Are you Tracking?

I wrote about Suze Orman’s appearance on The Biggest Loser and it got me thinking.  Tracking your food is hard, tracking your money is easy.

Tracking your food

Truthfully, I’ve never really tried this.  This sounds near impossible to me.  You have to keep track of everything you eat throughout the day and you have to know how much you eat of it.  My only experience with this is that I know a girl that use to (I’m not sure if she still does) actually weigh food on a scale to make sure she’s getting the right serving sizes.  It was a lot of work to weigh everything out, count out things to make sure you are eating the right amounts.  It was a surprising experience, a serving size is not very much food.

That’s just calorie intake…

What about calories burned?  This is a whole other animal.  I only know of one way for an average person to fairly accurately know how many calories they’ve burned throughout the day.  In fact, they use it on The Biggest Loser.  It is the Bodybugg, from reviews I’ve read you should look into GoWear Fit (made by the same company just a better interface on the computer).  However, these things aren’t cheap.  Without a device like these, you just guess.  You guess at the intensity of your exercise and hope you’re right.  I don’t like guessing.

Tracking money

In this day and age it is easy.  Do you bank online?  If not you should.  Everything is there.  All your transactions, all your paychecks, it’s all there.  The problem with online banking is it’s just a list of transactions and difficult to sort out.  This is were a personal finance software comes in.  I use Mint.com but there are others as well.  What Mint does is bring all of my online banking into one place.  Then it allows me to tag transactions.  That’s a paycheck, that’s pet food, that’s gas, that’s going out to dinner, you get the picture.  Now I can see all the money that is coming in and all the money going out all broken down into categories.

The one shortfall…cash.

Cash is a lot harder to track.  People who use cash will have a harder time breaking down their spending.  Who still carries cash?  I barely carry any.  Then when I do take out $40 or $50 at the ATM I track it as miscellaneous spending.  This way I know how much is going into this category.  It makes it easier for me.

Can’t change what you don’t know.

If you don’t know whether you are eating too big of portions or whether you are exercising too much (yes this can happen) or whether you are eating out too much or not making enough, you can’t change things.  Actually, I guess you could change things you just don’t know whether it will make things better or worse.  I always hear people talk about spending too much or having too much debt or being overweight.  My question is always do you know why? If you’re not tracking it your guess is as good as mine.

What do you track in your life? Why?

What do you track in your business? Why?

Tagged as: calories, money, tracking