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.
