My New Food Journal

or, how I do not count calories

My lady-friend--referred to elsewhere as Wine Allergic Girlfriend--keeps a food journal. She writes down everything she eats and has lost significant weight because of it. She doesn't add anything up at the end of the day; she does not compute points or consult a wheel chart, she simply writes everything down. As she puts it, she just wants to be more mindful of the food she eats and forcing herself to write it down gives her that extra checkpoint: do I really want to eat this?

This inspired me to create my own food journal--we should all be so mindful--but being of the more categorically inclined type, I wanted some type of journal that would give me feedback based on what I had been eating. If I was recording data, I wanted a report on that data. I looked initially at some iPhone applications. Since I carry my phone with me most everywhere, it seemed like an ideal way to capture what I was eating and then report back to me. It is a little computer after all.

BUT OHMIGOSH were the iPhone applications complicated. Every single one I looked at required calorie and portion estimates and super-specific rundowns on what exactly was in whatever it was you ate. If you ate a Sandwich, you needed to list out the vegetables, the meat, the bread, whatever.

There are some for whom this level of detail is not only nice, but actually important to their health and well-being. This is totally reasonable and I am glad the iPhone exists to offer those folks a touch-screen way to record this data. But I realized when looking at these applications that really, I need about a Fuzzy Clock level of precision when it comes to what I eat. Fuzzy Clock lives in my computer navbar and tells me about what time it is: five past 10; quarter till 2; almost noon. It's great, because in most cases my days are not as exciting or choreographed as 24, and knowing that it's almost noon will do me just fine thank you.

Ok so same with what I am eating. Basically I want to know if I'm getting about the right amount of vegetables; or, more to the point, be reminded that I should probably have a vegetable snack rather than a cookie snack.

So, as you can see above, I created a little grid in a small notebook and labeled a column for each food group (we can argue later about whether the Food Pyramid is a good thing or not). Everytime I put food in my mouth, I write it down and then check off if that food contained Vegetables, Grains, Beans (I'm a vegetarian), Dairy, or Fruit. If it contains a significant amount of something else I'm not sure know how to categorize, I throw a check in the '?' column. Lastly, I record whether what I just ate/drank was a Meal, Snack, or Beverage, thinking that mostly I want to be eating meals rather than drinking a lot or snacking.

If at the end of the day I've got a lot of checks in the '?' column and not many in the fruit column, then that helps me focus more on fruit tomorrow. Similarly, if I look down and I see four entries for coffee, then I know I should warn Wine Allergic Girlfriend that my sleep will be, most likely, pretty restless.

Comments

[Matthew Cornell]

I love the power of pure observation - large potential for creating behavior changes, simply by recording. And paper is great!