5 ms·

In line with the point of the article, I can attest to the difficulty of tracking food intake. It's an experiment I've done several times in the past 20 years.

by jrapdx3 11y ago

In line with the point of the article, I can attest to the difficulty of tracking food intake. It's an experiment I've done several times in the past 20 years. The idea is not only recording everything eaten, but weighing every item consumed to assure accuracy. Doing that for a week is a lot of work, but also highly educational. What's interesting, on repetition the experiment has shown 2 somewhat contradictory results. Day to day there was wild variation in diet, always found surprises in what or how much I ate. OTOH at the end of the week, the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable at 2100 +/-100 kcal/day. Of course there was a wealth of info about my diet composition as well. I'd understand how very difficult it would be to scale up my experiment to the point of having enough participants to make it scientifically useful. In fact I'm not at all sure I'd recommend it to anyone unless the individual was so committed to the project to willingly put up with its arduous and tedious process. However, as a personal nutrition learning tool nothing else I know of could possibly ever beat it.

dspillett 11y ago
* Day to day there was wild variation in diet ... at the end of the week the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. The average person's daily calorie burn is generally not as stable as they think it is unless they are closely following a plan. You can calculate base rate then add the standard percentage for a normal relatively sedentary lifestyle to guestimate your normal daily output but that ignores the fact that you body's daily routine is not fixed. In your working day you will walk around more or less some days, the difference won't be massive but if you are micromanaging (which you probably shouldn't: that can lead to over-worrying and potentially to certain physiological eating disorders) it counts, your social hours will vary too and probably more so on a day-to-day basis then your working and "doing nothing" hours, your environment will vary, particularly by temperature which will affect what your body does to maintain internal equilibrium, and unless you eat exactly the same food at exactly the same time every day there are differences there: different foods take different amounts of time to digest, have their energy extracted, and have their waste pass on through, have different water content which adds to the natural variation in what you drink, different amounts of drugs (caffeine and alcohol for most people) that affect water intake/output in the body is an issue and so forth. There are extra complications for a woman: changing hormone levels over the course of their regular reproductive cycle can make quite a difference to water retention and hunger levels. Basically: your body's routine does not follow an exact 24 hour cycle - this is why your weekly diet is a lot more predictable than your daily one, over the longer time the natural variances average out. But we do have mechanisms that alter out hunger levels to try make sure things do even out over time. There are things that these mechanisms don't account for though: problems such as diabetes and other illnesses that affect energy absorption and use, and it is generally believed that a high sugar diet "breaks" these systems because they are geared towards slow-ish release foods and the energy in compact food high in small sugars is very quickly either used or stored away (so you have the energy ready for use, but you become hungry because the food is so easy to break down that it has already passed the parts that register hunger). I monitor my intake very closely, having gone (over the last ~30 months) from ~18.5 stone to ~10 and wanting to stay somewhere near there. I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value because I know there will be daily variations both that are due to either my routine not being very routine or sometimes are far less intuitively understandable. It is actually easier for athletes because they can measure their extra calorie output with some accuracy, and if you are training a lot then this output is going to be more significant than the random daily variations. Their incoming diet is likely to be far more predictable than that of the man on the street too. I'm not an athlete by anyone's definition but I do exercise "recreationally" these days (mostly running, some strength/tone work, some cycling & walking for fun/exercise not just to suit commuting requirements) and I do notice the results being more predictable in periods when I do quite a bit of that compared to times when I do very little.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. > I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value(...) That's the key. I was always under the impression that the reason for advising people against weighing daily is because you can't rely on general population to understand the concepts of moving average and low-pass filtering. Personally, I try to weigh daily (easier to keep a habit this way), but I care only about the 7-day moving average.
  - dspillett 11y ago
    That is similar to my reasoning: I've kept to the changes I've made over the last couple of years by making them habit. My general morning routine, when I don't oversleep are am otherwise in more of a rush than usual, is now "wake up, feed the cat, lavatory, check and note mass, dress, breakfast while checking messages, go to work/other". Weighing myself weekly, or possibly even less often, would almost certainly suffice - but doing it more often keeps it habit and much reduces the risk that I'll simply stop doing it at some point. Similarly with exercise, while I don't have a fixed schedule except where there are things I do with a group of people I do try do something (sometimes something small, but not nothing) at least every other day. If something is a habit you notice when you miss it (your routine feels wrong because of the "forgotten something" feeling) which I find helps my self management. Of course you have to be careful not to care too much about the routine and the occasional missing something, or there is a risk it can become mentally unhealthy (which may be another reason people are careful about recommending daily measurements - it needs to become a habit not an obsession).
  - jhallenworld 11y ago
    I've discovered that my sneaky digital scale has hysteresis: it shows the last reading unless the new reading is more than 1/2 pound different.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      All bathroom scales are witchcraft. Analog ones always seem to have the precision of ±10kg and generate an aura of untrustworthiness around themselves. Digital ones behave as if they were haunted. Every once in a while, usually when the upward-opening crescent Moon passes through an astral node on the sky, my digital scale just picks one of two or three values at random. The values are around 1-2kg apart. I learned to just step on and off it until it either settles on a single result, or I get tired and just end up averaging last three or five measurements.
maccard 11y ago
I started tracking everything I eat. MyFitnessPal* makes it much easier, combined with buying a scale and leaving it on the counter (meaning I weigh every serving of everything I eat). I don't find it particularly arduous (been doing it since ~April last year) and it has made a noticeable impact on my waistline and my shopping bill (forced me to plan my meals to an extent). * Not affiliated with MyFitnessPal, but they provide a nice mobile app (iOS at least) and a HUGE database of foods and recipes. If you cook from BBC Good Food (as I do regularly0 you can normally find the recipe entered w/ calories and macro nutrients. I dislike the amount of tracking they perform, but no other software comes even close to offering the functionality they offer.
- darkandbrooding 11y ago
  I have also been using that app and I am very happy with the results. I had a couple of false starts, but now have gotten into a nice rhythm. The trick is to not judge or criticize yourself during data entry. Analysis is a completely separate phase. Seeing a few months of data really helped me think differently about my diet. My mother programmed all her children to be "comfort eaters," and when I saw that the bulk of my too many calories were coming from "comfort foods," it helped me tackle the situations and stress responses that triggered non-nutritional eating. I am not suggesting that MyFitnessPal is the only tool/process/technique that could lead one to these revelations. It is the tool that led me to those revelations, so I am a happy customer. (Also not affiliated.)
- joshstrange 11y ago
  I also use MyFitnessPal and while it can be a slight pain to use sometimes it really is best in class. Reminders to log food, save full meal for reuse, huge DB of food, ability to enter new foods, copy from yesterday (great when you eat the same thing for breakfast almost every morning). It also integrates into my Withings WiFi scale (which I HIGHLY recommend), I love just stepping on it in the morning and knowing it will all be synced up and ready for me to access from the API/Web/Mobile app.
  - trowawee 11y ago
    I liked MFP, but I do think it's gotten crappier in the last few months (possibly since the UA purchase? Not sure of the exact timing there). I just switched to LoseIt.
woobar 11y ago
I don't think scaling this "experiment" is a problem anymore. There are millions of people that use calorie counting apps and websites. Among them there must be plenty of people with consistent data. My personal anecdata: I have 5+ years of personal food intake and exercise data in MFP app. It is not hard at all. Data entry takes about 10 minutes a day. And now I know what a cup of salmon looks like. I've also ran some unscientific analysis that confirmed my biases. Major one: when I consume less calories then I burn my weight goes down, and vice versa. ;-)
- richardboegli 11y ago
  hehe, yep I wrote a book about it. Just Eat Less, its that simple . http://weightloss40kgin40weekswithoutexercise.com/ http://weightloss40kgin40weekswithoutexercise.com/
  - nikolay 11y ago
    Loosing weight is not that hard; maintaining the loss is what's hard - the notorious Boomerang Effect.
    - woobar 11y ago
      If you buy into the "calories in/calories out" theory, there is no boomerang effect. Just don't eat more* than you burn. *) add individual adjustment (~10%?) based on your personal data.
      - nikolay 11y ago
        The notorious "calories in, calories out" is so unscientific and is in my view a criminal oversimplification. It ignores things like epigenetics, hormones, thermogenesis, metabolic diseases, digestion problems, microbiota, etc. Yes, counting calories can give you some rough idea about things, but it's so rough that it's useless for the purpose of dieting! Calories from fats and carbs don't get metabolised the same way either! When I see MDs giving such advice, I smell quackery! I cut my dietary intake by over 1,000 from fats (I was putting ghee and MCT/coconut oil in my coffee) without actually compensating or expending less energy. I didn't lose a gram of weight!
richardboegli 11y ago
If you don't want to track your calories intake per meal 1) Prepare your food before hand 2) Eat the same meal often, so you only have to figure it out once. I didn't bother counting calories. Just figure out the calory content for a typical serve and just counted that. In the end its the same thing, but just less administration at eating time.:)
- tzs 11y ago
  Another interesting approach that can simplify things is to track calories when you buy them rather than when you eat them. For instance, suppose that on Monday you go to the grocery store and buy a 3 pound ham (100 calories per 85 g serving), 1 half gallon of whole milk (8 servings at 160 calories per serving), a loaf of sliced bread (20 slices at 100 calories per slice), and a bottle of ketchup (33 servings of 20 calories each). You record in your food log 5541 calories for Monday. Tuesday you buy no food or drink, just consuming stuff you previously bought. So you record 0 calories for Tuesday. Wednesday, you eat breakfast at home, and then for lunch you buy a Son of Baconator from Wendy's (650 calories), and a 20 oz Pepsi (250 calories) from the vending machine at work. Dinner comes out of your fridge. So Wednesday you log 900 calories. ...and so on. This kind of log is useless for determining exactly what or how much you ate on a particular day, but over time your average daily calorie purchase will be very close to your average daily calorie consumption. This is probably not a good approach when you are trying to make a change in your eating habits and need to know exactly what is going on day to day, but once you've gotten settled in your new eating habits and just need to make sure you aren't drifting off track this can be a good approach.

by jrapdx3 11y ago

dspillett 11y ago

* Day to day there was wild variation in diet ... at the end of the week the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. The average person's daily calorie burn is generally not as stable as they think it is unless they are closely following a plan. You can calculate base rate then add the standard percentage for a normal relatively sedentary lifestyle to guestimate your normal daily output but that ignores the fact that you body's daily routine is not fixed. In your working day you will walk around more or less some days, the difference won't be massive but if you are micromanaging (which you probably shouldn't: that can lead to over-worrying and potentially to certain physiological eating disorders) it counts, your social hours will vary too and probably more so on a day-to-day basis then your working and "doing nothing" hours, your environment will vary, particularly by temperature which will affect what your body does to maintain internal equilibrium, and unless you eat exactly the same food at exactly the same time every day there are differences there: different foods take different amounts of time to digest, have their energy extracted, and have their waste pass on through, have different water content which adds to the natural variation in what you drink, different amounts of drugs (caffeine and alcohol for most people) that affect water intake/output in the body is an issue and so forth. There are extra complications for a woman: changing hormone levels over the course of their regular reproductive cycle can make quite a difference to water retention and hunger levels. Basically: your body's routine does not follow an exact 24 hour cycle - this is why your weekly diet is a lot more predictable than your daily one, over the longer time the natural variances average out. But we do have mechanisms that alter out hunger levels to try make sure things do even out over time. There are things that these mechanisms don't account for though: problems such as diabetes and other illnesses that affect energy absorption and use, and it is generally believed that a high sugar diet "breaks" these systems because they are geared towards slow-ish release foods and the energy in compact food high in small sugars is very quickly either used or stored away (so you have the energy ready for use, but you become hungry because the food is so easy to break down that it has already passed the parts that register hunger). I monitor my intake very closely, having gone (over the last ~30 months) from ~18.5 stone to ~10 and wanting to stay somewhere near there. I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value because I know there will be daily variations both that are due to either my routine not being very routine or sometimes are far less intuitively understandable. It is actually easier for athletes because they can measure their extra calorie output with some accuracy, and if you are training a lot then this output is going to be more significant than the random daily variations. Their incoming diet is likely to be far more predictable than that of the man on the street too. I'm not an athlete by anyone's definition but I do exercise "recreationally" these days (mostly running, some strength/tone work, some cycling & walking for fun/exercise not just to suit commuting requirements) and I do notice the results being more predictable in periods when I do quite a bit of that compared to times when I do very little.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. > I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value(...) That's the key. I was always under the impression that the reason for advising people against weighing daily is because you can't rely on general population to understand the concepts of moving average and low-pass filtering. Personally, I try to weigh daily (easier to keep a habit this way), but I care only about the 7-day moving average.
- dspillett 11y ago
  That is similar to my reasoning: I've kept to the changes I've made over the last couple of years by making them habit. My general morning routine, when I don't oversleep are am otherwise in more of a rush than usual, is now "wake up, feed the cat, lavatory, check and note mass, dress, breakfast while checking messages, go to work/other". Weighing myself weekly, or possibly even less often, would almost certainly suffice - but doing it more often keeps it habit and much reduces the risk that I'll simply stop doing it at some point. Similarly with exercise, while I don't have a fixed schedule except where there are things I do with a group of people I do try do something (sometimes something small, but not nothing) at least every other day. If something is a habit you notice when you miss it (your routine feels wrong because of the "forgotten something" feeling) which I find helps my self management. Of course you have to be careful not to care too much about the routine and the occasional missing something, or there is a risk it can become mentally unhealthy (which may be another reason people are careful about recommending daily measurements - it needs to become a habit not an obsession).
- jhallenworld 11y ago
  I've discovered that my sneaky digital scale has hysteresis: it shows the last reading unless the new reading is more than 1/2 pound different.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    All bathroom scales are witchcraft. Analog ones always seem to have the precision of ±10kg and generate an aura of untrustworthiness around themselves. Digital ones behave as if they were haunted. Every once in a while, usually when the upward-opening crescent Moon passes through an astral node on the sky, my digital scale just picks one of two or three values at random. The values are around 1-2kg apart. I learned to just step on and off it until it either settles on a single result, or I get tired and just end up averaging last three or five measurements.

maccard 11y ago

I started tracking everything I eat. MyFitnessPal* makes it much easier, combined with buying a scale and leaving it on the counter (meaning I weigh every serving of everything I eat). I don't find it particularly arduous (been doing it since ~April last year) and it has made a noticeable impact on my waistline and my shopping bill (forced me to plan my meals to an extent). * Not affiliated with MyFitnessPal, but they provide a nice mobile app (iOS at least) and a HUGE database of foods and recipes. If you cook from BBC Good Food (as I do regularly0 you can normally find the recipe entered w/ calories and macro nutrients. I dislike the amount of tracking they perform, but no other software comes even close to offering the functionality they offer.

darkandbrooding 11y ago
I have also been using that app and I am very happy with the results. I had a couple of false starts, but now have gotten into a nice rhythm. The trick is to not judge or criticize yourself during data entry. Analysis is a completely separate phase. Seeing a few months of data really helped me think differently about my diet. My mother programmed all her children to be "comfort eaters," and when I saw that the bulk of my too many calories were coming from "comfort foods," it helped me tackle the situations and stress responses that triggered non-nutritional eating. I am not suggesting that MyFitnessPal is the only tool/process/technique that could lead one to these revelations. It is the tool that led me to those revelations, so I am a happy customer. (Also not affiliated.)
joshstrange 11y ago
I also use MyFitnessPal and while it can be a slight pain to use sometimes it really is best in class. Reminders to log food, save full meal for reuse, huge DB of food, ability to enter new foods, copy from yesterday (great when you eat the same thing for breakfast almost every morning). It also integrates into my Withings WiFi scale (which I HIGHLY recommend), I love just stepping on it in the morning and knowing it will all be synced up and ready for me to access from the API/Web/Mobile app.
- trowawee 11y ago
  I liked MFP, but I do think it's gotten crappier in the last few months (possibly since the UA purchase? Not sure of the exact timing there). I just switched to LoseIt.

woobar 11y ago

I don't think scaling this "experiment" is a problem anymore. There are millions of people that use calorie counting apps and websites. Among them there must be plenty of people with consistent data. My personal anecdata: I have 5+ years of personal food intake and exercise data in MFP app. It is not hard at all. Data entry takes about 10 minutes a day. And now I know what a cup of salmon looks like. I've also ran some unscientific analysis that confirmed my biases. Major one: when I consume less calories then I burn my weight goes down, and vice versa. ;-)

richardboegli 11y ago
hehe, yep I wrote a book about it. Just Eat Less, its that simple . http://weightloss40kgin40weekswithoutexercise.com/ http://weightloss40kgin40weekswithoutexercise.com/
- nikolay 11y ago
  Loosing weight is not that hard; maintaining the loss is what's hard - the notorious Boomerang Effect.
  - woobar 11y ago
    If you buy into the "calories in/calories out" theory, there is no boomerang effect. Just don't eat more* than you burn. *) add individual adjustment (~10%?) based on your personal data.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      The notorious "calories in, calories out" is so unscientific and is in my view a criminal oversimplification. It ignores things like epigenetics, hormones, thermogenesis, metabolic diseases, digestion problems, microbiota, etc. Yes, counting calories can give you some rough idea about things, but it's so rough that it's useless for the purpose of dieting! Calories from fats and carbs don't get metabolised the same way either! When I see MDs giving such advice, I smell quackery! I cut my dietary intake by over 1,000 from fats (I was putting ghee and MCT/coconut oil in my coffee) without actually compensating or expending less energy. I didn't lose a gram of weight!

richardboegli 11y ago

If you don't want to track your calories intake per meal 1) Prepare your food before hand 2) Eat the same meal often, so you only have to figure it out once. I didn't bother counting calories. Just figure out the calory content for a typical serve and just counted that. In the end its the same thing, but just less administration at eating time.:)

tzs 11y ago
Another interesting approach that can simplify things is to track calories when you buy them rather than when you eat them. For instance, suppose that on Monday you go to the grocery store and buy a 3 pound ham (100 calories per 85 g serving), 1 half gallon of whole milk (8 servings at 160 calories per serving), a loaf of sliced bread (20 slices at 100 calories per slice), and a bottle of ketchup (33 servings of 20 calories each). You record in your food log 5541 calories for Monday. Tuesday you buy no food or drink, just consuming stuff you previously bought. So you record 0 calories for Tuesday. Wednesday, you eat breakfast at home, and then for lunch you buy a Son of Baconator from Wendy's (650 calories), and a 20 oz Pepsi (250 calories) from the vending machine at work. Dinner comes out of your fridge. So Wednesday you log 900 calories. ...and so on. This kind of log is useless for determining exactly what or how much you ate on a particular day, but over time your average daily calorie purchase will be very close to your average daily calorie consumption. This is probably not a good approach when you are trying to make a change in your eating habits and need to know exactly what is going on day to day, but once you've gotten settled in your new eating habits and just need to make sure you aren't drifting off track this can be a good approach.