Keeping a food journal is an essential step towards weight control. If you don’t know what you’ve eaten, and how much, how can you control your intake? Rule #1: Regulate your food intake.
Keeping track of your weight is also essential for weight control. How do you know your calorie counting is effective and honest? The proof is your weight. Rule #2: Weigh yourself regularly.
This could be called the well-regulated approach to weight control: Regulate your food intake and weigh yourself regularly.
There is also a transformation: start seeing the world like a thin person. Everyone who is thin and stays thin is putting a lot of work into it. They absolutely weight themselves, check the fit of their clothes, count the notches in their belts, and have a hundred ways of making sure their body is under control. It is so important to them that they spend a lot of time doing it. On the eating side, people who are thin eat just enough to avoid hunger. That’s the main reason they eat. To the dedicated thin person, eating enough to be stuffed full feels like failure. For an overweight person, feeling full is associated with comfort and happiness. Not being full causes anxiety.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – oven toasted Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissantwich (400); with Tobasco
- 400 calories
Lunch – Aldi frozen pizza half (600);
- 600 calories
Dinner – 12oz homemade lentil soup (230); 1 Tyson panko chicken breast filet (200); 4 oven roasted Brussels sprouts (60)
- 490 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80); beef jerky (90);
- 80 calories
Total for the day: 1660 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)
History and transformation
I used to think that atkins and low carb and keto diets meant you could eat just as much as you wanted, as long as you restricted what kinds of foods you could eat. Bacon? Have a pound! Bread? Not a wafer! But I tried it. Amazingly, it was my most successful attempt ever. I didn’t have to change a thing about my eating behavior, except I made sure not to exceed 30g of carbs per day. That’s about the same carbs as an English muffin. I actually lost about 20 pounds while eating as much low carb food as I wanted (such as: meatballs, bacon, peanut butter, cheese). But then I hit a wall and didn’t lose any more.
It turns out that I was probably eating fewer calories by skipping bread, chips, pizza, ice cream, candy, and other sugar rich foods. There’s only so much peanut butter a person can eat from a spoon. It was the most I ever lost, but it relied on magic: I didn’t have to change myself. I only had to eat the Right Magic Foods. That was not a helpful lesson for me. And I gained all that weight back. Now, while living a weight control lifestyle, I eat anything I like and I lose weight. Take that, magic diets!
Today I was talking to a lady about weight loss – she noticed I had lost weight. She was complaining that she was having trouble losing 20 pounds. Interestingly, she was sure I was skipping meals, and that was my secret to weight loss. It’s terrible how people try to lose weight by punishing themselves, being hungry, deprivation, and not changing their minds instead.
I couldn’t and didn’t condense the whole Doctor of Things lifestyle into the 10 minute we had to talk, but I did get across two ideas. The first is that keeping a food journal is essential. You don’t even have to restrict what you are eating. Just keep the journal, weigh and measure everything you eat. Then at least you will know. You will know why you are not losing weight.
Spoiler: it’s because you are eating too much. Your goal is to be full. And you have no idea how much you are eating. If she starts keeping a journal, she will be surprised at just how much she is eating. I was. But I learned a lot about myself that way. It’s important. Keep the journal!
Change your mind and your body will follow. How would you change your mind?
-The Doctor
Food for thought – people notice you have lost weight. There is no secret to how this is done – you have an addiction, you have a terrible disease, or you write down what you eat, count your nutrients and consume less than you burn. If someone does not get these concepts – well being dumb is not a crime. So, when somebody comments about your weight loss – the last thing they want to hear is what you really did. It is like preaching Christ to an athiest (or vice-versa) They want to tell you what you are doing and have you agree. People are funny that way!
Ha, it is a secret how it is done. Otherwise everyone would be in control of their weight. Nobody will write down a food journal and count calories unless they have changed their mind first. The world is full of food journals that are a few days or weeks long, then abandoned. You can’t force yourself to go against your life goals, not for long. Change your goals, change your mind, and the food journal can be kept every day.