One Percent Higher Fat Content

[livingdeb]

There was a wellness fair today. Although I have been improving my fitness level over the past couple of years, as measured by resting pulse, blood pressure, and lung capacity, I have not been improving my fat composition. I went from being 32.98% fat last year at this time to 33.7%. The margin for error on this instrument is +/-3%, but it still seems likely that I ought to pay attention to this.

I already pay attention to my activity, recording objective and comparable, if flawed, data (numbers from my pedometer). I'm going to start doing the same for my diet.

I've never done that before. I've compared servings of different things so that I know which is the better choice to make, but I've never kept a food journal, at least not for more than a few days, and I've never counted total calories or other nutrients for a day. It sounds like a giant pain.

And of course, there's going to be plenty of experimenter bias and that thing where merely measuring something changes the data. Like I had to quit eating chocolate chips out of this bag once I'd decided I'd eaten the amount they are calling one serving because my estimate would only get more and more inaccurate the more I ate.

Bad diet plan: eat only things for which I can easily find nutrition information. So that would include fast food and things in packages. It would exclude produce.

At first I want to just observe what I normally eat for a while and get used to measuring things and whatnot. Then I'll see what surprises I discover, like that one time I discovered my lunch didn't have enough calories. And then based on that, I'll make some sort of plan to improve that reality.

I'd heard good things about fitday.com, so I checked it out. It has an unbelievably nice food journal, in addition to a bunch of other stuff I won't be using. You can look things up and type in quantities and it keeps track of fat, carbs, protein, fiber, and a bunch of vitamins and minerals for you. And if you have the information for something not on their list, you can add it to your custom list once, and then click on that every time you eat that.

I'm also going to use it to calculate the nutrient values of my favorite recipes. I've found some tools for that before but they either cost money, show only the things that are on the Nutrition Facts section of American packaging (quite minimal), or have only weight measures without calculating percentages of daily recommended amounts. FitDay has percentages on all kinds of things. Next time I publish a recipe here, you'll get some of that information, and although they will be percentages based on my gender, age, weight, etc., they will still be cool to have.

Alright, any other hints from folks who have kept food journals (or have good hints for other reasons) would be greatly appreciated. Bleh, I don't even know how much peanut butter I put on a sandwich. Once you stuff it into a measuring spoon to measure it, how do you get it all back out to put it on the bread?

Comments

[sallini.livejournal.com]

If you are at all serious about tracking your food intake, I recommend getting a nice food scale. They aren't very expensive and work wonderfully. Mine is flat, so you can put a plate or bowl on it, and it allows you to zero out the weight of the e.g. plate with a piece of bread that you are about to spread peanut butter on. Scales also have other non-dieting related benefits. I also use it for measuring out quantities of stuff like mayonnaise or honey (or peanut butter, back when I ate it) into recipes that are otherwise annoying because they stick to the measuring implement; this way you just squeeze until you reach the correct number of grams and have no measuring cup to deal with. Other people swear by them for measuring out flour for baking and so forth but I do not make anything touchy enough to require that degree of precision.

In diet journaling, the Hawthorne effect is a feature, not a bug. When journaling, I have found myself unwilling to eat some ridiculous thing because I don't want to have to write it down or because I know that the quantity that I will be satisfied with eating is too high to want to have to count it. You do need to make the commitment that you will write down everything for it to work well, though, IMO.

Good luck. I hope you will report on how it goes for you.

Got one!

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

I did just get a scale. I'm not sure it's a good one--I started with a cheap one ($7) just to see if I'd use it. It comes with a bowl, or you can take off the bowl and access a flat surface. And you can change the zero point. And it's analog, which I like.

It turns out Robin's been thinking of getting a kitchen scale, too. He'll settle for this one if it turns out to be accurate. I haven't actually bothered to measure the accuracy yet, though (other than noticing that the needle turns in the expected direction). He says it will be good for European recipes that use weight rather than volume.

I have already used the scale to measure butter and pumpkin butter by measuring the containers before and after spreading the substance on my toast. It works great.

Honey and molasses are things I have always avoided because of the measuring problem, but you're right, I can now make gingerbread.

I think I remember my mom using a scale to help her divide hamburger into matching patties, which she then shaped in a little plastic doohicky.

I have actually been thinking of getting a kitchen scale for weighing things I want to mail. Sadly, you no longer just add a postcard stamp for every additional ounce after the first, so I'll mostly be going to the post office anyway.

The Hawthorne effect works if it keeps you from eating something. But I can also see it making me want to eat a whole, easily measurable serving rather than stopping whenever I feel like it! Like that third square of chocolate I'm having when I finish this, which will bring me up to 1/3 of a serving. (Okay, people who know math have no excuse for this, and since when is it harder to type in .22 than .33?)