Write it down...

Like everyone else, I would like to eat better, exercise more, weigh less, and look cuter.  Most of all, I want to feel good.  Because I am lazy, I love finding ways to accomplish lots of things at once, so this post makes me happy.

The picture is a notebook and pens.  They may be my best weapon for accomplishing my goals around eating.  Numerous studies suggest that writing down what we eat significantly impacts what we put in our mouths.  For one thing, we don’t really want to write down that we ate an entire carton of ice cream, so we might stop at a bite or two, or skip it entirely.  For another, it makes us conscious of the fact that we ate more bread or fewer vegetables than we thought.  It forces mindfulness.

Beyond that, keeping track of what we eat, how much, when, and how we feel supplies us with useful data.  If it turns out that we feel terrible every time we eat eggs and we had not yet made the connection, we can then adjust our intake.  Or we might learn that the days we skip our afternoon snack are the days we Must Have Chocolate in the middle of the night.  We can see the patterns.

As much as I like notebooks and pens and writing, I really really hate writing down what I eat.  It is a challenge not to write down “annoyed” for how I feel every time.  That is why I have added this post.  I have now told anyone reading this that I am going to do it, so it’s out there, in the world.  Ask me to show you!  Hold me accountable!  It is another way to make the practice more effective.  (And, of course, I am happy to hold you accountable, too.)

Let’s do this.