Should I plan my food ahead or log it as I eat?

Nikkiey has lived both sides of this. On Ep. 55 she describes logging each meal after eating it and constantly landing over on carbs and fats and short on protein, often because foods she assumed had protein were mostly fat or carbs. She was frustrated enough to want to quit, until she started planning every meal the night before. She calls that switch a game changer. On Ep. 54 she puts it bluntly: tracking as you go sets you up for failure, because you hit the end of the day with 20 grams of protein, 50 of carbs and 30 of fat left and end up macro hoarding, which leaves you feeling awful and sleeping badly.

In her daily habits video she calls after-the-fact tracking a post-mortem. Log first, eat second. When the day is mapped out before it starts, you can see that dinner needs more protein or swap a snack before it's too late. In her 2,000-calorie planning video she shows how the night-before plan works in practice: about 20 minutes to plan, meals portioned into containers, and the next day you just pull them from the fridge.

There is one nuance. On Ep. 54 Nikkiey says that once tracking is a solid habit, more experienced trackers can go half the day without logging, then check in to see what's left. That's a later stage. Start by building the habit of planning ahead.