How to track nutrition while training for a competition?
Doing my first physique competition in 6 months. I know nutrition needs to be dialed in but tracking 5-6 meals a day is tedious. How do you competitive folks handle the logging burden during prep?
Most competitors I coach eat the same meals daily during prep. Once you log it once, you just copy the day. MFP lets you copy meals, so does Cronometer. Monotonous but efficient.
Food scale is non-negotiable for comp prep. You need to be within 50 cals of your target daily. Weigh everything in grams, not cups/tablespoons. Way more accurate.
I eat the same 5 meals every single day during prep. Saves mental energy. I logged them once in my app and just copy daily. Boring as hell but it works.
For prep accuracy you probably want a food scale + manual logging. But for off-season or casual tracking, PlateLens photo logging is clutch since you can log in seconds. During comp prep though, precision matters too much for photo estimates.
Prep your meals on Sunday, weigh and log everything then, and just eat the same thing all week. You'll spend 30 min logging once instead of 5 min per meal every day.
Spreadsheet gang here. I build a meal plan in a spreadsheet with exact macros and just follow it daily. No daily logging needed once the plan is built.
The "eat same meals and copy daily" strategy is smart. Going to build my prep meal plan this weekend and stick to it. Thanks for the practical tips!
One thing that helped me: have 2-3 meal templates you rotate. Gives a tiny bit of variety while keeping logging simple. Monday meals, Tuesday meals, etc.