Quick: what did you have to eat last week Thursday? And I mean everything. Every drink, snack, meal, and mouthful throughout the entire day. Chances are, you can't recall, and that's fine...unless you're trying to analyze problems with your current dietary habits and improve upon them.
Tracking everything you eat is the only reliable way to detect unhealthy patterns and measure your progress in correcting them. (The same is true for fitness, but that's another story.)
But there's more to it than that.
The very act of tracking what you eat can help you lose weight. One study showed that keeping a food log doubled the weight-loss of people on a diet and exercise plan.
But wait, there's still more!
In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg discussed keystone habits: habits that can "shift, dislodge, and remake other patterns." One such habit is exercise. (Of course it is.) Another is...drum roll please...food logging.
Then, in 2009 a group of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health published a study of a different approach to weight loss. They had assembled a group of sixteen hundred obese people and asked them to concentrate on writing down everything they ate at least one day a week.
... Then something unexpected happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn't know existed. Some noticed they always seemed to snack at about 10 A.M., so they began keeping an apple or banana on their desks for midmorning munchies. Others started using their journals to plan future menus, and when dinner rolled around, they ate the healthy meal they had written down, rather than junk food from the fridge.
This isn't detailed nutrition tracking, where you have to enter not just foods but detailed quanitities. It's just logging. The type of logging you do is not nearly so important as doing it, so you don't have to count calories or carbs or weigh and measure everything you eat and drink. Unless you're into that sort of thing, of course.
There are lots of diet tracking tools available online (most with associated mobile apps) including myfitnesspal.com, fitday.com and fatsecret.com . But you can also use old school pen and paper to get it done, using a Hipster PDA or our StrongFast tracking sheets available for download at http://strongfast.blitzometer.com/assets/food-journal.pdf .
Here are some sample entries (not necessarily recommended eating!):
8:10 am - 2 bowls of Cheerios with banana and 2% milk. Small glass of orange juice.
12:05 pm - Big salad with head of romaine lettuce, apple, sweet apple chicken sausage, baby carrots, ¼ cucumber, raisins, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
3:10 pm - Bottle of Diet Snapple and a small bag of pretzels.
More detail is fine, but don't have too much less or you'll be missing some potentially critical information to help identify patterns or "bad habits."
Other things that can be helpful to log include your energy level, sleep quality, and bathroom experiences. This can help you track down foods that are causing you physical problems your may not be aware of. (A long history of eating a food is no guarantee it's not causing problems: it may have always been trouble but you got used to it and consider it "normal" or you may have developed an intolerance to it over time.) But the crucial part is to log what you eat.
It's common for people to "cheat" on their food logs, usually by failing to write in unhealthy items, or by under-reporting quantities. One rationalization is that "it's not something I usually eat" so it's omitted as an aberration. But it's funny (not funny "ha ha") how those aberrations accumulate over time, so put them all in. It's not like you have to publish it online or anything.
Quantities are a tougher problem. People frequently underestimate how much they consume, not (usually) in a deliberate attempt to mislead but simply from miscalculating. One solution is to weigh and measure. A simpler one is to use standard approximations. Here's an easy way to estimate portion sizes:
- Protein: size of your palm
- Veggie: size of your fist
- Carbs: cup of your hand
- Fats: size of your thumb
Note that these will vary depending on your physical size, and that's good: a portion for a 6'4" man should not be the same size as for a 5'4" woman. And, of course, these will differ from standard serving sizes. The important thing is to choose one method of measuring or approximating how much you consume and staying consistent with that method.
So now you could be logging entries like this:
5:30 pm - 2 servings of chicken breast, 1 serving of broccoli with butter.
7:50 pm - 5 servings of popcorn, 3 servings of peanuts, large diet pop
Pick your method of logging, whether it's on paper, on a website or mobile device, or some other method, and get to it. It's best to log as soon as possible after eating or drinking since our memories for these things tend to be unreliable.
Happy logging!
Be seeing you.
-gary