Since we just started our 10-Week Advanced Nutrition Course at the gym, I figured now was a good a time as any to deliver an email about a few more advanced nutritional concepts.

If you’ve ever tried to lose fat or gain muscle, you’ve probably heard about counting calories and tracking macros.

These are powerful tools that can help you understand exactly what you’re eating and how it affects your body.

But like any tools, they have pros and cons.

Tracking calories and macros (short for macronutrients, the family of nutrients that includes proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and even alcohols) gives you precise control over your diet, helping you hit your goals faster and more reliably.

It teaches portion awareness and the true makeup of different foods.

Tracking macros themselves helps improve muscle preservation, performance, health, and overall wellness while you’re dieting.

There are downsides, though.

It can be tedious and is not sustainable long-term.

It doesn’t teach you how to eat intuitively.

It can lead to unnecessary stress around food choices.

Short-term tracking of food is an amazing tool to help you hit your goals, but these downsides mean you really need to be able to compartmentalize specific diet periods and your “normal” times.

A basic rule of thumb is to not spend more than ¼ of the year in a calorie deficit. (That’s about 12-13 weeks or 3ish months.)

By compartmentalizing your diet period(s) and restricting total length, you leave yourself time in the year to recover from the calorie deficit (i.e. allow your energy, hormones, hunger, and general good vibes to bounce back, which can take a few weeks sometimes) and give yourself plenty of time to focus on building lean mass, feeling great, and improving your overall health and fitness.

If fat loss is your goal, plan short, focused periods of cutting, followed by maintenance or building phases to keep your metabolism and energy levels strong.

Tracking can be a great tool, but it’s just that—a tool. The real goal is learning how to eat in a way that fuels your lifestyle while keeping you sane.

Breaking your year up into concentrated periods of tracking with much longer periods of performance-focused exercise and intuitive eating will, in a way, allow you to have your cake and eat it too.

Except when you’re tracking. Cake is hard to track.