Have you ever weighed and tracked your food? If not you definitely should it’s an incredibly useful practice, especially if fat loss is a goal.

Today isn’t a primer on food tracking though, it’s about how those food tracking apps and activity trackers can fail us.

Most of the food tracking apps have a feature that accounts for your exercise. A nifty little feature that will add calories back to your daily budget when you enter your exercise manually or if your tracker is linked to it.

While this seems like a cool feature it doesn’t help especially when fat loss is a goal. The reason being is it makes us think it’s ok to eat more calories. And quite frankly that defeats the whole purpose of a fat loss diet.

You can quickly put the brakes on a fat loss diet by eating a few hundred extra calories, and giving yourself a pass to do so just compounds the problem. Most of us are not that great at tracking our food, so do yourself a favor and don’t add back exercise calories. It is likely not helping you in the long run.