Real-time Tracking for Food Foundations

Don’t wait until Monday — you can start this now

Tracking food intake has the greatest return on investment for both time and effort when you are getting things started (or restarted).

The best way to improve your food intake is to understand what it looks like right now. Most people think they have a pretty good understanding of what’s going in, but when they track their intake over a week or so, they are surprised by their actual consumption.

The challenge is we eat quite frequently — 3–6 times a day for most people — so it’s hard to remember everything we ate over the past week if we try to recall it. This leads us to rely on our typical intake or what we think we should be eating.

So if we typically eat tuna and rice for lunch during the week, when trying to remember what we ate last Thursday, we often assume that’s what we ate. The longer the timeframe, the more likely we will replace actual intake with aspirational intake.

The issue with inaccurate food recall is that it can make a new strategy harder than it needs to be. If you recall two meals of tuna and rice that were actually schnitzel and chips, there could be 700 kcal of additional food intake you are missing for last week (100 kcal/day).