Food – Month-End Update

I’m wrapping up the fourth month in my year-long foundations project. This month, my focus was on food. You can also read my opening update, and my book notes for the month. Previous months centered on fitness, productivity and money.

You can also watch my wife’s and my conversation about how this month in the ongoing project went:

Eating Better and Healthier

This month was a bit unusual because I made most of the changes I wanted to make to my eating habits during the fitness month, which was the first month of my year-long project. Although I read a lot more and deepened my knowledge of many of the aspects of nutrition I was unclear on, behaviorally speaking, I was already pretty happy with my eating habits when this month began.

My focus for the month, then, was on tracking my food intake. In particular, I was curious to see how my actual eating habits conformed to both dietary guidelines and my own subjective sense of how healthy I have been eating.

As an experiment, I found tracking my food intake for the month to be informative. In terms of nutritional information, I learned:

1. I almost always get more than the minimum recommendation for fiber.
2. I’m typically under the threshold for saturated fat.
3. I consume more sodium than I should. I’m typically over, and this may be an undercount as my tracking might have missed some added salt in home-cooked dishes.
4. My protein intake is above the DRIs, but can be lower than what is considered optimal for strength training if I’m not intentional about including it in every meal.

I would have liked to learn more about micronutrients in my diet, but the software I used couldn’t track these well. Too few foods reliably list things like omega-3 or other micronutrient content to really know whether my diet, which abstains from red meat, is low on zinc or iron, for instance.

In addition to nutritional information, I also got a lot of behavioral data:

1. I tended to overconsume food when eating at restaurants or having guests over and cooking large dinners. When I cooked my own food and ate with my family, eating moderate portion sizes was pretty easy to do.
2. I don’t drink often, but drinks caught me off guard for empty calories.

Some of My Early Results

Of course, most people don’t track food intake to gain insight; they track to lose weight. I wasn’t aiming to lose a lot of weight this month, but the app I used (MacroTracker) required it to set up the goals. Despite my ambivalence about sticking to the calories it recommended, I did end up adhering most of the time and lost about 4 lbs. from the start of the month.

While I mostly credit the fitness and dietary changes I started four months ago, rather than the specific efforts of this month, I’m quite happy with my progress in my overall body composition. I’m now around 165 lbs., down from a peak of around 178 lbs. shortly before the project started.

I haven’t been consistent in measuring my waistline, but that has shifted too: it started around 37” sometime during the first month of the project and is around 33” now. Given I’m in the “healthy” BMI range, I’m going to pay more attention to this metric over the long-term, since muscle gains and losses will blur any effect of weight loss per se.

It’s nice to be a bit leaner, closer to my college-era weight than I have been for the last several years, but I’m also doing my best to not fixate on it. I’m chastened by the pessimistic data on weight regain, so I’d rather focus on sustaining health and fitness over the long-term.

Why I’m Not Tracking Long-Term

While my experiment with tracking food was informative, it’s not a behavior I want to sustain in the future. Tracking was annoying in the beginning, but now it’s fairly well-automated as a habit, so I don’t find the act of tracking to be the main problem. Instead, I think tracking what I ate had a few unwanted side effects that distracted me from how I’d really like to eat:

1. Tracking encourages you to eat easy-to-track foods rather than healthy foods. While tracking discourages some poor food choices, such as junk food with a lot of calories, I find it also subtly encourages eating foods with nutritional labels, which ends up increasing processed foods rather than whole foods.
2. Tracking encourages a focus on calories (or macros) rather than other aspects of nutritional quality. This could be a side-effect of the app I was using, but I found that gamifying things like calorie count or grams of protein/fat/carbs encourages you to use that lens for viewing nutrition—but this approach wasn’t really supported by my overall research. Such an emphasis encourages you to see whole wheat bread and white bread as being basically the same nutritionally, when they’re really worlds apart.
3. Tracking encourages paying attention to numbers rather than internal sensations. The month of tracking gave me renewed appreciation for the more mindful way of eating I had been following the previous three months. When you focus on calories, you eat more when you have “room” and you hold back, even though you’re hungry, when you’re over. This may be good if you’re struggling with overeating, but I found it discouraged me from listening to my own sensations of hunger and satiety, instead taking the app for ground truth.

While the research on tracking tends to be fairly positive in terms of its overall effectiveness, for the sake of my diet long-term, I’m going to focus on generally eating high nutritional quality food, being as physically active as possible and being mindful that I’m eating enough—not too much or too little.

Food, Beyond Nutrition

I’m leaving this month feeling good about how I eat. One disappointment from the month was that the act of tracking preoccupied more of my time than anticipated, so I feel like the month ended up being more about nutrition (and less about other aspects of food) than I had initially intended. I had wanted to also focus on cooking more, exploring new recipes and finding more ways to make healthier eating more satisfying on a regular basis.

Now that I’m taking a pause on tracking, I think I’ll be able to resume some of these other aspirations, and I’ll certainly get to revisit them when this essay gets published and I’m working on this foundation along with everyone in the Foundations course.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how this month went. I gained some insight into my eating habits, recommitted myself to the changes I started four months ago, and even managed to lose a few pounds.

Update on Fitness, Productivity and Money

Some quick updates on my continued progress in the previous three foundations I covered:

For fitness, I continued to make major strides. I did two long runs of 21km, a half-marathon distance, and by far my longest runs ever. I can now do 9 pull-ups in a row, compared to 3 when I started. I’m still below my peak strength on major lifts, but I’m inching closer.

For productivity, I can’t say that much has changed. I’m better at tracking and coordinating a lot of non-work related tasks with my wife, but time is still limited, and staying on top of low-priority chores is still hard. I’m accepting that there will always be more to do than time to do it in, and trying to feel good about what I am able to accomplish.

For money, I’m actually a little behind with my monthly expense tracking. This was largely a side-effect of creating a new tracking template and thus needing to go through and relabel the past year of transactions before moving forward. Given I’ve been tracking my expenses for nearly two decades already, I’m not too concerned, but I’m hoping to get caught up.

This month was also incredibly busy. Because I write these updates three months before we cover each topic in the class and they are published here, this was also (for me) the first month of the Foundations course with the new students. I love teaching, but it definitely adds to my workload compared to just doing a solitary project. Additionally, my wife broke her foot which forced a reorganization of many of our day-to-day habits and childcare tasks.

Next month’s focus will be on reading, a foundation I’m already quite content with, so I’m hoping it will act as a little bit of a breather on my end.