Everyday Systems

I was just wondering how many of you keep a food journal. Also, do you have any goals about drinking water or eating a certain number of fruits and vegetables (my Weight Watcher training kicking in here)?
One more question -- how much exercise do you do?

Thanks,

Patty

I try to max out the fruits and veggies. Used to be a lot better about this; ate eight or nine servings a day and found it was a great way to squeeze other foods out of my diet (simply didn't have room for cookies or chips if I managed to eat that many veggies).

I keep a pretty good written record of what I eat. Not calorie-tracking, just what I ate.

For the first three months of No-S, I aimed at 20 to 30 minutes of exercise each day ... mostly walking. This really helped and I saw some results!

The only thing I write is what you see in my daily check-in here, and that's limited to dinner on no-s days, treats on s-days, and exercise. I want to keep myself honest, as it were, in the program, but not get obsessive about anything.

I agree with the previous posts. I do often mention what I eat in my daily-check-in thread on this forum. I do it more for historical curiosity and to have data available for trend-spotting, but I don't get too obsessive about it.

The beauty of No-S is 3 platefuls of food per day (actually I do 2 platefuls). That's the only counting you need to do.

I kept a book of what I ate for about a month to get an idea of what I was eating. Sometimes I'd work out a rough estimate of the kJ-count, just out of curiousity. I've stopped now, but I think in a month or two I'll do it again, in order to compare & contrast.

I also ought to go see a doctor for a general check up (its been a few years) so I'd like to have something to take along and make sure I'm getting everything I should be, nutrition-wise (I don't think it will be a problem).

I'm still using the same book to write down my weight every so often, and any observations on the progress of no-sing.

Kathleen.

I don't think keeping a journal on what you eat is obsessive. You've just got a record that you can look back on and it could help to see what you've been eating if you have any health problems or if you find it hard to lose weight.

On the other hand, the beauty of this "diet" is that you don't have to write down what you eat.

Maybe it will be instructive to you - it seems to be so for many here. But if I had to write down what I was eating, I might not even do No S.

Do what feels right, but don't feel like you should record. If it helps, great. If not, no problem.

Last year, just to find out more about my eating habits, I kept a diary for about eight months of EVERYTHING I ate down to excruciating detail (even mayonnaise on a sandwich, for example). I logged the whole thing in a spreadsheet and also calculated my vitamin/mineral intake (using data about specific foods from a fantabulous free online site, www.nutritiondata.com).

I actually didn't count the calories. Mostly I was trying to see how much of the recommended daily minimum of nutrients I could get by diet alone. I wanted to see if what I usually ate left me "high and dry" on certain vitamins or anything.

It also was a way to get a handle on just what I was eating to check areas where I needed improvement (was I eating enough veggies on average, how many servings of meat did I get in an average week, how was my dairy or fiber consumption, etc.)

This was a really useful exercise for me; very educational. Some of the things I learned were:

- If you really eat five or more veggies a day, you won't have room for snacks!!
- It was much easier to eat enough fruits/veggies in a day if I got a running start with two servings of same at breakfast.
- I eat more than enough dairy products!
- Fiber fills me up and keeps me from getting hungry.
- Most of all ... if I didn't eat dried beans and peas (navy beans, red beans, black beans, pintos, lentils, split peas, etc.) I almost never got up to the recommended daily intake, especially on B vitamins and certain minerals.
- Said beans and peas are so cheap, they're practically free. Learned to make them a major part of my diet ...

Food journaling can be useful a short term exercise, but it gets to be a real pain. I don't think it's something you want to rely on long term.

If you want to keep track of something, I'd recommend simple "days on habit" until you hit 21. If you follow them, the no-s rules are a good enough approximation for limiting excess. After 21 days only record deviations and "funny stuff." The pain of recording then becomes positively useful: an additional incentive not to do anything you'd be obligated to write about. Virtue should become a given; there's no point in meticulously recording it, and not having to becomes an additional reward.

The question is how to get maximum accountability for minimum effort. Your minimum might be a little higher than mine, but I'd recommend minimizing it as much as possible. Food journaling sounds so innocent and virtuous, but it's an expensive, even dangerous (if it leads to food-obsession) prop.

Reinhard

I agree completely with Reinhard, calorie counting and tedious tracking of your nutritional intake can very quickly become a pain in the butt. The real problem is when you let the annoyance of following this tedious recording routine get to be too much for you and you just bail out on both the recording and your good eating habits all at once.

Despite this good advice, however, I have been using www.fitday.com to monitor my own food intake, exercise, and nutritional information for awhile now. I do this because it is not a problem for me to do so (I am at a computer for 8 hours a day at work, and have more than enough time to enter this information when I'm not doing other things), and I find that being able to take a look at my eating trends over time helps me to be more readily able to comprehend and deal with my own little nutritional issues.

For those who are interested in this type of monitoring - and again I do not necessarily suggest it unless you have some true need for it, or know yourself well enough to know that monitoring will not pose a problem - fitday.com accounts are 100% free and provide an excellent array of tools for monitoring your caloric and nutritional intake, exercise and estimated lifestyle energy (calorie) usage, and many, many reporting features for tracking your progress (or lack thereof) over time. If you are interested, the following is a link (these links are optional from within your account and not required if you wish to keep your information private) to my own summary page if anyone is interested in seeing an overview of what fitday.com offers:

http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/PublicJour ... =gl00ml0rd

Note: I do not work for fitday.com, I don't really care if you support them or their product, I'm only mentioning this because I found it to be a particularly useful tool for my purposes.

Food journaling can be useful a short term exercise, but it gets to be a real pain. I don't think it's something you want to rely on long term.

Ditto!

Peace,
Deb

You are all absolutely brilliant!

Patty

I have stopped keeping a journal since starting No S - I am even stopping the daily accountabililty of my Daily Check In - as it feeds my food obsessions.

MerryKat, that's a very interesting point, and I imagine there are lots of people in the same boat who would be helped by your observation.

It is pretty amazing how No-S is so simple and therefore its variations and iterations can be adapted easily to address particular needs.