Notes from a Year of Food Logging

I mentioned I got my Lose It! badge for daily logging for a year the other day.  Food logging has been incredibly important tool for me – I was overweight because I spent 39 years not knowing how many calories I needed in the first place (vast over-estimate) and not really knowing too much about what I was eating (I’m talking to you fast food places!).  It has been critical to me learning how to eat better and learn what a portion is, be mindful of my food and find better ways to spend my calories.

I also have no real intention of stopping anytime soon.  I still don’t trust my sense of judgement.  I am beginning to trust my informed judgement, but only when informed by the running total for the day.

Most frequently eaten food?  Large coffee with skim milk – 513 for the year, 25714 calories (sounds like a lot but that’s about 9-10 days of calories for the year).  Of course medium and small coffee with skim milk were also high on the list.  Whole wheat breads – pretty high. 200 apples of various sizes (not part of recipes).  100+ pears.  A lot of yogurt.

So (non-scientifically) how did I do?  I think I was pretty good about logging everything or some equivalent that went into my mouth.  I’d like to say 95% or better score on this.  The one big repeated failure is my lack of recording of pasta sauce.  In a recipe – sure.  As just included as part of a meal, nope.  And we eat pasta roughly once a week.  It was the one place I drew a line in the sand about asking my wife to record how much she put into my portion (so she didn’t draw a line in the sand ).  I don’t eat a lot of sauce (I prefer it to be just enough to coat but not much extra especially since I’m not having bread to mop it up with).  So I felt okay about this one item.

Then their is the question of quantities – my wife was incredibly helpful tracking what she gave me and what she put into it for dinner.  I tend to like mass consumer food anyway and work in NYC where calorie listings are mandatory so I was able to get a lot pre-computed info.  But..still plenty of opportunity to guess.  I think this brings me down to the 85% or so score.  And that it appears was good enough!  :)

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