Goals are great things.
Seriously, though, how realistic are they until we actually put them down on paper or map them out in a tangible way?
It is so easy to dream big and live small. In fact, dreaming up goals is a piece of cake. It’s living them out that proves most difficult. Speaking of cake, I was reminded of this notion when I logged my diet for a whole month.
My experience of recording what I ate for an extended period of time was a lot more in depth than I had originally perceived. I ended up learning more about not only myself in regards to my daily and weekly eating habits, but also how I manage my time.
I discovered the existence of patterns in my diet that were consistent and some that were more sporadic.
For example, on days I had earlier classes I tended to plan out what I ate a little more carefully than on days I had the option to sleep a little later. And when I did plan out my meals and snacks, they were more likely to be healthier food items as opposed to convenient, processed junk.
Tracking my diet also forced me to really take into consideration how much food I was taking in compared to how much I was burning for that specific day. Serving sizes are extremely easy to overlook. It wasn’t until I was forced to enter in portions I ate in the log that I again seriously thought about what 100 grams of nuts or half a cup of rice truly resembled. Sure, I had tracked my food before for shorter periods of time but there’s nothing like a whole month of recording your food to remind you what a real serving size looks like!
Throughout this whole experience I found that I struggle most with keeping myself accountable. Writing things down really kept me focused on what I was eating and how much. I mean, if I didn’t eat that chocolate bar, I didn’t have to write it down.
Seeing things add up throughout the day made me more conscious as well. It’s one thing to guess how much sodium is in a few handfuls of chips, but it’s a whole other can of worms to see it on paper.
As annoying as the process of logging my food was, it made me more aware of what I was putting into my body for fuel and how I was using that fuel. It might have taken time out my day to write everything down, but in the end, logging my diet actually saved me time. It saved me the time I might have been accumulating over the next few months or even years in making unwise diet choices over and over again. Sacrificing little bits of my time throughout the day to improve my lifestyle with minor changes and choices definitely beats making major changes in the future as a result of present laziness or neglect. I plan to move forward in this by limiting the amount of processed sugar I consume and paying better attention to the time of day I eat it.
Devin is a current student at Vanguard University of Southern California. She is on the school cross-country team and in her third year in the undergraduate program studying Kinesiology with an emphasis in exercise science. Read more about Devin here.
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Mason Murphy says
I can relate to this by my own eating habits. I have a set meal plan I follow but didn't realize how much I was truly supposed to have but after reading this it got me to think of how much sodium and other things I was putting in my my body without writing the contents of my meals down.