Food Journaling = Food On My Mind

mastidon

This past week I've been dedicated to journaling my food for many purposes. The first purpose is probably why we all do it, to keep track of all the calories I eat. A sub-purpose of that was to see if I could return to eating 5-6 small meals again & keep those meals small, instead of them growing. Months ago I realized my small meals had grown to larger meals, and I put myself on a 3 meals a day program with one snack. This plan worked better & kept my calories at bay, and I lost some weight just in time for my wedding. Another purpose of my food journaling was to see if I could do it without getting obsessed if I had lost weight everyday and/or obsessing how many calories everything was that I saw or wanted to consume.

Now a few days into this & I truly believe when I do count calories I do get obsessed & all I have is food on my mind. Then I end up getting so narrowly focused on food, that I actually eat too much when I count calories because that's all I think about. I'm determined to stick to the journaling for a week, however, I wonder if anyone else has these issues.

Thoughts?

demonNIИ

That's one reason I don't journal... and lack of time working full time exercise...etc

lynn1982

The same thing happened to me at the beginning. I started eating the same thing for breakfast and lunch almost every day and I don't really vary my snacks either. So then it's only dinner that I need to decide on. I know it's boring, but it made it easier.

AlsDonkBoxSquat

Sounds like you need to figure out how to work out your relationship with food. If I could do this successfully without food logging I wouldn't have ended up here in the first place. For the first month I was pretty obsessive, but as I increased my exercise and opened up my available calorie count I realized that if I earned it I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted as long as it was healthy, and if I could eat pretty much anything I wanted within reason I didn't have to focus on the food as much because of the quality of the food I was eating. It was a one for one, exercise allowed me to get a healthier perspective on food. I don't even know if that makes sense.

auntiebabs

This helped me loosen up a bit, but gave me comfort that I would not go too far astray.

Rather than being uberstrict with the target MFP set for me I did the math to find out the calories needed to maintain my goal weight and my current weight and I gave myself a range with 1200 as my rock bottom, lose 1 lb/wk as my target and maintain my goal weight as the top of my range. As long as I keep within in this range I'll lose. I tend to naturally zig zag my calories 3-4 at very close to my target and then a higher calorie day closer to the top of my range.

My safety valve was knowing that as long as I stayed under maintain my current weight calories I won't gain. So no need to throw in the towel, just pick-up where I left off.

also once my lose 1 lb/week target was down to 1200 calories I switch to lose 1/2 lb/ week (1200 cal rock bottom, 1/2 lb/week as my target, maintain goal weight as the high end of my range.)

Once I found ways to lessen the stress, I found it way easier to focus on the process and let the results follow.