What I Ate

Updated 12/16/o7.  The link below gives a record of what I ate from October 15, 2007 through November 23, 2007.

http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/PublicJournals.html?Owner=homer%5Fq%5Fkitty

Some time around the end of November, tracking everything I ate lost its appeal.  This is one of the reasons that I think a diet that requires tracking, measuring, counting, and recording everything one puts in one’s mouth is quite likely doomed to failure.  (I add here my usual “Different strokes for different folks” caveat - if it works for you, don’t stop on my say-so.)  But tracking, measuring, counting, and recording can be useful in the early stages of a lifestyle change - what does 6 oz. of chicken look like?  How many grams of carbohydrate are in an apple?  How much sugar is in that drink I’m about to consume?  Once you’ve done that exercise, however, you may not need to count regularly.  And this is good - you have a life to live and food to enjoy, and counting is actually a very time-consuming exercise.

In my mind, the beauty of a low-carb diet, aside from its extreme effectiveness in improving health, is that, in spite of what the diet books say, you can usually do it without a lifetime of counting.  After a few weeks of tracking, you will know the list of foods that you should almost never eat (for me, it’s grain products, including corn, potatoes, sweets, peas, beans, including soy, liquid milk, low-fat or fat-free dairy products, trans fats), ones that you can eat occasionally in small amounts (most fruits, carrots, winter squash, parsnips), and ones that you can eat every day (meat, fish, fowl, most vegetables, nuts, cheeses, whole milk yogurt, butter, olive oil, coconut oil, small servings of berries, cream, avocados, lemons, limes …)  And if you find the diet stops being as effective as it used to be, you can always go back to counting for a few weeks.  But my point is, counting should be a tool; it doesn’t need to be a way of life.

Below I reproduce the original text of this page, preserved mostly so previous comments will make sense:

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A couple of things to note.  FitDay uses the USDA food and nutrition databases, which, while useful, are problematic for two reasons.

First, while these databases are extensive, they are not comprehensive.  I cannot find, for example, Greek salad dressing, something I eat often.  I have substituted full-fat ranch dressing based on my not-very-scientific estimate that they must have similar ingredients.  The USDA also doesn’t have data for strained Greek yogurt, which has a different nutritional profile from regular whole milk yogurt.  The database is particularly deficient in different kinds of cheese - there are probably thousands of cheeses available worldwide, and hundreds in the US, and they vary greatly in fat content.  So if I eat double Gloucester, not present in the fitday database, I enter a comparable amount of some high-fat cheese such as Gruyère instead.  If I eat Jarlsberg, I enter a comparable amount of some part-skim cheese such as mozzarella instead.  For Indian paneer, I have used “Cottage cheese, farmers,” but I suspect these products are not very similar at all.  And so forth.  The more “foreign” or “exotic” the product, it seems, the more likely it is that they will not occur in the USDA database.  It is possible to enter a custom food in Fitday, but to do this I’d need to find some reliable source of nutrition data for double Gloucester, paneer, Jarlsberg, or strained Greek yogurt.  I’m happy to approximate instead.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that my fitday records might not be exact, because the database often lacks things that I eat.

Second, for very many foods, USDA data is presented for specific brands.  If the brand I used was not available in the database, or if I was eating a restaurant-made product, I had to choose the closest possible item instead.  So, while my journal may say I ate Kraft Ranch Dressing, it’s more likely that I ate homemade Greek dressing from the Chicken Lady (a wonderful kabob vendor downtown).

Finally, I often update yesterday’s journal early the next day with the foods I ate for dinner.

This is all a way of saying that my food journal may not be exact, but it is the best approximation I can give with the tools and time at hand.  This inexactitude is not meant to deceive, and whenever I must approximate, I try to do so as intelligently as possible.

Update, 10/25/07:  Fitday doesn’t have values for bacon fat!  How weird is that?  When you see “lard” in my diet records, it probably means bacon fat.