The Power of NOT Logging Your Food

When someone wants to start eating healthier, oftentimes they’ll start logging their food by writing down everything they’ve eaten at the end of each day.

Makes sense – if you write down all you eat and drink and examine it at a glance, you can see where you might need to make healthy changes.

What I’ve found is that realizing that you eat or drink too much or too little of this or that can help some make healthy changes (if you take action, of course), but I have an alternative to logging your food that I believe is much more effective.

I’ve been doing this for years.

Instead of writing down what you eat after you eat it or at the end of the day, imagine if you write out what you are going to eat ahead of time and then stick to it.

For example, when you go to a restaurant, the server gives you a menu, as if to say, “These are our available items. Take your pick.”

In my experience, I actually prefer fewer items on the menu to choose from.

Here’s why.

At a restaurant, the fewer items that are available, usually the easier your decision is because you only have (let’s say) 10 meals to choose from as opposed to 50.

Let’s break that decision-making process down even further.

Imagine only having 1 option – no choosing, no decision-making – just take it or leave it.

Let’s say that not only is there only 1 option, but that option is healthy, meaning, no need to worry about making a “bad” food choice simply because there just isn’t one to make.

On the other hand, writing down what you ate after you ate it is like having a multitude of options – some healthier than others, and it’s up to you to make the best choice regardless of how you’re feeling at the time – happy, sad, angry, hungry, frustrated, discouraged, overwhelmed, stressed, etc.

Instead, if you only had 1 choice, no matter how you’re feeling at the time, the only available meal is the one you have already prepared for yourself.

Not only can you ensure this meal is aligned with your healthy lifestyle, but you also don’t have to waste precious mental energy making a decision, because again, the decision has already been made.

To give you an example, what I’ve done for years is write out everything I’m going to eat Monday through Friday.

You see, the week is a critical time for me. I have to be at my best for my clients.

The work I do requires a lot of focus, concentration, and mental energy, and because we all only have so much of this every day, I don’t want to “waste” it deciding what I’m going to eat every day (the same is true for deciding what you’re going to wear) – I’d much rather put that energy into coaching my clients.

What’s more, I find that oftentimes logging your food at the end of the day and reviewing it daily or weekly can lead to feelings of failure and discouragement as we have the tendency to look at what we did wrong, not right.

Since it’s more effective to build on what’s going right instead of trying to fix what’s wrong, it’s important we practice looking at the positive.

A great way have more successes than failures when it comes to creating healthier eating habits is to write down what you’ll eat ahead of time, and again, make sure to stick to it!

Give it a try this week.

As always, if you need help with anything, just set up a laser-coaching call during my available Office Hours.

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