Food journals. Being honest with ourselves.

This week hasn’t been the best for me.  The weather hit us hard in Michigan with snow, blowing snow, blowing blowing snow, windchills of -30, no-place to pile up the blowing snow.  It has been crazy.  And it is difficult to keep your morale up for a healthy life when you feel overwhelmed by the freezing cosmos.

And then I got a bit sick…just a little cold and I eased it away with soup and zinc lozenges and loads of hydration.  Much better now. 

What did not go well for me this week was completely staying away from sugar.  I indulged.  Three times.  First in a decadent chocolate pie made for my friends, then in a little ice cream, then in home-made dark chocolate turtles.  Yeah.  At least it was all chocolate, so I can claim some health benefit right?  Well, needless to say, I didn’t feel so great after that and I missed two days of exercise when I was sick.

There is some serious medical debate as to whether or not it is good for you to exercise when you are sick.  Now, if you have the flu…like really have the flu, you should rest.  But if you have just a bit of a cold, it’s better for you to do some mild exercise like swimming laps or going for a light job or walk.  According to several articles in Exercise Science and the New England Journal of Medicine, it is absolutely safe for you to exercise when you have a cold and it speeds up the healing process.  Exercise acts like an expectorant and gets rid of nasty stuff.  However, you should stay away from other people, so do it where you aren’t breathing on other people.  Don’t go to hot yoga and breathe all over everyone else in the room, stay home and do yoga on your own.

So, I probably should have hauled my butt out of bed on Sunday when I felt a little under the weather and at least gone for a walk or done a little pilates or yoga.

What did go well this week was pretty much everything else.  The discipline of keeping up with my journal and meditation is wonderful.  Love it.

Sleep is going well.  At least 8 hours un-interrupted for 6 out of 7 nights this week.

I barely drink caffeine any more.  Mostly just green tea and the occasional coffee.

I’ve been eating well and cooking a ton of good whole food.  Indian cooking now being my favorite to dabble in.

It’s been fantastic and the one thing that is really hard for me, but has been going well is keeping a food journal.  Nutritionists agree, worldwide, that keeping a food journal is a very good way to stay on top of what you eat and to completely assess it.  Nutritionists estimate that people eat about 500 to 1000 calories more than they think they eat every day.  So, you don’t have to count forever, but you really do have to learn how to count and do it completely.

My favorite food journal is www.myfitnesspal.com

You can track your food there as well as your exercise and if you wish, your weight and measurements.  Really, I am just interested in the patterns I make in what I eat and this does help you to see those kinds of nutritional patterns.  There are loads of interesting articles out there about how and why we overestimate our eating.  Here’s just one called “The Dieter’s Conundrum” which looks at how health-conscious eaters are just as bad at estimating calories as unhealth-conscious eaters.

http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/a_dieting_conundrum/

Finding your metabolic number that will maintain a healthy weight is very difficult.  I went through some testing to get to the number 1800 per day.  They looked at my body fat (20%) and my activity level (moderate) and my sleep cycles (average) and my body frame type (slight curves, fit), including all of my measurements from my neck to my shoulder circumference to my waist at three different points to my hips at three different points to my thighs to my calves.  They put all of this information into a calculator and came up with the number 1800.  I did this at a wellness nutrition clinic at my own cost, because such extensive tests are not covered by insurance.

I was surprised at the moderate activity level because I workout every day.  But I do sit or stand at a desk for a good portion of the day too and this puts me in the moderate activity level. 

I encourage you to do some real examination of the calorie counters and tools that are out there to figure out your own metabolic level.  Then see how you can be more honest with yourself about everything.

And remember what Virginia Woolf said about truth:

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”