Two weeks ago I began counting nearly every calorie I've consumed to provide some insight on the foods I eat. As I've told people I almost always get the, WTF you're a skinny bastard you're making me feel lazy look. Then I generally follow up the comment with a, this is just for fun, to see how many calories are in the food I eat, a learning event.
I recently upgraded my phone to one that accommodates apps, and I've been keeping my food diary on it. Having one of those on my phone makes it really easy to keep track of what I am eating because I always carry my phone around with me and it makes it pretty easy to quickly add the food I eat. The app has a database of thousands of food items with complete nutrition facts. It even has a bar code scanner which makes it really easy for finding packaged foods. During my two weeks of logging I wasn't able to find anything that wasn't at least close to what I was eating. The app even has a weight tracker and exercise log for accurate calorie counting.
What did I learn? First off as weird as you might find it, I found that the days that I ate more than my 3000 calorie 'limit' I found that the next day I weighed more. Duh. For some reason I never really thought about it like that, I think I just assumed when you eat unhealthy foods you gain weight. This taught me, I can eat a lot even relatively healthy food and still gain weight.
I also learned the unhealthy foods I ate really weren't packed with tons of calories. For example, yesterday Laura and I had ice cream cones for breakfast, 150 calories. Now compared to these other breakfasts it doesn't look so bad: 2 Eggs in a basket with a glass of OJ, 512 Calories, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, 376, Calories, Oatmeal with brown sugar 330 Calories. Now I know you can't base your diet solely on calories for this reason, there are plenty of other qualities of food that are important. I would also say I stayed full longer from the ice cream than the cheerios.
Another thing I learned was when you go to a party and graze on delicious dips, chips, several beers, nearly a whole rack of ribs, a Daiquiri, and delicious red velvet cake with cool whip and fresh fruit on top for dessert, you can consume enough calories for nearly three days of eating. Which is what I did yesterday, my normal calories I 'should' consume in a day is around 3,000 yesterday I at 8,400. I now know how people can get fat so quickly. Hell two Miller Lites had more calories than my ice cream cone breakfast.
I think another thing I learned was if I ate enough fruit to get full off of I add so few calories to the count its almost felt like cheating. That was pretty cool.
Altogether if someone really wanted to get serious about losing weight a food diary is really a fantastic way to learn portion control and how eliminating your stereotypical unhealthy things from your life isn't the way to go but to limit the amount of everything.
I'm nearly back down to my college waist size and you can bet this has really helped me learn how much or little food I can consume to help me get back to where I was before.
