Food Diaries

I have to say that almost at the top of my list of things that I don't want to do is start keeping a food diary again.

I did, for a very long time. I did it obsessively for a year and a half right after Michael and I got married, before we were eating low carb. I have to say that one of the extreme pleasures of low carb for me was that I felt like I could stop keeping a food diary, after I got the hang of it. And it just made everything better, in two ways.

First, it always takes me a lot of time. I eat almost no prepared foods, so all the components of every recipe have to go in there somewhere, and it can take ages if its something complicated. I can get around that with recipes that I prepare often... but that's not a lot of things. So it forces me to spend a lot of time and get obsessive about measuring and, all in all, put a lot of much-needed brain cells into an activity that doesn't thrill me. And I hate all the software, too, to varying degrees.

Secondly... although I suppose that it doesn't really have to be this way... it causes a lot of marital friction, or at least it did when it was "our" food diary and not "my" food diary, because I had to keep careful track of what Michael ate, and I am not that great about keeping my mouth shut about things that I think he shouldn't eat. Which is a whole different post, I think, the different ways that people relate to food. And I don't want to go down that road again; we have entirely enough stress going on already.

But let's face it. I am not losing weight at any great speed. Or, really, at all. Just bouncing the same few pounds back and forth. And I'll regain them next week when I go to NYC with my student team, if I'm not VERY careful anyway. I'm feeling fitter since I've been doing the Wii (more about that some time in the future), even though it's been kind of intermittent, and I've been eating a better balance of food lately. And everyone who's commented is right, and I do eat too much salt, and so on... and I know that I'm stressed, etc.... but at the end of the day, I need to do something to change the current pattern. And much though I hate this idea, I think that I'm going to have to go back to a food diary, at least for a while, and make sure that my carbs AND calories are where they should be. I think that my carbs are ok, but that really, I just eat too much to actually lose weight.

And so I'm just going to have to go back to doing this, at least for a while.