Diary

Sunday's post about nutrition and food planning left out one very important thing:

You must keep a diary. That really should be step 1. The diary will keep you honest with yourself. It seems like it would be easy to remember each meal. When you get hungry, you will conveniently forget about that cookie or candy bar you ate. When you write down what you eat, you will be faced with your choices. Remember, you are doing this for yourself and no one else. If you decide to have a candy bar, that's totally fine. Just write it down so you don't forget and eat another one tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday…

I know it sounds daunting, but it really isn't bad. You can take the old fashion route: get a small notebook and a pen. Just make an entry for each meal and exercise. Record the food, meal time, calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein of everything you eat. Do it while you are eating or immediately after, before you forget. There's no need to follow any particular format or style, as long as you are recording your food. No one will look at this but you, so you only need to make it legible to yourself! For example, my written diary entries look like this:

Tuesday, May 5 - Daily Calorie goal 2200Kcal

600Kcal Breakfast 8AM:

Egg Sandwich, 320Kcal, F 9g, C 28g, P 26g

Oatmeal, 190Kcal, F 2g, C 38g, P 6g

Americano with milk, 60Kcal, F 4g, C 3g, P 4g

300Kcal Snack 11AM:

Greek Yogurt and Cheerios, 270Kcal, F 4.5, C 31g, P 26g

Exercise 2PM:

30 Minutes treadmill

If you're a tech savvy iPhone user, there are a number of iPhone apps that will allow you to track your daily food intake. I use an app called Lose It! From Fit Now. The app is Free and it has a huge database of foods and it allows you to create custom foods (very important).

Why go to all this trouble?

1 - Your health: healthy eating means knowing exactly what you eat. Food is essential to life. What you eat has a direct impact on your body. It's something we all must do to survive and the more healthy the food, the better we feel. Eating without thinking is a shortcut that will come back to haunt you.

2 - The environment: As you begin to keep track of what you eat and get used to reading the labels, you'll become aware of the origin of the foods and the ingredients. Why buy English muffins that were shipped across the country when there's a brand that comes from Seattle?