Original email for context: What macro/nutrient tracker do you recommend and how exactly do we put our veggies in to it? Is it just with grams?
For online tracking what you can do is use myfitnesspal.com (MFP) but combine this with searching for most ingredients by searching “Rayzel strawberries” or “rayzel celery” – this is because when we were starting the hcgchicarecipes project we wanted to make sure that we created our recipes with truly accurate macros and calories – the problem with MFP is that there are a lot of inaccurate entries in there (for instance, you could choose a food based on size or weight and you are thinking of it raw, but the listing is for cooked, and it doesn’t state either way which it is, which makes for very different calories depending on which it really is). What happens that is that you can either undereat or overeat on hCG.
So to fix that from being a problem, we basically created all our own custom ingredients by getting all the P2 veggies and fruits and weighing and measuring them, then checking how many calories and macros were in those amounts based on the USDA nutrition database – something that IS accurate.
A few tips for finding my listed ingredients in MyFitness Pal:
- We created custom ingredient entries for all sorts of cuts and amounts of veggies and fruits – so if you see a listing for whole strawberries, don’t think that’s all there is. We likely have something for diced strawberries by the cup measurement as well. We have veggie noodles and diced veggies and cut rounds of veggies – we did loose cups of lettuce and packed cups of lettuce – stuff like that- so you could truly get a pretty accurate picture of what you are eating.
- When you can’t seem to find the ingredient you are looking for under my name, note that their search function isn’t the best – if you search rayzel strawberries you might see rayzel shrimp and rayzel egg white as the first items listed, but if you continue scrolling you’ll often find what you were looking for.
- If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you can also search “usda” and then the ingredient you are looking for, and that is more likely to be accurate since hopefully that entry is pulling from the same source.
- Once you have input the items you use a few times, MFP will have a memory of your most frequently used ingredients and you will no longer have to keep searching high and low for them
- You’ll notice that I always put the grams per cup or what have you below the ingredient so you can also go by weight if you prefer over cups.
- If you are using the hcgchica recipes, you do not need to track each ingredient like this but rather just input the calories from the recipe, since this is how we got the calories and macros per serving for all our recipes.
- MFP does have an app- so download on your phone and it works great.
- You can use this app in tandem with my hCG Diet Workbook for tracking our overall journey if you like.
- All this said, we don’t all track calories on P2. If you follow the basic outline of the diet – 2 100g protein portions, 2 fruits, 2 veggie servings per day, you’re going to more or less be in the right calorie framework so you can save yourself the time if you like.
Here’s an example of the various “cuts” or preparation styles we added for many of our custom P2 ingredient entries – I also always clarify if the ingredient is weighed/measured raw or not.
