You’ve reached your goals! Is it time to stop tracking macros? Is this approach practical long term? If you stop tracking will you undo all of your hard work?

There’s no need to fear tracking macros because you’re unsure about the long term benefits.

Let’s be real, you never truly cross the finish line of your goals, they’re always ongoing. As soon as you reach one goal, a new one is born. Tracking macros lets you learn seriously valuable info about your body, nutrition and your relationship with eating. This is knowledge you keep for life and it makes your future goals much easier to reach.

Will you continue to track macros in pursuit of your future endeavors? *Spooky ghost voice*. Nooooboooody knooooows! You don’t have to choose right now, but eventually you’ll decide if you want to weigh and log everything you eat for the rest of your life, or not.

Tracking Your Macros is No Fad Diet
Remember your first job in a brand new career? You didn’t know anything. You were awkward, made mistakes and needed help.

Eventually you got the hang of it, though. Through hard work and experience, you became a professional.

Tracking your macros long enough means you can acquire practical skills for life outside of tracking:

You Visually Identify Healthy Portions
Soon you can recognize what 150 g of meat or 200 g of broccoli looks like.

In the past you might have free poured some wine or boiled fists full of pasta with no concept of carbohydrates. After a few months of weighing your pasta before you boil it, you can eyeball or use your hand to identify a healthy portion, no problem.

This skill also lets you judge (without measuring) how much fat, protein or carbs you’ve consumed and whether or not you need more or less for the rest of the day.

You’re More Aware of What You Eat
No one realizes how much – or little – they’ve been eating until they start physically monitoring it. I’ll bet at some point you discover(ed), to your shock, that you consume crazy high or low amounts of certain macronutrients.

Many seemingly healthy or ‘light’ meals are full of hidden calories and it’s not uncommon for your innocent neighborhood salad to have more calories than a hamburger. You become proficient in identifying lighter choices over calorie dense ones.

You’ve Permanently Fixed Poor Food Choices
Before tracking you ate a whole avocado or drank two vanilla lattes every day. Then you found out it was actually holding you back from your goals. Once you switch those problematic diet staples with better options, congrats — you’ve fixed that issue for life.

Your Taste Preferences Change
After switching calorie dense foods with alternatives that align better with your goals (replacing bacon with turkey bacon, lattes with black coffee or white rice with cauliflower rice) you actually start enjoying your new replacements.

In fact, you crave them, get excited about them and tend to leave behind or even stop enjoying the food of your past. Who would have thought!

There is no need to fear life after macros. Work hard and be diligent today so that in the future your nutrition can run seamlessly in the background.

And remember that if you do stop, you can always come back to tracking. It’s like riding a bike, you never lose these skills.