YouTuber Mario Tomic frequently makes videos about the techniques he used to overcome his muscle-building plateau, burn fat, and achieve his desired physique, from incorporating walking into his daily routine to training more consistently.

One of the other key factors in his fitness journey has been tracking his daily calorie intake, which illuminated to him some of the simple nutrition mistakes he had been making which were holding back his results. Previously, Tomic had always made “common sense” choices with his nutrition, eating whole foods and plenty of vegetables, which helped him get to 15 percent body fat, but then he hit a wall.

“There was no way for me, just by eating clean, to get to 10 or 12 percent body fat, I just didn’t have the skills, I didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “So tracking became one of the things on my journey that eventually allowed me to get to a physique that I was really happy with.”

In a video from 2020, Tomic explains that when he started tracking, he began to see that some of his estimations and assumptions were incorrect.

“The first thing I learned from tracking my calories for so long is just how little I understood nutrition; how little I knew what I was actually eating and putting in my body,” he says. “It was almost like that moment of unplugging myself from the Matrix… I realized I was severely underestimating how many calories I was eating, I thought I was eating a lot less than I actually did, I also realized I was under-eating my protein and over-eating my fats and carbs, so those things were definitely out of balance.”

Tomic also soon found that instead of “winging it” with his meals, he began to automatically, consistently make different food choices. “Keeping a food journal was keeping me accountable,” he says. “I was planning my diet a lot more: I was preparing for social events, I knew what I was going to eat… I could also look at months’ worth of data, which really helped me organize my diet.”

Additionally, Tomic says that through tracking he learned to “trust the process,” which helped him overcome his feelings of frustration at not seeing results or reaching his long-term goals quickly enough. “As you focus on your numbers daily, you develop more patience. And as an impatient person, I was always rushing. I was so goal-obsessed, I wasn’t really thinking about the process at all.”

“When you track, you just focus on the day-to-day, you do a good job, you have that positive feedback loop,” he continues. “It becomes a habit, and that’s how I ended up tracking for 1,000 days; it just gets easier after a while… Keeping the streak is also addictive! You can find a lot of enjoyment in it.”