I just wanted to take a few minutes to write about two terms that I think often get confused and I also think are highly relevant to nutrition and bodybuilding. Those terms are accuracy and precision.

So basically accuracy means how close you are to your target value and I’m going to cite Wikipedia here. Wikipedia says in the fields of science, engineering industry and statistics, the accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of measurements of quantity to that quantities actual or true value. So in the case of tracking let’s say calories we would be accurate if our goal value was 2,400 calories and we were hitting around that target pretty closely on a consistent basis. So I’ve drawn a imaginary picture where we would be accurate if this was our target of 2,400 and we were eating 2300, 2500, 2375. Let’s say we’re around the target but on average we’re averaging around 2,400. Now we can contrast this with precision which is essentially how well the individual values correspond to one another. If this is our target value of 2,400 we could be eating 2601 2602 2599 and all the values would be really close to one and there but they aren’t accurate because they aren’t close to the 2400 goal. And I wanted to point this difference out to say that it’s much more important to be accurate with your tracking than it is to be precise with your tracking. A lot of people get obsessive and they make sure that down to each and every gram of carbohydrate protein and fat it has to be dead-on to what it is that they want and I think that this is actually pretty futile for a few reasons.

First of all when you set up your daily caloric intake or your daily macronutrient intake it’s kind of arbitrary to begin with, whether you’ve determined it from a formula in a nutrition textbook or a calculator online or if you’ve just done a guess and check method yourself, it’s sort of arbitrary it isn’t that precise you’re not going to know exactly what your maintenance calories are we just don’t really have the accessible technology yet to do that.

The second reason is that there’s a degree of uncertainty associated with the reported nutritional content on food labels. These guys are not reporting it exactly to the gram that you think they are all the time, so it’s a little bit futile to expect your daily values to be that precise when the information that you’re tracking just isn’t that precise to begin with.

The third reason is that you aren’t really aware of how much energy you’re expending on a daily basis, so to be super precise with the food that you’re taking in, without being super precise about your energy that you’re expending, is kind of a mismatch there and it just renders it essentially a waste of mental energy to be extremely obsessive about how precise you are with your macronutrients. It would be much better to put more emphasis on how accurate you are with your macronutrients and just try to be around your daily targets consistently on a daily basis over time and then that will give you much better results without having to worry about precision excessively.