a lot of writing.

It was great.

As a teacher, you’re blessed with a lot of time off, but I don’t like to just wake up, roll out of bed, and get on with a lazy day. I like to pack my days full of as many things as possible.

So, what better time to finally track my calories?

I’ve never done this before – or not properly at least. But getting stronger in the gym has been one of my goals for years, and years, and years. If you’re not tracking your calories (so long as you’ve got a good relationship with food), you’ll be less likely to hit your goals as quickly as you want.

Now, I feel as if I eat relatively well; I always have done. A bit of salad here, a bit of veg there; a mostly balanced diet. But how often do you run on autopilot when it comes to your food choices?

Setting goals like ‘eat healthier’ or my one – ‘get stronger’ is intangible and unquantifiable. To make real, actual, proper progress, you need to set actionable goals – and track them.

So, to put my money where my mouth is, I committed to 30 days of tracking every single thing that I ate. Not simply as a diet, but as a genuine exercise in self-knowledge and intentionality. By getting a better understanding of what I’m eating, I was hoping to get closer and closer to my strength-building goals.

To carry out this experiment, I decided to use the in-built health tracker on my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, in tandem with the Galaxy Watch Classic 4 that I reviewed a while back. Opting for this combination made the process fast and convenient, right there in the palm of my hand.

The lessons that I learned weren’t about what not to eat; they were about what I didn’t know I was eating, and what I needed to have more of to reach my goals. Here are the five unexpected insights that I learned from my tracking what I ate for a month.

The system: making the S25 Ultra work

At the start of the year, I used my new phone to act as a tour guide for our trip to Florence, Italy. By the summer, I knew that I wanted it to act as my personal food and calories tracker.

I made one rule with using this – one non-negotiable that I had to abide by: track everything. One bite, a single cashew nut, a splash of milk. The little things derail you, and the data won’t lie. If I ate it, it went into the Samsung Health app.

While I’m sure there’s probably a deeper level of food tracking, and better food-tracking apps out there which might even let you scan barcodes, I went for this one because it was, quite literally, at the end of my fingertips, reducing the friction between the food I’d prepared and entering it into the app was essential for sticking to my new habit.

I actually really loved using the default Health app due to its integration with other Health features. I already use the Sleep section to monitor my sleep hygiene, using a whole host of other hacks to improve how well I drift off and recover at night, so it was important to me that this all stayed within one place.

However, one draw back was that the food database wasn’t always perfect for the more obscure things that I ate. As a result, I had to manually enter some bits, which created more friction than I’d have liked. The clarity for the data was worth it, but I’m not sure that I’d have stuck with it if I hadn’t been off for six weeks, and therefore had the mental energy necessary to commit to this project.

The 5 unexpected lessons

With all of that being said, I think we’re now ready for my five key takeaways from tracking all of my calories for a month.

Lesson 1: The Health Halo is Real

It’s easy to assume that you can eat ‘healthy’ foods limitlessly, but these can actually send certain macros – like your fat intake – through the roof. The so-called Health Halo is where food companies label foods as healthy based on very limited actual evidence. It’s easy to get sucked into this marketing.

By tracking what I ate, it was clear that a ‘serving size’ shouldn’t always be taken as a ‘portion size’, and that you’d need to weigh out each ingredient if you really want to hit your macros goals. Also, make sure you do your own research; that delicious peanut butter might give you the illusion of being healthy, but check the ingredients to ensure it’s not full of palm oil, to keep Sat Fat contents down.

Lesson 2: The Power of Pre-Emptive Tracking

In doing my research for how to run this experiment effectively, I saw that one of the things that let people down – and let me down in my first week of the challenge – was only tracking food after it had been eaten. Instead, I got into the habit of doing this before the food had even entered the oven.

This process did have its drawbacks: if you get too full during a meal, and need to leave the rest for leftovers, it can be easy to forget about what you’d put onto your Health app, leaving you with inaccurate data.

However, pre-emptively adding food made me realise that, if I was about to go over my calorie goals, or not hit my macros for the day, I would need to substitute a food; perhaps change the portion of chips for a jacket potato, if I needed to rebalance my fat intake.

This completely changed the decision-making process, as it became a logistical puzzle, rather than an emotional decision (i.e. what do I need vs what do I want?).

Lesson 3: The Mid-Afternoon Crash

I think we’ve all been there: it’s 3pm, you’ve eaten your lunch and still have a couple of hours of work left – but you notice that you’re all out of steam. There is not a bone in your body that wants to continue doing what you’re doing; what you’d really rather do is go for a nap.

This is called the mid-afternoon crash. It’s correlated with having high-sugar, low-protein lunches, which lead to a spike and then trough in energy. While it might feel great eating those 7 chocolate bars at midday, it’s not doing your energy levels any favours.

Having cross-referenced this data with my sleep scores, it was clear that my body wasn’t tired. It was the summer break, so of course I was getting a good 7-9 hours of shut eye every night. The issue was that I was running on fumes from a rapid glucose spike and fall.

The fix wasn’t extra coffee (enjoyable as it might be…), it was making sure that my lunches were meeting my midday protein targets.

Lesson 4: Stay hydrated

When I was younger, my hydration involved profuse amounts of Ribena and Orange Squash. I’d refill my glass any time I was thirsty – and this was usually an hour or so after I noticed that I was starting to get parched.

At University, I tried to maintain this, taking a bottle of pre-made squash with me. If I was staying late on campus, I’d usually need to refill my bottle with plain water – which mixed in a really nasty way with whatever orange residue was left behind.

So, a total switch to water it was.

But I would end days still feeling dehydrated. So, I decided to track my water intake on my Samsung Health app – and what a difference I noticed. My water intake was actually well below where it needed to be, which is recommended to be around 3 litres of total fluids (including water, as well as tea, coffee, and water from vegetables). So, I swapped to a water bottle that would get me a little closer: this 2 litre behemoth.

Having most of the water that I needed with my all day, needing to only refill it once each morning, brought me way closer to my water goals. Fixing this hugely improved my lethargy, which I had initially also blamed on my sleeping patterns.

The lesson? Food tracking is a gateway to tracking all of the essentials – so don’t neglect the most basic ones.

Lesson 5: Intentionality destroys guilt

When I ate a slice of cake or demolished a bar of chocolate, I logged it. It was a conscious, intentional choice. Because it was logged, it became part of the system. I hadn’t cheated on my diet or failed to do what I intended to do – I made that choice for me.

And because of that, it removed the shame and guilt that might otherwise accompany an unplanned indulgence.

Tracking isn’t a weapon against yourself – it’s a mirror. The point is not to be perfect, but to be aware. Then, if you want to cut down on snacks or delicious treats, you have the data to explain why (“This is not helping me to reach my protein/carb/fat goals). You can then try to put the systems in place that are needed to aid with this, such as removing all cake from the house, or saying that you can have it – but not for ten or fifteen minutes. That removes the power of the choice, which is a key process to becoming Indistractible, a book that I read and reviewed not too long ago.

Call to action

My main takeaway from doing this for a month? Just as a car needs the right fuel, so too does your body. You wouldn’t put diesel in a petrol car, so why would you do the same to your body?

With all of this being said, I’m really lucky to have a healthy relationship with food. I’m not planning to continue to track my calories because doing so once has given me a better sense of what I’m putting into my body, why I’m doing it, and the purpose that it’s serving me. It’s helping me to get closer to my goals but, if it’s harmful to you, then I’d highly recommend that you don’t do this.

Have you ever tracked what you eat? What did you learn from the whole process?

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