Finding the Starting Point, Part 2

Part 2: Establishing Your Eating Norm
Using the GPS analogy, you have entered the zip code and now it's time
to enter your street address. I can't stress enough how important it
is to get a handle on exactly what is the norm for your current eating
habits. I have multiple issues with prescribed diet plans, but one of
them is that they don't address your habitual eating behavior. Even
if the diet plan works, once the goal has been achieved, we leave the
diet plan and go right back to our old way of habitual eating which
then puts us right back where we started. Sound familiar? Well,
let's break that vicious circle!
We mostly eat out of habit. Yes, it's essential to life and we get
hungry, but it's habit that makes us pick up the same things at the
grocery store and prepare the same food at home. It's habit that
drives us to stop at the same fast food chains, pick up a grande
calorie coffee on the way into work, drink a few beers in the
afternoon, or pull out the same snacks while watching TV. The first
step to changing those habits into habits that will promote fitness is
to understand clearly what it is that we do. This is what I mean when
I say that we need to establish our eating norm.
The only way I know to do this is to make a list. We absolutely must
write down everything we eat over the course of a day. How much
information you record on this list or the number of days that you
keep the list going is up to you. As I've mentioned before when
discussing body size and will undoubtedly mention again, the key is
doing this in a way that suits you so that you'll really do it. We
can design the perfect widget, but if you won't use it then it's a
waste of time. So while I can't think of any way to work around
making a list of food consumed within a day, below I offer several
ways you can gather and record this information.
First, go back to your "My Starting Point" document and write: "My
Eating Norm" and add today's date. Then start a list with the title
"Food I eat in a day."
Method 1: The Basic List
This list is really the minimum information you can gather and still
hope to have something you can use. It's just as it sounds. Start
writing down everything you eat within a day. Make sure it's really
everything and try not to use too many generic terms. So if you
record that you eat cereal, write down what kind of cereal such as
frosted mini wheats. Don't leave out anything such as the piece of
candy you picked up when walking through the lobby of your office or
the soda you drank while out running errands. It must contain
everything.
This is harder than it looks on the surface. You will need to figure
out the best way to make it happen. You could carry a note pad with
you and write things down all day. You could open a note page on your
PDA and record it that way. You could wait till you're home in the
evening and sit down to write a list from memory. However you do it,
be honest and thorough.
In order to get a really good snapshot of your eating norm, keeping a
list every day for a week is best. Since how we eat is mostly
habitual, it is often driven by our other daily activities. So if you
work in retail or some other industry that doesn't allow for much time
to eat while you are working, then you will discover that your work
day eating habits look very different from how you eat on your day
off.
If you can't bring yourself to make a list every day for a week, then
pick two or three days on which you do very different kinds of things
and make lists for those days. In the end you want an accurate
assessment of what you are feeding your body so that you can make
smart decisions about how to improve your eating to achieve your
fitness goals.
Method 2: List plus Portion Size
To provide a little more information with which to work, beside each
food item on your list, write down the portion size. Weighing,
measuring and calculating it from the package information is the most
accurate way to do this, but if that's too much, then record the
portion size in some way that will be meaningful to you. So if you
recorded that you ate frosted mini wheat for breakfast, and you can't
bring yourself to use a measuring cup to determine how much you put in
your bowl, then you could write something like "frosted mini wheat,
blue bowl about ¾ full." With that information you can later decide
if you want to give yourself more or less than your typical serving to
achieve your fitness goal.
Method 3: Caloric Distribution
This is my preferred method of establishing my eating norm and later
to track changes to how I eat in order to achieve my goals. If this
is the street address information for the GPS, then the basic list is
like putting in the street name only, adding portions is like putting
in an approximate street number, and writing down calories is like
putting the exact full street address. The more information with
which you choose to work, the more accurate your results will be. But
of course, accurate information does you no good if you won't collect
it. Regardless of my obvious preference, it's still about choosing
the method that you will use.
To establish an eating norm through calories consumed, you need to
track calories at four levels: total calories, calories from fat,
carbohydrates and protein. If you have health issues such as diabetes
or high blood pressure, then you may also want to track other things
such as carbohydrates broken down into fiber and sugar, or sodium
content. But to establish a baseline for weight gain or loss, this
basic break down is sufficient.
Now when you look at the food you eat during a day, you want to look
up the nutrition facts about that food and record this caloric
information. This also requires more specific portion size
information. No source is going to be able to calculate the caloric
content of frosted miniwheat, blue bowl about ¾ full. You can,
however, easily learn that a cup of frosted mini wheat has 183 total
calories, 9 calories from fat, 135 calories from carbs, and 16
calories from protein. If you added a half cup of whole milk to that
bowl of cereal, you added 75 total calories, 36 calories from fat, 22
calories from carbs, and 16 calories from protein.
No way am I going to say anything but that this is a lot of work.
When I started out charting calories, I was totally surprised at how
much time I spent thinking about feeding myself! It's just another
indicator as to how much eating is habitual which means that we mostly
do it with little to no consideration. Of course, it's this lack of
consideration that got us into the situation of being less fit than
we'd like, and so it's going to take some effort to reverse this.
If you choose this method to establish your eating norm, collect the
information and then go to your "My Starting Point" document and
write: "My eating norm:" followed by summary information from your
daily chart such as "day 1, total calories XXX; fat calories XXX" etc.
Keep the complete daily list somewhere handy so you can refer bakk to
it when it's time to make decisions about needed changes to achieve
your fitness goals.
For more information about charting calories, check out an earlier
posting to this blog, "Counting Calories, The Bane of Any Fitness
Program"